James Fenimore Cooper / American Men of Letters

by Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury

This statement was widely copied in the newspapers. But the falsity of the fabrication soon became too apparent for even the journals most hostile to Cooper to endure. They made a vain effort to get from the author a confirmation of his story: but though he did not venture to repeat the lie manfully, he equivocated about it in a sneaking way. The newspapers, feeling, perhaps, that it was undesirable to arm the book agent with new terrors, credited at once the denial the story had received, and took back all imputations based upon it,--a proceeding which ought to have shown Cooper that they were not so utterly given over to the father of all evil as he fancied them. But the author of this impudent falsehood never withdrew it, nor did the publishers of the volume, in which it was contained, disavow it. The extract given above is taken from an edition which bears the date of 1845.

It is plain that these calumnious attacks sprang largely from Cooper's personal unpopularity. It is equally plain that his personal unpopularity was mainly due to the censorious tone he had assumed in the criticism of his country and his countrymen. It may accordingly be said that, in one sense, he deserved all that he received. He had pursued a certain line of conduct. He had no reason to complain that it had been followed by the same results here that would have followed similar conduct anywhere. In fact, while his censure of England had been far lighter than that of America, the language used about him in the former country had been far more vulgar and abusive than that used in the latter. But there were facts in his career which his countrymen were bound to bear in mind, but which, on the contrary, they strove hard to forget, and sometimes to pervert. He had been the uncompromising defender of his native land in places where it cost reputation and regard to appear in that light. He was assailed largely by the men who had toadied to a hostile feeling which he himself had confronted. His criticism of America was sometimes just, sometimes unjust. It was in a few instances as full of outrageous misrepresentation as any which he had resented in others. Even when right, it was often wrongly delivered. But in no case did it spring from indifference or dislike. The very loftiness of his aspirations for his country, the very vividness of his conception of what he trusted she was to be, made him far more than ordinarily sensitive to what she was, which fell short of his ideal. Every indignity offered to her he felt as a personal blow; every stain upon her honor as a personal disgrace. He had no fear as to the material greatness of her future. What he could not bear was that the slightest spot should soil the garments of her civilization. It was for her character, her reputation, that he most cared. It is not necessary to maintain that he was as wise as he was patriotic. Had he been in a position where he wielded political power, his impulsive and fiery temperament might very probably have made him an unsafe adviser. His whole idea of foreign policy, as connected with war, may be summed up in the statement that the nation should be as ready to resent a wrong done to ourselves as to repair a wrong done to others. Nothing could be better doctrine in theory. Unfortunately, the nation in all such cases is itself both party and judge, and the question of right becomes, in consequence, a hard one to decide as a matter of fact. Cooper's intense convictions would therefore have been likely to have led the country into war, had he had the control of events,--and war, too, at a time when under the agencies of peace it was daily gathering strength to meet a coming drain upon its resources in a conflict which but few were then far-sighted enough to see would squander wealth as lavishly as it wasted blood. Had it rested with him, it is quite clear that no Ashburton treaty would have been signed. There is a striking passage printed to this day in italics, which he puts into the mouth of Leather-Stocking in the novel of "The Deerslayer." Its point is made specially prominent when it is remembered that this work was written while the controversy was going on between Great Britain and the United States in regard to the Northeastern boundary. "I can see no great difference," says Leather-Stocking, "atween givin' up territory afore a war, out of a dread of war, or givin' it up after a war, because we can't help it--onless it be that the last is most manful and honorable."

The features of Cooper's personal character, as well as his prejudices and limitations, are always to be kept in mind because they explain much that is defective in his art, and account for much of his unpopularity. Some of them became unpleasantly conspicuous in the writings of his later years. In 1840 he entered upon a new period of creative activity which lasted until 1850. Between and including those years he brought out seventeen works of fiction. Eleven of them were written during the first half of this period ending with 1845, and even these did not constitute the whole of what he then wrote. This fertility is made the more remarkable by the fact that during this same time he was engaged in the special controversy about the battle of Lake Erie, not to speak of his standing quarrel with the press and his running fight of libel suits in which he was not only plaintiff, but did the main work of the prosecution.

It is possible that his unpopularity stirred him to unwonted exertion. There is certainly no question that the years from 1840 to 1845 inclusive, are, as a whole, the supreme creative period of Cooper's career. Its production does not dwarf his early achievement in vigor or interest; but it does often show a far higher mastery of his art. Two of the works then written mark the culmination of his powers. These were the Leather-Stocking tales called "The Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer." The former appeared on the 14th of March, 1840, the latter on the 27th of August, 1841. They complete the circle of these stories; for others which he contemplated writing he unfortunately never executed. Still the series was a perfect one as it was left. The life of Leather-Stocking was now a complete drama in five acts, beginning with the first war-path in "The Deerslayer," followed by his career of activity and of love in "The Last of the Mohicans" and "The Pathfinder," and his old age and death in "The Pioneers" and "The Prairie."

"The Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer" stand at the head of Cooper's novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole. For once, whether from greater care or happier inspiration, Cooper discarded those features of his writings in which he had either failed entirely, or achieved, at the most, slight success. The leading characters belonged to the class which he drew best, so far as he was a delineator of character at all. Here were no pasteboard figures like Heywood in "The Last of the Mohicans," or Middleton in "The Prairie." Here were no supernumeraries dragged in, in a vain effort to amuse, as the singing-master in the former of these same stories, or the naturalist in the latter. Humor, Cooper certainly had; but it is the humor that gleams in fitful flashes from the men of earnest purposes and serious lives, and gives a momentary relief to the sternness and melancholy of their natures. The power of producing an entire humorous creation he had not at all, and almost the only thing that mars the perfectness of "The Pathfinder" is the occasional effort to make one out of Muir, the character designed to play the part of a villain. But the defects in both these tales are comparatively slight. The plot in each is simple, but it gives plenty of room for the display of those qualities in which Cooper excelled. The scene of the one was laid on Lake Ontario and its shores; the other, on the little lake near which he had made his home; and the whole atmosphere of both is redolent of the beauty and the wildness of nature.

These works were a revelation to the men who had begun to despair of Cooper's ever accomplishing again anything worthy of his early renown. They were pure works of art. No moral was everlastingly perking itself in the reader's face, no labored lecture to prove what was self-evident interrupted the progress of the story. There is scarcely an allusion to any of the events which had checkered the novelist's career. References to contemporary occurrences are so slight that they would pass unheeded by any one whose attention had not been called beforehand to their existence. These works showed what Cooper was capable of when he gave full play to his powers, and did not fancy he was writing a novel when he was indulging in lectures upon manners and customs. "It is beautiful, it is grand," said Balzac to a friend, speaking of "The Pathfinder." "Its interest is tremendous. He surely owed us this masterpiece after the last two or three rhapsodies he has been giving us. You must read it. I know no one in the world, save Walter Scott, who has risen to that grandeur and serenity of colors." "Never," he said in another place, "did the art of writing tread closer upon the art of the pencil. This is the school of study for literary landscape-painters." Cooper himself, if contemporary reports are to be trusted, was at the time in the habit of saying that the palm of merit in his writings lay between this novel and "The Deerslayer." He certainly reckoned them the best of the five stories which have the unity of a common interest by having the same hero, and these five he put at the head of his performances. "If anything from the pen of the writer of these romances," he said, toward the close of his life, "is at all to outlive himself, it is unquestionably the series of 'The Leather-Stocking Tales.' To say this is not to predict a very lasting reputation for the series itself, but simply to express the belief that it will outlast any or all of the works from the same hand."

But at this time no work of his was treated fairly by the American press. His name was rarely mentioned save in censure or derision. Both "The Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer" on their first appearance were violently assailed. It is giving praise to a good deal of the contemporary criticism passed upon them to call it merely feeble and senseless. Much of it was marked by a malignity which fortunately was as contemptible intellectually as it was morally. Still, neither this hostile criticism nor Cooper's own personal unpopularity hindered the success of the books. He says, to be sure, in the preface to the revised edition of the Leather-Stocking tales which came out towards the end of his life, that probably not one in ten of those who knew all about the three earlier works of the series had any knowledge of the existence of the two last. This assertion seems exaggerated. It certainly struck many with surprise at the time it was made; for both "The Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer" had met with a large sale.

Between the publication of these two novels appeared, on the 24th of November, 1840, "Mercedes of Castile." The subject of this was the first voyage of Columbus. It had several very obvious defects. It was marred by that prolixity of introduction which was a fault that ran through the majority of Cooper's tales. The reader meets with as many discouragements and rebuffs and turnings aside in getting under way as did the great navigator the story celebrates. There was, moreover, an excess of that cheap moralizing, that dwelling upon commonplace truths, which was another of Cooper's besetting sins. The only effect these discourses have upon the reader is to make him feel that while virtue may be a very good thing, it is an excessively tedious thing. As a novel, "Mercedes of Castile" must be regarded as a failure. On the other hand, as a story of the first voyage of Columbus, told with the special knowledge of a seaman, the accuracy of an historian, and with something of the fervor of a poet, it will always have a peculiar interest of its own.

Two sea-stories followed "The Deerslayer." The first of these, entitled "The Two Admirals," was published in April, 1842, and the second in November of the same year. Cooper was at this time engaged in the hottest of his fight with the American press and people. Publicly and privately he was expressing his contempt for nearly everything and everybody. He, in turn, was undergoing assaults from every quarter. It is, therefore, a singular illustration of the love of country which burned in him with an intense, even when hidden, flame, that in the midst of his greatest unpopularity he was unwilling to desert his own flag for that of the land to which he was forced to go for material. Yet there was every inducement. He wished to do what had never before been done in fiction. His aim was to describe the evolutions of fleets instead of confining himself to the movements of single vessels. But no American fleet had ever been assembled, no American admiral had ever trod a quarter-deck. In order, therefore, to describe operations on a grand scale he had to have recourse to the history of the mother-country; but he purposely put the scene in "The Two Admirals" in a period when the states were still colonies. This novel takes a very high place among the sea-stories, so long as the action is confined to the water. But it suffers greatly from the carelessness and the incompleteness with which the details are worked out.

In "Wing-and-Wing," which followed it, the fortune of a French privateer is told. The scene is laid in the Mediterranean, and the time is the end of the last century. Though inferior in power to some of his other sea-stories, it is far from being a poor novel; and it was, in fact, one of the author's favorites. But its greatest interest is in the view it gives of a tendency in Cooper's character which was constantly becoming more pronounced. The Puritanic narrowness of the very deep and genuine religious element in his nature was steadily increasing as time went on. In "Precaution" it has been already observed that the doctrine had been laid down by one of the characters that there should be no marriage between Christians and non-Christians. In "Wing-and-Wing" this doctrine was fully carried out. The heroine is a devout Roman Catholic. She loves devotedly the hero, the captain of the French privateer. She trusts in his honor; she admires his abilities and character; she is profoundly affected by the fervor of the affection he bears to herself. But he is an infidel. He is too honest and honorable to pretend to believe and think differently from what he really believes and thinks. As she cannot convert him, she will not marry him: and in the end succeeds indirectly, by her refusal, in bringing about his death. It never seemed to occur to Cooper that the course of conduct he was holding up as praiseworthy, in his novels, could have little other effect in real life than to encourage hypocrisy where it did not produce misery. The man who, for the sake of gaining a great prize, changes his religious views is sure to have his sincerity distrusted by others. That can be borne. But he is equally certain to feel distrust of himself. He cannot have that perfect confidence in his own convictions, or even in his own character, that would be the case had no considerations of personal advantage influenced him in the slightest in the decision he had made, or the conclusions to which he had come. Even he who believes in this course of action as something to be quietly adopted might wisely refuse to proclaim it loudly as a rule for the conduct of life.