[JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.]
The publication, now brought to a close, of a new edition of the novels of Cooper66. We refer to the new edition of the novels of Cooper by Messrs. W.A. Townsend & Co., with illustrations by Darley. gives us a fair occasion for discharging a duty which Maga has too long neglected, and saying something upon the genius of this great writer, and, incidentally, upon the character of a man who would have been a noticeable, not to say remarkable person, had he never written a line. These novels stand before us in thirty-two goodly duodecimo volumes, well printed, gracefully illustrated, and, in all external aspects, worthy of generous commendation. With strong propriety, the publishers dedicate this edition of the “first American novelist” to “the American People.” No one of our great writers is more thoroughly American than Cooper; no one has caught and reproduced more broadly and accurately the spirit of our institutions, the character of our people, and even the aspects of Nature in this our Western world. He was a patriot to the very core of his heart; he loved his country with a fervid, but not an undiscerning love: it was an intelligent, vigilant, discriminating affection that bound his heart to his native land; and thus, while no man defended his country more vigorously when it was in the right, no one reproved its faults more courageously, or gave warning and advice more unreservedly, where he felt that they were needed.
This may be one reason why Cooper has more admirers, or at least fewer disparagers, abroad than at home. On the Continent of Europe his novels are everywhere read, with an eager, unquestioning delight. His popularity is at least equal to that of Scott; and we think a considerable amount of testimony could be collected to prove that it is even greater. But the fact we have above stated is not the only explanation of this. He was the first writer who made foreign nations acquainted with the characters and incidents of American frontier and woodland life; and his delineations of Indian manners and traits were greatly superior in freshness and power, if not in truth, to any which had preceded them. His novels opened a new and unwrought vein of interest, and were a revelation of humanity under aspects and influences hitherto unobserved by the ripe civilization of Europe. The taste which had become cloyed with endless imitations of the feudal and mediaeval pictures of Scott turned with fresh delight to such original figures—so full of sylvan power and wildwood grace—as Natty Bumppo and Uncas. European readers, too, received these sketches with an unqualified, because an ignorant admiration. We, who had better knowledge, were more critical, and could see that the drawing was sometimes faulty, and the colors more brilliant than those of life.
The acute observer can detect a parallel between the relation of Cooper to America and that of Scott to Scotland. Scott was as hearty a Scotchman as Cooper an American: but Scott was a Tory in politics and an Episcopalian in religion; and the majority of Scotchmen are Whigs in politics and Presbyterians in religion. In Scott, as in Cooper, the elements of passion and sympathy were so strong that he could not be neutral or silent on the great questions of his time and place. Thus, while the Scotch are proud of Scott, as they well may be,—while he has among his own people most intense and enthusiastic admirers,—the proportion of those who yield to his genius a cold and reluctant homage is probably greater in Scotland than in any other country in Christendom. “The rest of mankind recognize the essential truth of his delineations, and his loyalty to all the primal instincts and sympathies of humanity”; but the Scotch cannot forget that he opposed the Reform Bill, painted the Covenanters with an Episcopalian pencil, and made a graceful and heroic image of the detested Claverhouse.
The novels of Cooper, in the dates of their publication, cover a period of thirty years: beginning with “Precaution,” in 1820, and ending with “The Ways of the Hour,” in 1850. The production of thirty-two volumes in thirty years is honorable to his creative energy, as well as to the systematic industry of his habits. But even these do not constitute the whole of his literary labors during these twenty-nine years. We must add five volumes of naval history and biography, ten volumes of travels and sketches in Europe, and a large amount of occasional and controversial writings, most of which is now hidden away in that huge wallet wherein Time puts his alms for Oblivion. His literary productions other than his novels would alone be enough to save him from the reproach of idleness. In estimating a writer’s claims to honor and remembrance, the quantity as well as the quality of his work should surely be taken into account; and in summing up the case of our great novelist to the jury of posterity, this point should be strongly put.
Cooper’s first novel, “Precaution,” was published when he was in his thirty-first year. It owed its existence to an accident, and was but an ordinary production, as inferior to the best of his subsequent works as Byron’s “Hours of Idleness” to “Childe Harold.” It was a languid and colorless copy of exotic forms: a mere scale picked from the surface of the writer’s mind, with neither beauty nor vital warmth to commend it. We speak from the vague impressions which many long years have been busy in effacing; and we confess that it would require the combined forces of a long voyage and a scanty library to constrain us to the task of reading it anew.
And yet, such as it was, it made a certain impression at the time of its appearance. The standard by which it was tried was very unlike that which would now be applied to it: there was all the difference between the two that there is between strawberries in December and strawberries in June. American literature was then just beginning to “glint forth” like Burns’s mountain daisy, and rear its tender form above the parent earth. The time had, indeed, gone by—which a friend of ours, not yet venerable, affirms he can well remember—when school-boys and collegians, zealous for the honor of indigenous literature, were obliged to cite, by way of illustration, such works as Morse’s Geography and Hannah Adams’s “History of the Jews”; but it was only a faint, crepuscular light, that streaked the east, and gave promise of the coming day. Irving had just completed his “Sketch-Book,” which was basking in the full sunshine of unqualified popularity. Dana, in the thoughtful and meditative beauty of “The Idle Man,” was addressing a more limited public. Percival had just before published a small volume of poems; Halleck’s “Fanny” had recently appeared; and so had a small duodecimo volume by Bryant, containing “The Ages,” and half a dozen smaller poems. Miss Sedgwick’s “New England Tale” was published about the same time. But a large proportion of those who are now regarded as our ablest writers were as yet unknown, or just beginning to give sign of what they were. Dr. Channing was already distinguished as an eloquent and powerful preacher, but the general public had not yet recognized in him that remarkable combination of loftiness of thought with magic charm of style, which was soon to be revealed in his essays on Milton and Napoleon Bonaparte. Ticknor and Everett were professors in Harvard College, giving a new impulse to the minds of the students by their admirable lectures; and the latter was also conducting the “North American Review.” Neither had as yet attained to anything more than a local reputation. Prescott, a gay and light-hearted young man,—gay and light-hearted, in spite of partial blindness,—the darling of society and the idol of his home, was silently and resolutely preparing himself for his chosen function by a wide and thorough course of patient study. Bancroft was in Germany, and working like a German. Emerson was a Junior in College. Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and Poe were school-boys; Mrs. Stowe was a school-girl; Whipple and Lowell were in the nursery, and Motley and the younger Dana had not long been out of it.
“Precaution,” though an indifferent novel, was yet a novel; of the orthodox length, with plot, characters, and incidents; and here and there a touch of genuine power, as in the forty-first chapter, where the scene is on board a man-of-war bringing her prizes into port. It found many readers, and excited a good deal of curiosity as to who the author might be.
“Precaution” was published on the 25th of August, 1820, and “The Spy” on the 17th of September, 1821. The second novel was a great improvement upon the first, and fairly took the public by storm. We are old enough to remember its first appearance; the eager curiosity and keen discussion which it awakened; the criticism which it called forth; and, above all, the animated delight with which it was received by all who were young or not critical. Distinctly, too, can we recall the breathless rapture with which we hung over its pages, in those happy days when the mind’s appetite for books was as ravenous as the body’s for bread-and-butter, and a novel, with plenty of fighting in it, was all we asked at a writer’s hands. In order to qualify ourselves for the task which we have undertaken in this article, we have read “The Spy” a second time; and melancholy indeed was the contrast between the recollections of the boy and the impressions of the man. It was the difference between the theatre by gas-light and the theatre by day-light: the gold was pinchbeck, the gems were glass, the flowers were cambric and colored paper, the goblets were gilded pasteboard. Painfully did the ideal light fade away, and the well-remembered scene stand revealed in disenchanting day. With incredulous surprise, with a constant struggle between past images and present revelations, were we forced to acknowledge the improbability of the story, the clumsiness of the style, the awkwardness of the dialogue, the want of Nature in many of the characters, the absurdity of many of the incidents, and the painfulness of some of the scenes. But with all this, a candid, though critical judgment could not but admit that these grave defects were attended by striking merits, which pleaded in mitigation of literary sentence. It was stamped with a truth, earnestness, and vital power, of which its predecessor gave no promise. Though the story was improbable, it seized upon the attention with a powerful grasp from the very start, and the hold was not relaxed till the end. Whatever criticism it might challenge, no one could call it dull: the only offence in a book which neither gods nor men nor counters can pardon. If the narrative flowed languidly at times, there were moments in which the incidents flashed along with such vivid rapidity that the susceptible reader held his breath over the page. The character of Washington was an elaborate failure, and the author, in his later years, regretted that he had introduced this august form into a work of fiction; but Harvey Birch was an original sketch, happily conceived, and, in the main, well sustained. His mysterious figure was recognized as a new accession to the repertory of the novelist, and not a mere modification of a preëxisting type. And, above all, “The Spy” had the charm of reality; it tasted of the soil; it was the first successful attempt to throw an imaginative light over American history, and to do for our country what the author of “Waverley” had done for Scotland. Many of the officers and soldiers of the Revolutionary War were still living, receiving the reward of their early perils and privations in the grateful reverence which was paid to them by the contemporaries of their children and grandchildren. Innumerable traditionary anecdotes of those dark days of suffering and struggle, unrecorded in print, yet lingered in the memories of the people, and were told in the nights of winter around the farm-house fire; and of no part of the country was this more true than of the region in which the scene of the novel is laid. The enthusiasm with which it was there read was the best tribute to the substantial fidelity of its delineations. All over the country, it enlisted in its behalf the powerful sentiment of patriotism; and whatever the critics might say, the author had the satisfaction of feeling that the heart of the people was with him.
Abroad, “The Spy” was received with equal favor. It was soon translated into most of the languages of Europe; and even the “gorgeous East” opened for it its rarely moving portals. In 1847, a Persian version was published in Ispahan; and by this time it may have crossed the Chinese wall, and be delighting the pig-tailed critics and narrow-eyed beauties of Pekin.