“The Ways of the Hour” (1850) was also a novel with a purpose, which overweighted its interest as a story; the purpose was the reform of court procedure in the State of New York.
In “Homeward Bound” and its sequel, “Home as Found” (1838), the latter being one of his worst stories, Cooper lashed the petty vices of his countrymen and sought to show them what ought to be. As he might have expected, he only confirmed the public in its hatred of him, while he materially impaired his reputation as a story-teller. Had he been more tactful, philosophical, and far-seeing, he would have saved himself years of stormy conflict.
In Lakewood Cemetery at Cooperstown, on the hill overlooking Otsego Lake, is a majestic monument to Fenimore Cooper, twenty-five feet in height, and surmounted by a statue of the hunter Leatherstocking and his dog. As enduring as bronze is this character in our American fiction; the hero that will live longest of Cooper’s creations. In him Lowell found “the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as poetic as that of Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don Quixote, as romantic in his relation to our homespun and plebeian myths as Arthur in his to the mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry.” The series in which he appears, “The Deerslayer,” “The Pathfinder,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Pioneers,” and “The Prairie,” the group which Cooper himself preferred to his other stories, is now (excepting always “The Spy”) more read than all Cooper’s other works put together. Drawn at first from life, Natty Bumppo becomes an idealised character, the perfect type of the bold frontiersman and scout, who read nature as an open book, and who was most at home when farthest from the haunts of the civilised world. Worthy to stand by his side is the noble Indian Chingachgook, “grave, silent, acute, self-contained,” as Mr. James H. Morse says of him; “sufficiently lofty-minded to take in the greatness of the Indian’s past, and sufficiently farsighted to see the hopelessness of his future,—with nobility of soul enough to grasp the white man’s virtues, and with inherited wildness enough to keep him true to the instincts of his own race.” Famous among Cooper’s sailor folk is Long Tom Coffin, of “The Pilot”—type of the rough but honest seaman, superstitious like all seamen but devoutly religious, faithful to the last and capable of the most heroic self-sacrifice. Other characters scarcely less well drawn, if less famous, move through Cooper’s pages—rough, uncouth waifs and strays of border life, grizzled old sea-dogs, soldiers’ and sailors’ wives and sweethearts, such as the wife of Ishmael Bush, Hetty and Judith Hutter, and Dew-of-June.
That he exhibited marked imperfections in style and technique no one will deny. He wrote too rapidly to attain to anything like elegance of style, and he is not infrequently obscure. He continually repeats words and expressions, to the great annoyance of the reader. The same carelessness that characterises his style is occasionally seen in the construction of his stories. Scenes are repeated. Mistakes due to forgetfulness occur, as in “Mercedes of Castile,” where the heroine presents her lover, on his outward voyage, with a cross of sapphire stones, emblems, she tells him, of fidelity, which later appear as turquoise stones. Peculiarities of habit or manner are referred to so continually that the reader becomes weary and disgusted. Numerous characters are, it must be admitted, conventional in the extreme. Cooper failed signally in his fine women. They are not creatures of flesh and blood; they are purely imaginary creatures in petticoats, mere simulacra, invariably paragons of sweetness, discretion, and artlessness, ever saying and doing the correct thing until the reader longs for a little less of the angel and a good deal more of Mother Eve. Finally, his introductions are exceedingly prolix and tedious, though in this respect he sinned in company with Scott and many another of the time.
But we must not let this catalogue of Cooper’s defects obscure his virtues. In spite of occasional carelessness of construction, all his best stories are highly interesting; he spins a good yarn. Never straining after effects, never loading his sentences with ornaments, when once started he moves straight ahead to his goal; one stirring scene follows another; there is wonderful fertility of resource, set forth with the confidence that begets faith. His was a large genius, which, though unsuccessful at miniature work, could manage a large canvas marvellously well. It must not be forgotten that Cooper was a pioneer; that he was the creator of our American romance of forest and prairie and sea. His descriptions of nature are done with the hand of a master. “If Cooper,” remarked Balzac, “had succeeded in the painting of character to the same extent that he did in the painting of the phenomena of nature, he would have uttered the last word of our art.” Moreover, Cooper’s stories are honest and wholesome like himself; they breathe the same genuineness, the same sincerity and hatred of shams and meanness; they uniformly hold up noble and worthy ideals; their tone is always as healthful and invigorating as a breath of ozone. As Professor Trent remarks, he “lifted the story of adventure into the realms of poetry”; and as the poet of the primeval American forest he has never been superseded.
Professor Lounsbury, whose Life of Cooper, in the “American Men of Letters” Series, remains the authoritative biography, sums up the man and his work as follows:
America has had among her representatives of the irritable race of writers many who have shown far more ability to get on pleasantly with their fellows than Cooper. She has had several gifted with higher spiritual insight than he, with broader and juster views of life, with finer ideals of literary art, and, above all, with far greater delicacy of taste. But she counts on the scanty roll of her men of letters the name of no one who acted from purer patriotism or loftier principle. She finds among them all no manlier nature, and no more heroic soul.
Mr. W. C. Brownell prepared for the Iroquois Edition of Cooper’s Works a critical introduction which may safely be accepted as the most just, most delicate, and most comprehensive analysis of the man and of his work. Mr. Brownell writes:
There is a quality in Cooper’s romance, however, that gives it as romance an almost unique distinction. I mean its solid and substantial alliance with reality. It is thoroughly romantic, and yet—very likely owing to his imaginative deficiency, if anything can be so owing—it produces, for romance, an almost unequalled illusion of life itself.... Cooper’s ... work is in no sense a jardin des plantes; it is like the woods and sea that mainly form its subject and substance. Only critical myopia can be blind to the magnificent forest, with its pioneer clearings, its fringe of “settlements,” its wood-embosomed lakes, its neighbouring prairie on the one side, and on the other the distant ocean with the cities of its farther shore—the splendid panorama of man, of nature, and of human life unrolled for us by this large intelligence and noble imagination, this manly and patriotic American representative in the literary parliament of the world.
The Elder Dana.—Richard Henry Dana (1787–1879), lawyer, politician, poet, critic, and novelist, was one of the group of Boston writers that laid the foundations of New England literature. His tales, “Tom Thornton” and “Paul Felton,” are romantic stories of villainy and insanity, and give evidence of the influence of Brockden Brown. The narrative has at times an impetuous sweep that hurries the reader along in spite of himself; and the characterisation is wrought with powerful strokes. A collective edition of his “Poems and Prose Writings” appeared in 1833.