From “Personal Opinions of Honoré de Balzac,” translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.

I HAVE a serious reproach to make against Cooper. Certainly, he does not owe his fame to his fellow-citizens, neither does he owe it to England; he owes it in a great measure to the passionate admiration of France, to our fine and noble country, more considerate of foreign men of genius than she is of her own poets. Cooper has been understood and, above all, appreciated in France. I am therefore surprised to see him ridicule the French officers who were in Canada in 1750. Those officers were gentlemen, and history tells us that their conduct was noble. Is it for an American, whose position demands of him lofty ideas, to give a gratuitously odious character to one of those officers when the sole succor that America received during her War of Independence came from France? My observation is, I think, the more just because in reading over all Cooper’s works I find it impossible to discover even a trace of good-will to France.

  The difference that exists between Walter Scott and Cooper is derived essentially from the nature of the subjects towards which their genius led them. From Cooper’s scenes nothing philosophical or impressive to the intellect issues when, the work once read, the soul looks back to take in a sense of the whole. Yet both are great historians; both have cold hearts; neither will admit passion, that divine emanation, superior to the virtue that man has constructed for the preservation of society. They have suppressed it, they have offered it as a holocaust to the blue-stockings of their country, but the one initiates you into great human evolutions, the other into the mighty heart of Nature herself. One has brought literature to grasp the earth and ocean, the other makes it grapple body to body with humanity. Read Cooper and this will strike you especially in “The Pathfinder.” You will not find a portrait which makes you think, which brings you back into yourself by some subtle or ingenious reflection, which explains to you facts, persons, or actions. He seems, on the contrary, to wish to plunge you into solitude and leave you to dream there; whereas Scott gives you, wherever you are, a brilliant company of human beings. Cooper’s work isolates; Scott weds you to his drama as he paints with broad strokes the feature of his country at all epochs. The grandeur of Cooper is a reflection of the Nature he depicts; that of Walter Scott is more peculiarly his own. The Scotchman procreates his work; the American is the son of his. Walter Scott has a hundred aspects; Cooper is a painter of sea and landscape, admirably aided by two academies,—the Savage and the Sailor. His noble creation of “Leather-Stocking” is a work apart. Not understanding English I cannot judge of the style of these two great geniuses, happily for us so different, but I should suppose the Scotchman to be superior to the American in the expression of his thought and in the mechanism of his style. Cooper is illogical; he proceeds by sentences which, taken one by one, are confused, the succeeding phrase not allied to the preceding, though the whole presents an imposing substance. To understand this criticism read the first two pages of “The Pathfinder,” and examine each proposition. You will find a muddle of ideas which would bring pensums upon any rhetoric pupil in France. But the moment the majesty of his Nature lays hold of you, you forget the clumsy lurching of the vessel,—you think only of the ocean or the lake. To sum up once more: one is the historian of Nature, the other of humanity; one attains to the glorious ideal by imagery, the other by action, though without neglecting poesy, the high-priestess of art.