Harper's Round Table, June 25, 1895

by Various

The story of Leatherstocking begins in The Deerslayer, though it was not written until twenty years after the publication of The Pioneers. The scene was laid on Otsego Lake, and the character of Leatherstocking was drawn as that of a young scout just entering upon manhood. The next year, 1841, came The Pathfinder, having for its background the shores of Lake Ontario, with which Cooper had become familiar during the winter there in the service of the navy.

In these two books Cooper reached the highest point of his art. Leatherstocking appears in The Deerslayer as a young man full of the promise of a noble manhood. And this ideal character is developed through a succession of stirring adventures, the like of which are to be found only in the pages of Scott. Side by side with Leatherstocking stand those pictures of Indian character, which became so famous that the Indian of that day has passed into history as represented by Cooper.

The Pathfinder carries Leatherstocking through some of the most exciting episodes of his adventurous career, and belongs to the same part of his life as The Last of the Mohicans, published sixteen years before, the scene of which is laid near Lake Champlain. The Last of the Mohicans takes rank with The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder in representing Cooper at his best. In these three novels we see Leatherstocking as a man in the prime of life battling with the stirring events that were making the history of the country. All the story of the war of the white man with nature, with circumstances, and with his red brother in civilizing the frontier, is told in these books. It is the romance of real history, and Leatherstocking had his prototype in many a brave frontiersman whose deeds were unrecorded, and whose name was never known beyond his own little circle of friends.

In The Pioneers Leatherstocking has become an old man who has sought a home in the forest to avoid the noise and strife of civilized life, and he closes his career in The Prairie, a novel of the plains of the great West, whither the old man has gone to spend his last days. It is the story of a lonely life of the prairie-hunter of those days, whose love for solitude has led him far from even the borders of the frontier, and whose dignified death is a fitting ending to his noble and courageous life. It is supposed that this end to Leatherstocking's career was suggested to Cooper by the ever-famous Daniel Boone, and some of the incidents of the story read like real life. One of Cooper's most famous descriptions—that of the prairie on fire—occurs in this book—a scene excelled only by the description of the panther-fight in The Pioneers, or the combat between Deerslayer and his foe.

Cooper began his series of sea novels by the publication of The Pilot in 1824, and stands as the creator of this department of fiction. He was the first novelist to bring into fiction the ordinary, every-day life of the sailor afloat, whether employed on a merchant vessel or fighting hand to hand in a naval encounter. Scott's novel, The Pirate, had been criticised by Cooper as the evident work of a man who had never been at sea, and to prove how much better an effect could be produced by one familiar with ocean life he began his story, The Pilot.

COOPER READING TO AN OLD SHIPMATE.

The period of the story is the American Revolution, and the hero was that famous adventurer John Paul Jones, introduced under another name. It was such a new thing to put into fiction the technicalities of ship life, to describe the details of an evolution in a naval battle, and to throw in as background the vast and varying panorama of sea and sky, that Cooper, familiar as he was with ocean life, felt some doubt of his success. In order to test his powers, he read one day to an old shipmate that famous account of the passage of the ship through the narrow channel in one of the thrilling chapters of the yet unfinished work. The effect was all that Cooper could desire. The old sailor got into such a fury of excitement that he could not keep his seat, but paced up and down the room while Cooper was reading; in his excitement he was for a moment living over again a stormy scene from his own life; and the novelist laid down the manuscript, well pleased with the result of his experiment. The Pilot met with an instant success both in America and Europe. As it was his first, so it is perhaps his best sea story. In it he put all the freshness of reminiscence, all the haunting memories of ocean life that had followed him since his boyhood days. It was biographical in the same sense as The Pioneers, a part of the romance of childhood drafted into the reality of after-life.

Red Rover, the next sea story, came out in 1828. Other novelists had begun to write tales of the sea, but they were mere imitations of The Pilot. In the Red Rover the genuine adventures of the sailor class were again embodied in the thrilling narrative that Cooper alone knew how to write, and from its first appearance it has always been one of the most popular of the author's works. In these pages occurs that dramatic description of the last sea fight of Red Rover, one of Cooper's finest achievements.

Cooper's popularity abroad was equalled only by that of Scott. His works as soon as published were translated into almost every tongue of Europe, and were sold in Turkey, Prussia, Egypt, and Jerusalem in the language of those countries. It was said by a traveller that the middle classes of Europe had gathered all their knowledge of American history from Cooper's works, and that they had never understood the character of American independence until revealed by this novelist.