He entered Yale in 1802, but he did not succeed in eradicating his love of outdoor life and of the unfettered habits of the pioneer, and did not remain to graduate. The faculty dismissed him in his junior year. It was unfortunate that he did not study more and submit to the restraints and discipline of regular college life; for his prose often shows in its carelessness of construction and lack of restraint his need for that formal discipline which was for the moment so grievous to him.
After Cooper had left college, his father decided to have him prepare for the navy. As there was no naval academy, he adopted the usual course of having the boy serve a year on a merchant vessel. After this apprenticeship, Cooper entered the navy as a midshipman. From such experiences he gained sufficient knowledge of the ocean and ships to enable him to become the author of some of our best tales of the sea. He resigned from the navy, however, in 1811, when he married.
BECOMES AN AUTHOR.—Cooper had reached the age of thirty without even attempting to write a book. In 1820 he remarked one day to his wife that he thought he could write a better novel than the one which he was then reading to her. She immediately challenged him to try, and he promptly wrote the novel called Precaution. He chose to have this deal with English life because the critics of his time considered American subjects commonplace and uninteresting. As he knew nothing of English life at first hand, he naturally could not make the pages of Precaution vivid with touches of local color.
This book was soon forgotten, and Cooper might never have written another, had not some sensible friends insisted that it was his patriotic duty to make American subjects fashionable. A friend related to him the story of a spy of Westchester County, New York, who during the Revolution served the American cause with rare fidelity and sagacity. Cooper was then living in this very county, and, being attracted by the subject, he soon completed the first volume of The Spy, which was at once printed. As he still doubted, however, whether his countrymen would read "a book that treated of their own familiar interests," he delayed writing the second volume for several months. When he did start to write it, his publisher feared that it might be too long to pay, so before Cooper had thought out the intervening chapters, he wrote the last chapter and had it printed and paged to satisfy the publisher. When The Spy was published in 1821, it immediately sold well in America, although such was the bondage to English standards of criticism that many who read the book hesitated to express an opinion until they had heard the verdict from England. When the English received the book, however, they fairly devoured it, and it became one of the most widely read tales of the early nineteenth century. Harvey Birch, the hero of the story, is one of the great characters of our early fiction.
[Illustration: OTSEGO HALL, COOPERSTOWN]
Cooper now adopted writing as a profession. In less than thirty years, he wrote more than thirty romances, in most cases of two volumes each. When he went to Europe in 1826, the year of the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, he found that his work was as well known abroad as at home. Sir Walter Scott, who met Cooper in Paris, mentions in his diary for November 6, 1826, a reception by a French princess, and adds the note, "Cooper was there, so the American and Scotch lions took the field together."
LATER YEARS.—After Cooper's return from Europe in 1833, he spent the most of the remaining seventeen years of his life in writing books at his early home, known as Otsego Hall, in Cooperstown. Here in the summer of 1837 there occurred an unfortunate incident which embittered the rest of his life and for a while made him the most unpopular of American authors. Some of his townspeople cut down one of his valuable trees and otherwise misused the picnic grounds on a part of his estate fronting the lake. When he remonstrated, the public denounced him and ordered his books removed from the local library. He then forbade the further use of his grounds by the public. Many of the newspapers throughout the state misrepresented his action, and he foolishly sued them for libel. From that time the press persecuted him. He sued the Albany Evening Journal, edited by Thurlow Weed, and received four hundred dollars damage. Weed thereupon wrote in the New York Tribune:—
"The value of Mr. Cooper's character has been judicially determined. It is worth exactly four hundred dollars."
Cooper promptly sued The Tribune, and was awarded two hundred dollars. In the heat of this controversy Thurlow Weed incautiously opened Cooper's The Pathfinder, which had just appeared, and sat up all night to finish the book. During the progress of these suits, Cooper unfortunately wrote a novel, Home as Found, satirizing, from a somewhat European point of view, the faults of his countrymen. A friend, trying to dissuade him from publishing such matter, wrote, "You lose hold on the American public by rubbing down their shins with brickbats, as you do." Cooper, however, published the book in 1838, and then there was a general rush to attack him. A critic of his History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839), a work which is still an authority for the time of which it treats, abused the book and made reflections on Cooper's veracity. The author brought suit for libel, and won his case in a famous trial in which he was his own lawyer. These unfortunate incidents, which would have been avoided by a man like Benjamin Franklin, diminished the circulation of Cooper's books in America during the rest of his life.
[Illustration: STATUE OF LEATHERSTOCKING OVERLOOKING OTSEGO LAKE]