Encouraged by the plaudits from both sides of the Atlantic Cooper wrote another story, “The Pioneers” (1823), which was the first attempt to put into fiction the life of the frontier and the character of the backwoodsman. Here Cooper was in his element, on firm ground, familiar to him from his infancy, but the book was a revelation to the outside world. It is in this work that one of the greatest characters in fiction, the old backwoodsman Natty Bumpo—the famous Leather-Stocking—appeared and gave his name to a series of tales, comprised, in five volumes, which was not finally completed for twenty years. Strange to say, this famous series of books was not written in regular order. To follow the story logically the reader is recommended to read first the “Deerslayer,” next the “Last of the Mohicans,” followed by “The Pathfinder,” then “The Pioneers,” and last “The Prairie,” which ends with the death of Leather-Stocking.
The sea tales of Cooper were also suggested by Walter Scott, who published the “Pirate” in 1821. This book was being discussed by Cooper and some friends. The latter took the position that Scott could not have been its author since he was a lawyer and therefore could not have the knowledge of sea life which the book displayed. Cooper, being himself a mariner, declared that it could not have been written by a man familiar with the sea. He argued that it lacked that detail of information which no mariner would have failed to exhibit. To prove this point he determined to write a sea tale, and in 1823 his book “The Pilot” appeared, which was the first genuine salt-water novel ever written and to this day is one of the best. Tom Coffin, the hero of this novel, is the only one of all Cooper’s characters worthy to take a place beside Leather-Stocking, and the two books were published within two years of each other. In 1829 appeared “The Red Rover,” which is wholly a tale of the ocean, as “The Last of the Mohicans” is wholly a tale of the forest. In all, Cooper wrote ten sea tales, which with his land stories established the fact that he was equally at home whether on the green billows or under the green trees.
In 1839 Cooper published his “History of the United States Navy,” which is to this day the only authority on the subject for the period of which it treats. He also wrote many other novels on American subjects and some eight or ten like “Bravo,” “The Headsman” and others on European themes; but it is by “The Spy,” the five Leather-Stocking tales, and four or five of his sea tales that his fame has been secured and will be maintained.
In 1822, after “The Spy” had made Cooper famous, he removed to New York, where he lived for a period of four years, one of the most popular men in the metropolis. His force of character, big-heartedness, and genial, companionable nature—notwithstanding the fact that he was contentious and frequently got into the most heated discussions—made him unusually popular with those who knew him. He had many friends, and his friends were the best citizens of New York. He founded the “Bread and Cheese Lunch,” to which belonged Chancellor Kent, the poets Fitz-Green Halleck and Wm. Cullen Bryant, Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, and many other representatives of science, literature, and the learned professions. In 1826 he sailed for Europe, in various parts of which he resided for a period of six years. Before his departure he was tendered a dinner in New York, which was attended by many of the most prominent men of the nation. Washington Irving had gone to the Old World eleven years before and traveled throughout Great Britain and over the Continent, but Cooper’s works, though it was but six years since his first volume was published, were at this time more widely known than those of Irving; and with the author of the “Sketchbook” he divided the honors which the Old World so generously showered upon those two brilliant representatives of the New.
Many pleasant pages might be filled with the records of Cooper’s six years in Europe, during which time he enjoyed the association and respect of the greatest literary personages of the Old World. It would be interesting to tell how Sir Walter Scott sought him out in Paris and renewed the acquaintance again in London; how he lived in friendship and intimacy with General Lafayette at the French capital; to tell of his associations with Wordsworth and Rogers in London; his intimate friendship with the great Italian Greenough, and his fondness for Italy, which country he preferred above all others outside of America; of the delightful little villa where he lived in Florence, where he said he could look out upon green leaves and write to the music of the birds; to picture him settled for a summer in Naples; living in Tasso’s villa at Sarento, writing his stories in the same house in which the great Latin author had lived, with the same glorious view of the sea and the bay, and the surf dashing almost against its walls. But space forbids that we should indulge in recounting these pleasant reminiscences. Let it be said that wherever he was he was thoroughly and pronouncedly an American. He was much annoyed by the ignorance and prejudice of the English in all that related to his country. In France he vigorously defended the system of American government in a public pamphlet which he issued in favor of General Lafayette, upon whom the public press was making an attack. He was equally in earnest in bringing forward the claims of our poets, and was accustomed at literary meetings and dinner parties to carry volumes of Bryant, Halleck, Drake and others, from which he read quotations to prove his assertions of their merits. Almost every prominent American who visited Europe during his seven years’ sojourn abroad brought back pleasant recollections of his intercourse with the great and patriotic novelist.
Cooper returned to America in 1833, the same year that Washington Irving came back to his native land. He retired to his home at Cooperstown, where he spent the remaining nineteen years of his life, dying on the 14th day of September, 1852, one day before the sixty-second anniversary of his birth. His palatial home at Cooperstown, as were also his various places of residence in New York and foreign lands, were always open to his deserving countrymen, and many are the ambitious young aspirants in art, literature and politics who have left his hospitable roof with higher ideals, loftier ambitions and also with a more exalted patriotism.
A few days after his death a meeting of prominent men was held in New York in honor of their distinguished countryman. [♦]Washington Irving presided and William Cullen Bryant delivered an oration paying fitting tribute to the genius of the first great American novelist, who was first to show how fit for fiction were the scenes, the characters, and the history of his native land. Nearly fifty years have passed since that day, but Cooper’s men of the sea and his men of the forest and the plain still survive, because they deserve to live, because they were true when they were written, and remain to-day the best of their kind. Though other fashions in fiction have come and gone and other novelists have a more finished art nowadays, no one of them all has succeeded more completely in doing what he tried to do than did James Fenimore Cooper.
[♦] ‘Washingion’ replaced with ‘Washington’
If we should visit Cooperstown, New York, the most interesting spot we should see would be the grave of America’s first great novelist; and the one striking feature about it would be the marble statue of Leather Stocking, with dog and gun, overlooking the last resting-place of his great creator. Then we should visit the house and go into the library and sit in the chair and lean over the table where he was created. Then down to the beautiful Otsego Lake, and as the little pleasure steamer comes into view we peer to catch the gilded name painted on its side. Nearer it comes, and we read with delight “Natty Bumpo,” the real name of Leather Stocking. Otsego Hall, the cemetery and the lake alike, are a shrine to the memory of Cooper and this greatest hero of American fiction. And we turn away determined to read again the whole of the Leather Stocking Tales.