The success of “The Spy” unquestionably determined Cooper’s vocation, and made him a man of letters. But he had not yet found where his true strength lay. His training and education had not been such as would seem to be a good preparation for a literary career. His reading had been desultory, and not extensive; and the habit of composition had not been formed in early life. Indeed, in mere style, in the handling of the tools of his craft, Cooper never attained a master’s ease and power. In his first two novels the want of technical skill and literary accomplishment was obvious; and the scenery, subjects, and characters of these novels did not furnish him with the opportunity of turning to account the peculiar advantages which had come to him from the events of his childhood and youth. In his infancy he was taken to Cooperstown, a spot which his father had just begun to reclaim from the dominion of the wilderness. Here his first impressions of the external world, as well as of life and manners, were received. At the age of sixteen he became a midshipman in the United States navy, and remained in the service for six years. A father who, in training up his son for the profession of letters, should send him into the wilderness in his infancy and to sea at sixteen, would seem to be shooting very wide of the mark; but in this, as in so many things, there is a divinity that shapes our rough-hewn ends. Had Cooper enjoyed the best scholastic advantages which the schools and colleges of Europe could have furnished, they could not have fitted him for the work he was destined to do so well as the apparently untoward elements we have above adverted to; for Natty Bumppo was the fruit of his woodland experience, and Long Tom Coffin of his sea-faring life.
“The Pioneers” and “The Pilot” were both published in 1823; “Lionel Lincoln” in 1825; and “The Last of the Mohicans” in 1826. We may put “Lionel Lincoln” aside, as one of his least successful productions; but the three others were never surpassed, and rarely equalled, by any of his numerous subsequent works. All the powerful, and nearly all the attractive, qualities of his genius were displayed in these three novels, in their highest degree and most ample measure. Had he never written any more,—though we should have missed many interesting narratives, admirable pictures, and vigorously drawn characters,—we are not sure that his fame would not have been as great as it is now. From these, and “The Spy,” full materials may be drawn for forming a correct estimate of his merits and his defects. In these, his strength and weakness, his gifts and deficiencies, are amply shown. Here, then, we may pause, and, without pursuing his literary biography any farther, proceed to set down our estimate of his claims as a writer. Any critic who dips his pen in ink and not in gall would rather praise than blame; therefore we will dispose of the least gracious part of our task first, and begin with his blemishes and defects.
A skilful construction of the story is a merit which the public taste no longer demands, and it is consequently fast becoming one of the lost arts. The practice of publishing novels in successive numbers, so that one portion is printed before another is written, is undoubtedly one cause of this. But English and American readers have not been accustomed to this excellence in the works of their best writers of fiction; and therefore they are not sensitive to the want of it. This is certainly not one of Scott’s strong points. Fielding’s “Tom Jones” is, in this respect, superior to any of the “Waverley Novels,” and without an equal, so far as we know, in English literature. But, in sitting in judgment upon a writer of novels, we cannot waive an inquiry into his merits on this point. Are his stories, simply as stories, well told? Are his plots symmetrically constructed and harmoniously evolved? Are his incidents probable? and do they all help on the catastrophe? Does he reject all episodical matter which would clog the current of the narrative? Do his novels have unity of action? or are they merely a series of sketches, strung together without any relation of cause and effect? Cooper, tried by these rules, can certainly command no praise. His plots are not carefully or skilfully constructed. His incidents are not probable in themselves, nor do they succeed each other in a natural and dependent progression. His characters get into scrapes from which the reasonable exercise of common faculties should have saved them; and they are rescued by incredible means and impossible instruments. The needed man appears as unaccountably and mysteriously as if he had dropped from the clouds, or emerged from the sea, or crept up through a fissure in the earth. The winding up of his stories is often effected by devices nearly as improbable as a violation of the laws of Nature. His personages act without adequate motives; they rush into needless dangers; they trust their fate, with unsuspecting simplicity, to treacherous hands.
In works of fiction the skill of the writer is most conspicuously shown when the progress of the story is secured by natural and probable occurrences. Many events take place in history and in common life which good taste rejects as inadmissible in a work of imagination. Sudden death by disease or casualty is no very uncommon occurrence in real life; but it cannot be used in a novel to clear up a tangled web of circumstance, without betraying something of a poverty of invention in the writer. He is the best artist who makes least use of incidents which lie out of the beaten path of observation and experience. In constructive skill Cooper’s rank is not high; for all his novels are more or less open to the criticism that too frequent use is made in them of events very unlikely to have happened. He leads his characters into such formidable perils that the chances are a million to one against their being rescued. Such a run is made upon our credulity that the fund is soon exhausted, and the bank stops payment.
For illustration of the above strictures we will refer to a single novel, “The Last of the Mohicans,” which everybody will admit to be one of the most interesting of his works,—full of rapid movement, brilliant descriptions, hair-breadth escapes, thrilling adventures,—which young persons probably read with more rapt attention than any other of his narratives. In the opening chapter we find at Fort Edward, on the head-waters of the Hudson, the two daughters of Colonel Munro, the commander of Fort William Henry, on the shores of Lake George; though why they were at the former post, under the protection of a stranger, and not with their father, does not appear. Information is brought of the approach of Montcalm, with a hostile army of Indians and Frenchmen, from the North; and the young ladies are straightway hurried off to the more advanced, and consequently more dangerous post, when prudence and affection would have dictated just the opposite course. Nor is this all. General Webb, the commander of Fort Edward, at the urgent request of Colonel Munro, sends him a reinforcement of fifteen hundred men, who march off through the woods, by the military road, with drums beating and colors flying; and yet, strange to say, the young ladies do not accompany the troops, but set off, on the very same day, by a by-path, attended by no other escort than Major Heyward, and guided by an Indian whose fidelity is supposed to be assured by his having been flogged for drunkenness by the orders of Colonel Munro. The reason assigned for conduct so absurd that in real life it would have gone far to prove the parties having a hand in it not to be possessed of that sound and disposing mind and memory which the law requires as a condition precedent to making a will is, that hostile Indians, in search of chance scalps, would be hovering about the column of troops, and so leave the by-path unmolested. But the servants of the party follow the route of the column: a measure, we are told, dictated by the sagacity of the Indian guide, in order to diminish the marks of their trail, if, haply, the Canadian savages should be prowling about so far in advance of their army! Certainly, all the sagacity of the fort would seem to have been concentrated in the person of the Indian. How much of this improbability might have been avoided, if the action had been reversed, and the young ladies, in view of the gathering cloud of war, had been sent from the more exposed and less strongly guarded point of Fort William Henry to the safe fortress of Fort Edward! Then the smallness of the escort and the risks of the journey would have been explained and excused by the necessity of the case; and the subsequent events of the novel might have been easily accommodated to the change we have indicated.
One of the best of Cooper’s novels—as a work of art perhaps the very best—is “The Bravo.” But the character of Jacopo Frontoni is a sort of moral impossibility, and the clearing up of the mystery which hangs over his life and conduct, which is skilfully reserved to the last moment, is consequently unsatisfactory. He is represented as a young man of the finest qualities and powers, who, in the hope of rescuing a father who had been falsely imprisoned by the Senate, consents to assume the character, and bear the odium, of a public bravo, or assassin, though entirely innocent. This false position gives rise to many most effective scenes and incidents, and the character is in many respects admirably drawn. But when the end comes, we lay down the book and say,—“This could never have been: a virtuous and noble young man could not for years have been believed to be the most hateful of mankind; the laws of Nature and the laws of the human mind forbid it: so vast a web of falsehood could not have been woven without a flaw: we can credit much of the organized and pitiless despotism of Venice, but could it work miracles?”
Further illustrations of this same defect might easily be cited, if the task were not ungracious. Neither books, nor pictures, nor men and women should be judged by their defects. It is enough to say that Cooper never wrote a novel in regard to which the reader must not lay aside his critical judgment upon the structure of the story and the interdependence of the incidents, and let himself be borne along by the rapid flow of the narrative, without questioning too curiously as to the nature of the means and instruments employed to give movement to the stream.
In the delineation of character, Cooper may claim great, but not unqualified praise. This is a vague statement; and to draw a sharper line of discrimination, we should say that he is generally successful—sometimes admirably so—in drawing personages in whom strong primitive traits have not been effaced by the attritions of artificial life, and generally unsuccessful when he deals with those in whom the original characteristics are less marked, or who have been smoothed by education and polished by society. It is but putting this criticism in another form to say that his best characters are persons of humble social position. He wields his brush with a vigorous hand, but the brush itself has not a fine point. Of all the children of his brain, Natty Bumppo is the most universal favorite,—and herein the popular judgment is assuredly right. He is an original conception,—and not more happily conceived than skilfully executed. It was a hazardous undertaking to present the character backwards, and let us see the closing scenes of his life first,—like a Hebrew Bible, of which the beginning is at the end; but the author’s genius has triumphed over the perils of the task, and given us a delineation as consistent and symmetrical as it is striking and vigorous. Ignorant of books, simple, and credulous, guileless himself, and suspecting no evil in others, with moderate intellectual powers, he commands our admiration and respect by his courage, his love of Nature, his skill in woodland lore, his unerring moral sense, his strong affections, and the veins of poetry that run through his rugged nature like seams of gold in quartz. Long Tom Coffin may be described as Leatherstocking suffered a sea-change,—with a harpoon instead of a rifle, and a pea-jacket instead of a hunting-shirt. In both the same primitive elements may be discerned: the same limited intellectual range combined with professional or technical skill; the same generous affections and unerring moral instincts; the same religious feeling, taking the form at times of fatalism or superstition. Long Tom’s love of the sea is like Leatherstocking’s love of the woods; the former’s dislike of the land is like the latter’s dislike of the clearings. Cooper himself, as we are told by his daughter, was less satisfied, in his last years, with Long Tom Coffin than most of his readers,—and, of the two characters, considered that of Boltrope the better piece of workmanship. We cannot assent to this comparative estimate; but we admit that Boltrope has not had full justice done to him in popular judgment. It is but a slight sketch, but it is extremely well done. His death is a bit of manly and genuine pathos; and in his conversations with the chaplain there is here and there a touch of true humor, which we value the more because humor was certainly not one of the author’s best gifts.
Antonio, the old fisherman, in “The Bravo,” is another very well drawn character, in which we can trace something of a family likeness to the hunter and sailor above mentioned. The scene in which he is shrived by the Carmelite monk, in his boat, under the midnight moon, upon the Lagoons, is one of the finest we know of in the whole range of the literature of fiction, leaving upon the mind a lasting impression of solemn and pathetic beauty. In “The Chainbearer,” the Yankee squatter, Thousandacres, is a repulsive figure, but drawn with a powerful pencil. The energy of character, or rather of action, which is the result of a passionate love of money, is true to human nature. The closing scenes of his rough and lawless life, in which his latent affection for his faithful wife throws a sunset gleam over his hard and selfish nature, and prevents it from being altogether hateful, are impressively told, and are touched with genuine tragic power.
On the other hand, Cooper generally fails when he undertakes to draw a character which requires for its successful execution a nice observation and a delicate hand. His heroes and heroines are apt to abuse the privilege which such personages have enjoyed, time out of mind, of being insipid. Nor can he catch and reproduce the easy grace and unconscious dignity of high-bred men and women. His gentlemen, whether young or old, are apt to be stiff, priggish, and commonplace; and his ladies, especially his young ladies, are as deficient in individuality as the figures and faces of a fashion-print. Their personal and mental charms are set forth with all the minuteness of a passport; but, after all, we cannot but think that these fine creatures, with hair, brow, eyes, and lips of the most orthodox and approved pattern, would do very little towards helping one through a rainy day in a country-house. Judge Temple, in “The Pioneers,” and Colonel Howard, in “The Pilot,” are highly estimable and respectable gentlemen, but, in looking round for the materials of a pleasant dinner-party, we do not think they would stand very high on the list. They are fair specimens of their class,—the educated gentleman in declining life,—many of whom are found in the subsequent novels. They are wanting in those natural traits of individuality by which, in real life, one human being is distinguished from another. They are obnoxious to this one general criticism, that the author is constantly reminding us of the qualities of mind and character on which he rests their claims to favor, without causing them to appear naturally and unconsciously in the course of the narrative. The defect we are adverting to may be illustrated by comparing such personages of this class as Cooper has delineated with Colonel Talbot, in “Waverley,” Colonel Mannering and Counsellor Pleydell, in “Guy Mannering,” Monkbarns, in “The Antiquary,” and old Osbaldistone, in “Rob Roy.” These are all old men: they are all men of education, and in the social position of gentlemen; but each has certain characteristics which the others have not: each has the distinctive individual flavor-perceptible, but indescribable, like the savor of a fruit—which is wanting in Cooper’s well-dressed and well-behaved lay-figures.