James Fenimore Cooper / American Men of Letters

by Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury

The work excited but little attention in this country. In the following year it was printed in England by Colburn, and was there noticed without the slightest suspicion of its American authorship. In some quarters it received fairly favorable mention. It could not be hid, however, that the novel, as regarded the general public, had been a failure. Still, it was not so much a failure that the author's friends did not think well of it and see promise in it. They urged him to renewed exertions. He had tried the experiment of depicting scenes he had never witnessed, and a life he had never led. He had, in their opinion, succeeded fairly well in describing what he knew nothing about; they were anxious that he should try his hand at the representation of manners and men of which and whom he knew something. Especially was it made a matter of reproach that he, in heart and soul an American of the Americans, should have gone to a foreign land to fill the imagination of his countrymen with pictures of a social state alien both in feeling and fact to their own. This was an appeal of a kind that was certain to touch Cooper sensibly; for with him love of country was not a sentiment, it was a passion. As a sort of atonement, therefore, for his first work, he determined to inflict, as he phrased it, a second one upon the world. Against this there should be no objection on the score of patriotism. He naturally turned for his subject to the Revolution, with the details of which he was familiar by his acquaintance with the men who had shared prominently in its conduct, and had felt all the keenness of a personal triumph in its success. The very county, moreover, in which he had made his home was full of recollections. Westchester had been the neutral ground between the English forces stationed in New York and the American army encamped in the highlands of the Hudson. Upon it more, perhaps, than upon any other portion of the soil of the revolted colonies had fallen the curse of war in its heaviest form. Back and forth over a large part of it had perpetually ebbed and flowed the tide of battle. Not a road was there which had not been swept again and again by columns of infantry or squadrons of horse. Every thicket had been the hiding-place of refugees or spies; every wood or meadow had been the scene of a skirmish; and every house that had survived the struggle had its tale to tell of thrilling scenes that had taken place within its walls. These circumstances determined Cooper's choice of the place and period. Years before, while at the residence of John Jay, his host had given him, one summer afternoon, the account of a spy that had been in his service during the war. The coolness, shrewdness, fearlessness, but above all the unselfish patriotism, of the man had profoundly impressed the Revolutionary leader who had employed him. The story made an equally deep impression upon Cooper at the time. He now resolved to take it as the foundation of the tale he had been persuaded to write. The result was that on the 22d of December, 1821, the novel of "The Spy" was quietly advertised in the New York papers as on that day published.

The reader, however, would receive a very wrong idea of the feelings with which the author began and ended this work of fiction, should he stop short with the account that has just been given. The circumstances attending its composition and publication are, as a matter of fact, almost as remarkable as the story itself. They certainly present a most suggestive picture of the literary state of America at that time. Cooper, for his part, had not the slightest anticipation of the effect that it was going to have upon his future. In writing it he was carrying out the wishes of his friends full as much as his own. Nor, apparently, did they urge the course upon him because they conceived him capable of accomplishing anything very great or even very good. They felt that he could produce something that was not discreditable, and that was all that could reasonably be expected of an American. There was no other novelist in the field. Charles Brockden Brown had been dead several years. Irving and Paulding were writing only short sketches. John Neal, indeed, in addition to the poems, tragedies, reviews, newspaper articles, indexes, and histories he was turning out by wholesale, had likewise perpetrated a novel; but it was never known enough to justify the mention of it as having been forgotten. Here, consequently, was a vacant place that ought to be filled. Cooper was never the man who would be eager to take a place because there was no one else to occupy it; and the way he went at the task he had undertaken gives indirectly a clear insight into an American author's feelings sixty years ago. He entered upon the work not merely without the expectation of success, but almost without the hope of it. The novel was written very hastily; the sheets passed into the hands of the type-setter with scarcely a correction; and so little heart had he in the task that the first volume was printed several months before he felt any inducement to write a line of the second. The propriety of abandoning it entirely, under the apprehension of its proving a serious loss, was debated. "Should chance," he said, in a later introduction to the book, "throw a copy of this prefatory notice into the hands of an American twenty years hence, he will smile to think that a countryman hesitated to complete a work so far advanced, merely because the disposition of the country to read a book that treated of its own familiar interests was distrusted." In this respect the difficulty of his position was made more prominent by its contrast with that of the great novelist who was then occupying the attention of the English-speaking world. Scott, in writing "Waverley," could take for granted that there lay behind him an intense feeling of nationality, which would show itself not in noisy boastfulness, but in genuine appreciation; that with the matter of his work his countrymen would sympathize, whatever might be their opinion as to its execution. No such supposition could be made by Cooper; no such belief inspired him to exertion. He might hope to create interest; he could not venture to assume its existence. One other incident connected with the composition of this work marks even more plainly the almost despairing attitude of his mind. While the second volume was slowly printing, he received an intimation from his publisher that the work might grow to a length that would endanger the profits. The author hereupon adopted a course which is itself a proof of how much stranger is fact than fiction. To placate the publisher and set his mind at rest, the last chapter was written, printed, and paged, not merely before the intervening chapters had been composed, but before they had been fully conceived. It was fair to expect failure for a work which no bookseller had been found willing to undertake at his own risk, and which the author himself set about in a manner so perfunctory. The indifference and carelessness displayed, he said afterward, were disrespectful to the public and unjust to himself; yet they give, as nothing else could, a vivid picture of the literary situation in America at that time.

The reluctance and half-heartedness with which Cooper began and completed this work stand, indeed, in sharpest contrast to the existing state of feeling, when it is only the prayers of friends and the tears of relatives that can prevent most of us from publishing some novel we have already written. But almost as it were by accident he had struck into the vein best fitted for the display of his natural powers. In it he succeeded with little effort, where other men with the greatest effort might have failed. The delicate distinctions that underlie character where social pressure has given to all the same outside, it was not his to depict. Still less could he unfold the subtle workings of motives that often elude the observation of the very persons whom they most influence. Such a power is essential to the success of him who seeks to delineate men as seen in conventional society; and largely for the lack of it his first novel had been a failure. It was only at rare intervals, also, that he showed that precision of style and pointed method of statement which, independent of the subject, interest the reader in men and things that are not in themselves interesting. It was the story of adventure, using adventure in its broadest sense, that he was fitted to tell: and fortunately for him Walter Scott, then in the very height of his popularity, had made it supremely fashionable. In this it is only needful to draw character in bold outlines; to represent men not under the influence of motives that hold sway in artificial and complex society, but as breathed upon by those common airs of reflection and swept hither and thither by those common gales of passion that operate upon us all as members of the race. It is not the personality of the actors to which the attention is supremely drawn, though even in that there is ample field for the exhibition of striking characterization. It is the events that carry us along; it is the catastrophe to which they are hurrying that excites the feelings and absorbs the thoughts. There can be no greater absurdity than to speak of this kind of story, as is sometimes done, as being inferior in itself to those devoted exclusively to the delineation of manners or character, or even of the subtler motives which act upon the heart and life. As well might one say that the "Iliad" is a poem of inferior type to the "Excursion." Again, it is only those who think it must be easy to write what it is easy to read who will fall into the mistake of fancying that a novel of adventure which has vitality enough to live does not owe its existence to the arduous, though it may be largely unconscious, exercise of high creative power. No better correction for this error can be found than in looking over the names of the countless imitators of Scott, some of them distinguished in other fields, who have made so signal a failure that even the very fact that they attempted to imitate him at all has been wholly forgotten.

"The Spy" appeared almost at the very close of 1821. It was not long before its success was assured. Early in 1822 the newspapers were able to assert that it had met with a sale unprecedented in the annals of American literature. What that phrase meant is partly indicated by the fact that it had then been found necessary to publish a second edition. In March a third edition was put to the press; and in the same month the story was dramatized and acted with the greatest success. Still in the abject dependence upon foreign estimate which was the preëminent characteristic of a large portion of the educated class of that day, many felt constrained to wait for the judgment that would come back from Europe before they could venture to express an opinion which they had the presumption to call their own. Contemporary newspapers more than once mention the relief that was afforded to many when Cooper was spoken of in several of the English journals as "a distinguished American novelist." This, it has been implied, was then a condition of the public mind that no writer could dare wholly to disregard. When the project of abandoning this novel, already half printed, was under discussion, the principal reason that finally decided the author to persevere was the fact that his previous work had received a respectful notice in a few English periodicals. It was thought, in consequence, that in his new venture he would be secure from loss. Still, it is due to his countrymen to say that it was to them alone he owed his first success. In later years the declaration was often made that he would never have been held in honor at home, had it not been for foreign approbation. The assertion he himself indignantly denied. "This work," he said afterward, in speaking of "The Spy," "most of you received with a generous welcome that might have satisfied any one that the heart of this great community is sound." Certain it is that the success of the novel was assured in America some time before the character of its reception in Europe was known.

The printed volume was offered to the London publisher Murray, and for terms he was referred to Irving, who was then in England. Murray gave the novel for examination to Gifford, the editor of the "Quarterly." By his advice it was declined,--a result that might easily have been foretold from the hostility of the man to this country. He had made his review an organ of the most persistent depreciation and abuse of America and everything American. A new writer from this side of the ocean was little likely to meet with any favor in his sight, especially when his subject was one that from its very nature could not be flattering to British prejudices. Murray having refused, another publisher was found in Miller, who had also been the first to bring out Irving's "Sketch Book." Early in 1822 the work appeared in England. There its success was full as great as it had been in America. This novel, in fact, made Cooper's reputation both at home and abroad. It is important to bear this in mind, because it is a common notion that it was his delineations of Indian life that brought him his European fame. They established it, but they did not originate it. "The Spy" was a tale of a war, which in character was not essentially different from any other war. So far as the story painted the incidents of a struggle in which the English had been unsuccessful, it could have no right to expect favor from the English public unless there was merit in the execution of the work independent of the subject. The interest with which it was read by a people who could not fail to find portions of it disagreeable, who were moreover accustomed to look with contempt upon everything of American origin, was the best proof that a novelist had arisen whose reputation would stretch beyond the narrow limits of nationality. This was even more strikingly seen, when it came to be translated. If the English opinion was favorable, the French might fairly be called enthusiastic. A version was made into that tongue in the summer of 1822, by the translator of the Waverley Novels. In the absolute ignorance that existed as to its authorship, the work was ascribed by several of the Parisian papers to Fanny Wright, who subsequently achieved a fame of her own as a champion of woman's privileges and denouncer of woman's wrongs. In spite of its anonymous character and of some extraordinary blunders in translation, it was warmly received in France. From that country its reputation in no long space of time spread in every direction; translations followed one after another into all the cultivated tongues of modern Europe; and in all it met the same degree of favor. Nor has lapse of time shaken seriously its popularity. The career of success, which began sixty years ago, has suffered vicissitudes, but never suspension; and to this hour, whatever fault may be found with the work as a whole, the name of Harvey Birch is still one of the best known in fiction. No tale produced during the present century has probably had so extensive a circulation; and the leading character in it has found admirers everywhere and at times imitators. Of this latter statement a striking illustration is given in the memoirs of Gisquet, a prefect of the French police under Louis Philippe. In his chapter on the secret agents employed by him during his administration, he tells the story of one who by the information he imparted rendered important services in preventing the outbreak of civil war. He thus describes the motives which led the man to pursue the course he did. "Struck with the reading," he writes, "of one of Cooper's novels called 'The Spy,' he aspired to the sort of ambition which distinguished the hero of that work, and was desirous of playing in France the part which Cooper has assigned to Harvey Birch during the American war of independence.... Harvey Birch--for he adopted this name in all his reports--never belied his professions of fidelity. He rendered services which would have merited a competent fortune; but when the term of them ended, he contented himself with asking for a humble employment, barely enough to supply his daily necessities." The belief in the reality of the hero has, indeed, been part of the singular fortune of the book. In his account of Nicaragua, published in 1852, Mr. E. G. Squier furnished incidentally interesting testimony to the truth of this statement as well as to the wide circulation of the tale itself. At La Union, the port of San Miguel, he stayed at the house of the commandant of the place. His apartments he found well stocked with books, and among them was this particular novel. "The 'Espy,'" he went on to say, "of the lamented Cooper, I may mention, seems to be better known in Spanish America than any other work in the English language. I found it everywhere; and when I subsequently visited the Indian pueblo of Conchagua, the first alcalde produced it from an obscure corner of the cahildo, as a very great treasure. He regarded it as veritable history, and thought 'Señor Birch' a most extraordinary personage and a model guerillero."

CHAPTER III.

1822-1826.

Cooper would have been more or less than mortal if the unexpected success achieved by "The Spy" had not incited him to renewed effort. It definitely determined his career, though at the time he did not know it. As yet he was not sure in his own mind whether the favor his book had met was the result of a lucky hit or was due to the display of actual power. There can be no question as to the honesty of his assertion when he published his third novel, that it depended upon certain contingencies whether it would not be the last. But from this time on he wrote incessantly. From 1820 to 1830, including both years, he brought out eleven works. In many respects this was the happiest period of his literary life as well as the most successful. During it he produced many of his greatest creations. One decided failure he made; but with this exception if each new story did not seem to exhibit any new power, it at least gave no sign of weakness, or misdirection of energy. This period is in fact so supremely the creative one of Cooper's life as regards the conception of character and scene that nearly all he did demands careful examination.

He first set about a task that lay near his heart. This was to describe the scenes, the manners and customs of his native land, especially of the frontier life in which he had been trained. In 1823, accordingly, appeared "The Pioneers," itself the pioneer of the five famous stories, which now go collectively under the name of the "Leather-Stocking Tales." It was a vivid and faithful picture of the sights he had seen and the men he had met in the home of his childhood, where as a boy he had witnessed the struggles which attend the conquest of man over nature. In it appear in comparatively rude outlines the personages whose names and exploits his pen was afterwards to make famous throughout the civilized world. They are in this work of a far less lofty type than in those which followed. "The Pioneers," in truth, though not a poor story, is much the poorest of the series of which it forms a part. The almost loving interest he took in the matter about which he was writing tempted the author to indulge his recollections at the expense of his judgment. His first novel, he said in the prefatory address to the publisher which appeared in this one, had been written to show that he could write a grave tale, and it was so grave that no one would read it; the second was written to overcome if possible the neglect of the public; but the third was written exclusively to please himself. The story as a story suffered in consequence from the very fascination which the subject had for his mind. So subordinate was it made, especially in the first half, to the description of the scenes, that the details at times become wearisome and the interest often flags.

The expectation with which the appearance of this work was awaited is a striking proof of the impression that the previous novel had made. It was to have been brought out as early as the autumn of 1822. But during the summer of that year the yellow fever ravaged New York and largely broke up for a time all kinds of business, including printing. Causes beyond control still further delayed the publication, and it was not until the first of February, 1823, that the book appeared. The public curiosity, however, had been fully excited. Extracts from it--according to a custom then prevalent in England--had been furnished in advance to some of the newspapers, and though these were not the most striking passages, they served to direct attention and awaken expectation. At the close of January, announcement of the precise date of publication was made. Success was certain from the start; but the degree of it outran all anticipation. The evening papers of the first of February were able to state that up to twelve o'clock that day there had been sold three thousand five hundred copies. Even at this period, with a population more than five times as numerous, such a half day's sale, under similar circumstances, would be remarkable. It is little wonder, therefore, that the newspapers of that period felt that only largeness of type and profusion of exclamation points could suitably record such a success.