Born at Burlington, N. J., Sept. 15, 1789. Father, of Quaker descent and a congressman; mother, of Swedish descent. Family settled in Cooperstown, N. Y., 1790, where Mr. Cooper owned much land. Attended the village school; then became the private pupil of an Albany rector; entered Yale, 1802; dismissed for participation in a frolic, 1805. Served before the mast in a merchant vessel, 1806–1807; served as midshipman in the navy, part of the time on Lakes Ontario and Champlain, 1807–11. Married Miss DeLancey, 1811; five daughters and two sons were born to him. Resided at Mamaroneck, 1811–1814; Cooperstown, 1814–1817; Scarsdale, 1817–1822; New York, 1822–1826. Lived in Europe, chiefly in France and Italy, 1826–1833; consul at Lyons, 1826–1829. Returned to America, 1833; lived by turns at New York and at Cooperstown. Died at Cooperstown, Sept. 14, 1851; wife died four months later. An Episcopalian. Works: “Precaution,” 1820. “The Spy,” 1821. “The Pioneers,” 1823. “The Pilot,” 1824 (imprint, 1823). “Lionel Lincoln,” 1825. “The Last of the Mohicans,” 1826. “The Prairie,” 1827. “The Red Rover,” 1828. “The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish” (=“The Borderers”), 1829. “The Water-Witch,” 1830. “The Bravo,” 1831. “The Heidenmauer,” 1832. “The Headsman,” 1833. “The Monikins,” 1835. “Homeward Bound,” 1838. “Home as Found” (=“Eve Effingham”), 1838. “The History of the Navy of the United States of America,” 1839; abridged edition, 1841. “The Pathfinder,” 1840. “Mercedes of Castile,” 1840. “The Deerslayer,” 1841. “The Two Admirals,” 1842. “The Wing-and-Wing” (=“The Jack o’ Lantern”), 1842. “Wyandotte,” 1843. “Ned Myers” [the life of one of Cooper’s shipmates], 1843. “Afloat and Ashore,” 1844. “Miles Wallingford” (=“Lucy Hardinge”) [sequel to “Afloat and Ashore”], 1844. “Satanstoe,” 1845. “The Chainbearer,” 1846. “Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers,” 1846. “The Redskins” (=“Ravensnest”), 1846. “The Islets of the Gulf,” 1846–1848 in Graham’s Magazine; 1848 in book form, as “Jack Tier” (=“Captain Spike”). “The Crater” (=“Mark’s Reef”), 1847. “The Oak Openings” (=“The Bee Hunter”), 1848. “The Sea Lions,” 1849. “The Ways of the Hour,” 1850. The titles of the English editions, when they differed from the American are given in parentheses. Cooper also wrote several tales for Graham’s Magazine, ten volumes of travels, and a good deal of controversial matter.

Personal

  Visited Princess Galitzin, and also Cooper, the American novelist. This man, who has shown so much genius, has a good deal of the manners, or want of manners, peculiar to his countrymen.

  I met this evening (for the first time) with Cooper, the American writer. He is the author of the “Pioneers,” the “Spy,” etc. He has a dogged, discontented look, and seems ready to affront or to be affronted. His eye is rather deep-set, dull, and with little motion. One might imagine that he had lost his life in gazing at seas and woods and rivers, and that he would gaze—gaze on for ever. His conversation is rough, abrupt, and unamusing; yet I am told that he can recount an adventure well, and I can easily believe it. There was something peculiar in his physiognomy, but I could not make out what it was…. He resembles very much a caricature that I remember to have seen indicative of “Damme, who cares?”

  Mr. Cooper’s manuscript is very bad—unformed, with little of distinctive character about it, and varying greatly in different epistles. In most of those before us a steel pen has been employed, the lines are crooked, and the whole chirography has a constrained and school-boyish air.

  Anne A. and I went a few evenings since to take a sociable dish of tea with Mrs. Banyer, and Fenimore Cooper dropped in. I rather think the light by which we see the world emanates from ourselves. He moves in a belligerent spirit, waging war with classes and masses, boarding and broadsiding his fellow-creatures. He maintained that his own country was below France, Italy, and even England in civilization, intellectual development, morals, and manners; that we were going in every thing backward; that in common honesty we were below any other nation. Being in the presence of Mrs. Banyer and Miss Jay, who sanctify the very names of Christian and saint, he attacked the whole class with man-of-the-world slang, and wound up with promising me a pamphlet of his, just coming out, which is to grind M’Kenzie to powder. With all this, he was good-humored, and talked strongly and amusingly. He is a perfect John Bull in shape, dimensions, action, even to the growl.

  We are among those who regard Mr. Cooper as a wronged and persecuted man. We conceive that his countrymen have done him gross injustice—that they have not only shown themselves ungenerous but ungrateful, and that, in lending a greedy ear to the numerous malicious aspersions which have assailed his person and his reputation, they have only given confirmation and strength to the proverbial reproach, of irreverence and ingratitude, to which countries, distinguished by popular governments, have usually been thought obnoxious. We do not mean to regard him as wholly faultless—on the contrary, we look upon Mr. Cooper as a very imprudent person; one whose determined will, impetuous temperament, and great self-esteem, continually hurry forward into acts and expressions of error and impatience. We propose to compare sides in this question:—to put the case fairly between himself and countrymen, and show where the balance of justice lies.

  Of his failings I have said little; such as he had were obvious to all the world; they lay on the surface of his character; those who knew him least made the most account of them. With a character so made up of positive qualities—a character so independent and uncompromising, and with a sensitiveness far more acute than he was willing to acknowledge, it is not surprising that occasions frequently arose to bring him, sometimes into friendly collision, and sometimes into graver disagreements and misunderstandings with his fellow-men. For his infirmities, his friends found an ample counterpoise in the generous sincerity of his nature. He never thought of disguising his opinions, and he abhorred all disguise in others; he did not even deign to use that show of regard towards those of whom he did not think well, which the world tolerates, and almost demands. A manly expression of opinion, however different from his own, commanded his respect…. His character was like the bark of the cinnamon, a rough and astringent rind without, and an intense sweetness within. Those who penetrated below the surface found a genial temper, warm affections, and a heart with ample place for his friends, their pursuits, their good name, their welfare. They found him a philanthropist, though not precisely after the fashion of the day; a religious man, most devout where devotion is most apt to be a feeling rather than a custom, in the household circle; hospitable, and to the extent of his means liberal-handed in acts of charity.

  Mr. Cooper was in person solid, robust, athletic; in voice, manly; in manner, earnest, emphatic, almost dictatorial,—with something of self-assertion, bordering on egotism. The first effect was unpleasant, indeed repulsive, but there shone through all this a heartiness, frankness, which excited confidence, respect, and at last affection.

  A man of unquestioned talent,—almost genius,—he was aristocratic in feeling and arrogant in bearing, altogether combining in his manners what a Yankee once characterized as “winning ways to make people hate him.” Retiring to his parental acres near Cooperstown, N. Y., he was soon involved in a difficulty with the neighboring villagers, who had long been accustomed, in their boating excursions on the Lake (Otsego), to land and make themselves at home for an hour or two on a long, narrow promontory or “point,” that ran down from his grounds into the lake, and whom he had now dissuaded from so doing by legal force. The Whig newspaper of the village took up the case for the villagers, urging that their exclusion from “The Point,” though legal, was churlish, and impelled by the spirit of the dog in the manger; whereupon Cooper sued the editor for libel, recovered a verdict, and collected it by taking the money—through a sheriff’s officer—from the editor’s trunk.

  I had known Mr. Cooper during the later years of his life, and used to see him occasionally when he visited New York. He was an amazingly fluent talker as well as speaker and writer; and he affected an intense bitterness against the institutions of his native country in his conversation as well as in his writings. I can see him now, in my mind’s eye, standing with his back to the fire-place in my office, with his legs apart and his coat-tails under his arms, pouring out diatribes which did not seem half in earnest.

  Of the group around there was one who left an impression on my memory—Fenimore Cooper. He “stalked” around the salon—a tall, stalwart man, with the unmistakable air of self-confidence I have noticed in many Americans; as if it were a prime thought that independence was to be maintained by a seeming indifference to the opinions of on-lookers—a sensation that vanishes, however, when the demeanor that has given rise to it is found but the rough shell of a sweet kernel; for Americans are among the most socially generous of humankind. I had other and better opportunities of seeing Fenimore Cooper afterward; but in that salon, jostled by petits maîtres, he was out of place—as much so as an Indian cross-bow would have been among a collection of Minié rifles. Proctor, in 1828, wrote of him: “He has a dogged, discontented look, and seems ready to affront or be affronted. His eye is rather deep-set, dull, and with little motion.” He describes Cooper as rude even to coarseness in English society. That is not my experience of the author of the “Spy”—the originator of the class of sea-fictions—to whom the reading world owes a large debt. He was certainly the opposite of genial, and seemed to think it good taste and sound judgment to be condescending to his equals.

  The distinguished author died at his residence, Cooperstown, September 14, 1851, being then in his sixty-second year, and since that time his beautiful home, known as Otsego Hall, has been destroyed by fire and the property passed into other hands. He was buried among his kindred, in the family enclosure in the Episcopal churchyard of Christ Church, and beneath the shadows of a fine fir-tree, planted by himself, and several graceful elms and maples. The marble above his grave bears these simple lines:

The Spy, 1821

  Quite new scenes and characters, humour and pathos, a picture of America in Washington’s time; a surgeon worthy of Smollett or Moore, and quite different from any of their various surgeons; and an Irishwoman, Betty Flanagan, incomparable.

  “The Spy” was an event. It was the boldest and best attempt at the historical romance which had ever been made in America. It is somewhat the practice, at this day, to disparage that story. This is in very bad taste. The book is a good one,—full of faults, perhaps, and blunders; but full also of decided merits, and marked by a boldness of conception, and a courage in progress, which clearly showed the confidence of genius in its own resources. The conception of the Spy, as a character, was a very noble one.

  It is said that if you cast a pebble into the ocean, at the mouth of our harbor, the vibration made in the water passes gradually on till it strikes the icy barriers of the deep at the south pole. The spread of Cooper’s reputation is not confined within narrower limits. The “Spy” is read in all the written dialects of Europe, and in some of those of Asia. The French, immediately after its first appearance, gave it to the multitudes who read their far-diffused language, and placed it among the first works of its class. It was rendered into Castilian, and passed into the hands of those who dwell under the beams of the Southern Cross. At length it crossed the eastern frontier of Europe, and the latest record I have seen of its progress towards absolute universality, is contained in a statement of the International Magazine, derived, I presume, from its author, that in 1847 it was published in a Persian translation at Ispahan. Before this time, I doubt not, they are reading it in some of the languages of Hindostan, and, if the Chinese ever translated anything, it would be in the hands of the many millions who inhabit the far Cathay.

  That “Spy” made the groundwork of Cooper’s fame in this country, in England, and on the Continent. There were men who modelled their lives on lines traceable in the career of Harvey Birch, and were proud to do it. His devotion, his trueness to the cause he loved and served—his modesty, his strength of purpose, his self-effacement made up the preaching of a good moral sermon; none the less effective because his story was founded upon actual occurrences detailed to Mr. Cooper by his host, upon the occasion of some visit to the Jay homestead in Westchester.

  The success of “The Spy” was not altogether due to the novelty of its subject. With many of Cooper’s characteristic faults, it has also his characteristic merits. It is full of scenes that show the vigor and dash of his narrative power; and its central character, the humble peddler Harvey Birch, cool, brave, incorruptible, quick in resource in times of peril, is a noble example of that homely heroism in the portrayal of which Cooper excelled.

The Pilot, 1824

  In regard to the style of execution, the work has one fault which was mentioned in our notice of the “Spy;” it is in some instances, and more especially where the author speaks in his own person, overloaded with epithets, and the detail of particular circumstances. The author leaves too little to his readers, and from his solicitude to omit nothing of the quality, degree, and manner of everything related or described, he impairs the vivacity and force of the expression…. The choice of incidents and actors, and the frequent allusions to our history, manners, and habits, make the story strike deep into the feelings of American readers; and by implicating the tale with our naval history, the author possesses himself of one of the few positions from which our national enthusiasm is accessible.

  All who have since written romances of the sea have been but travelers in a country of which he was the great discoverer; and none of them all seemed to have loved a ship as Cooper loved it, or have been able so strongly to interest all classes of readers in its fortunes.

  “Pilot,” the first salt-water novel ever written, and to this day one of the very best. Its nameless and mysterious hero was a marine, Harvey Birch; obviously he had been modeled upon the Paul Jones whose name is held in terror to this day on the British coasts he harassed. In Long Tom Coffin, the Nantucket whaler, Cooper created the only one of his other characters worthy to take place beside Leatherstocking; and Tom, like Natty, is simple, homely, and strong. In writing the “Pilot,” Cooper evidently had in mind the friends who thought it impossible to interest the general reader in a tale of the ocean, and he laid some of his scenes on land; but it is these very passages which are tedious to-day, while the scenes at sea keep their freshness and have still unfailing interest.

  “The Pilot” is very uneven. The plot is conventionally trivial; and most of the characters are more so still. But Long Tom Coffin is a living Yankee sailor; and when we come to the sea, with its endless variety of weather, and to sea-fights, such as that between the “Ariel” and the “Alacrity,” it is hardly excessive to say that there is little better in print. If the plot and the characters had been half so good as the wonderful marine background in which they are set, the book would have been a masterpiece.

General

  Has the almost singular merit of writing American novels which everybody reads, and which we are of course bound to review now and then. For these last five or six years he has supplied the reading public annually with a repast of five or six hundred pages of such matter; so that we have a right to consider him as publicly professing this department of elegant literature. It is too late to say, that he does not excel in it; or at least, that he has not some considerable merit; for, however far he may fall short of our ideal standards, or wherever we may rank him among living writers, the public voice has long since confirmed to him the apellation of the American novelist, a title which was but sparingly and timidly suggested for the author of the “Spy.” No one has yet appeared among us who has been wholly able to cope with him in his proper walk; and we see no good reason why he should not be allowed, for the present at least, to maintain the distinction.

  Mr. Cooper is admitted by very general consent to have distanced every other competitor in the route struck out by the author of Waverley. We would not be understood by this language, to imply any thing like a servile imitation, in the detracting spirit of some English journals; for Cooper is no more an imitator of Scott, than Milton is of Shakspeare, because they both wrote in blank verse, or than Scott himself is of this latter, whom he resembles in the fond, though not the form of his writings. If this be imitation, it is more glorious than most originality…. Cooper’s great defect is his incapacity to seize the tone of good society; we say incapacity, for his repeated failures, we think, put it beyond a doubt. Nothing can be more lamentable than the compound of affectation, primness, and pedantry, a sort of backwoods gentility, which makes up with him the greater part of its dialogue and its manners. Defects like these would seem to be the natural result of an imperfect education, as well as a want of familiarity with well-bred society. But this last can scarcely be imputed to Mr. Cooper, and his experience of late years must have abundantly enlarged the sphere of his social observation, for all practical purposes. Has he shown a corresponding improvement?

  Do not hasten to write; you cannot be too slow about it. Give no ear to any man’s praise or censure; know that that is not it: on the one side is as Heaven if you have strength to keep silent, and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always at one’s right-hand and at one’s left, is the frightfulest Abyss and Pandemonium! See Fenimore Cooper;—poor Cooper, he is down in it; and had a climbing faculty too.

  Mr. Cooper’s works, for the last three or four years, seem to have been written under no higher inspiration than that of spleen. They abound in uncalled-for political disquisitions, filled up with expressions of the bitterest scorn and hatred. They are deformed by perpetual out-breaks of a spirit, which might be expected to show itself in the pages of a ruthless partisan, careless of truth in aiming at the reputation of an opponent whom he wishes to ruin; but from which the writings of the poet and the man of letters, sitting apart, “in the still air of delightful studies,” ought to be wholly exempt. He has added nothing to the range of characters in fiction, which amuse and occupy our hours of leisure, and to which the mind returns, as to old familiar scenes, or the faces of friends; he has told no new tale of human passions, for our instruction or warning; but he has given us, both in his books of travels, and his last novel, a few brilliant descriptions of natural scenery, both by land and sea.

  The first enthusiasm about Cooper having subsided, we remember more his faults than his merits. His ready resentment and way of showing it in cases which it is the wont of gentlemen to pass by in silence, or meet with a good humoured smile, have caused unpleasant associations with his name, and his fellow citizens, in danger of being tormented by suits for libel, if they spoke freely of him, have ceased to speak of him at all. But neither these causes, nor the baldness of his plots, shallowness of thought, and poverty in the presentation of character, should make us forget the grandeur and originality of his sea-sketches, nor the redemption from oblivion of our forest-scenery, and the noble romance of the hunter-pioneer’s life. Already, but for him, this fine page of life’s romance would be almost forgotten. He has done much to redeem these irrevocable beauties from the corrosive acid of a semi-civilized invasion.

  The greatest charm about Cooper’s novels is the perfect truthfulness of their forest scenery; there is nothing artificial in a single word—the very trees seem to grow around you; it is not scene painting, it is nature…. Even in the very worst of his novels, there are glimpses of nature so exquisitely painted as to justify the highest praise it is possible to bestow. It is just probable that the very success of this description of writing has led Mr. Cooper to persevere in a course which has exposed him to the charge of being considered a writer of limited range.

  Remarkable [“Pathfinder”], even among its companions, for the force and distinctness of its pictures. For ourselves—though we diligently perused the despatches—the battle of Palo Alto and the storming of Monterey are not more real and present to our mind than some of the scenes and characters of “The Pathfinder,” though we have not read it for nine years;—the little fort on the margin of Lake Ontario, the surrounding woods and waters, the veteran major in command, the treacherous Scotchman, the dogmatic old sailor, and the Pathfinder himself…. “The Prairie,” the last of the Leatherstocking Tales, is a novel of far inferior merit. The story is very improbable, and not very interesting. The pictures of scenery are less true to nature than in the previous volumes, and seem to indicate that Cooper had little or no personal acquaintance with the remoter parts of the West.

  Thought Leatherstocking a creation. No one would care to meddle with that class of character after Cooper.

  He is colonel of the literary regiment; Irving, lieutenant-colonel; Bryant, the major; while Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Dana, and myself may be considered captains…. Two or three of Cooper’s characters I consider the first in American fiction. Which are they? Why, Leatherstocking, Long Tom Coffin, and Uncas. Why this noble creation has been so neglected by painters and sculptors I am at a loss to understand. Certainly there is no nobler Indian character depicted in our literature. Thackeray calls the first of these immortal creations—and he was certainly a competent judge—one of “the great prize-men” of fiction, better perhaps than any of Scott’s men, and ranks dear old “Natty Bumppo” with Uncle Toby, Sir Roger de Coverley, and Falstaff—heroic figures all.

  When he began writing he stood almost alone where now an innumerable crowd are contesting every inch of vantage-ground; and although his style has its defects, his novels are powerful and interesting in themselves, besides presenting valuable pictures of the infancy of our country, the life of the pioneer, the characteristics of the Indians, and the struggle for national liberty both on land and sea. All public libraries are obliged to provide themselves with numerous copies of his works, and no private library is considered complete without a costly edition. As an evidence of his popularity abroad, it may be mentioned that in Holland alone there are three different translations of his novels into three different dialects of the country.

  An English critic can hardly know which are held in the greatest esteem among his own countrymen; but among English readers “The Last of the Mohicans” is considered his masterpiece.

  We pass to brief consideration of a less gentle, but on the whole a greater, power. Irving’s fame has, for some time, been unduly eclipsed; that of the greatest, with one exception, of American novelists, J. Fenimore Cooper, has seldom been sufficiently recognised. In their portraits you can read the differences of their characters: they had genius in common, industry and honesty, and good descent, but little more. That Irving made no enemies seems to me his weak point: that Cooper made too many was, if not his fault, at least his misfortune…. It is impossible in the case of Cooper, as of Irving, to do him any justice by quotations, for his genius is panoramic rather than dioramic: we must sit out a whole scene, or even act, to realise the power of the dramatist. There is, moreover, a certain severity in his style, which restricts the range of his readers. He often wastes words on circumstance, is exhaustive where he might have been suggestive; and his plots—a remark that does not apply to the “Red Rover,” where from first to last there is not a dull page—are apt to drag; and he has carried too far the practice of trotting out a single character, and making us accompany him—as Trollope and even Thackeray are apt to do—through the lives of his men and women, from the cradle to the grave…. An American to the core: he needs no slang or affectation to establish his originality, but moves in his own path, with something like disdain of comment.

  Characteristics there are of Cooper’s writings which would and do repel many. Defects exist both in manner and matter. Part of the unfavorable judgment he has received is due to the prevalence of minor faults, disagreeable rather than positively bad. These, in many cases, sprang from the quantity of what he did and the rapidity with which he did it…. In the matter of language this rapidity and carelessness often degenerated into downright slovenliness…. He too often passed the bounds that divide liberty from license. It scarcely needs to be asserted that in most of these cases the violation of idiom arose from haste or carelessness. But there were some blunders which can only be imputed to pure unadulterated ignorance. He occasionally used words in senses, unknown to past or present use. He sometimes employed grammatical forms that belong to no period in the history of the English language…. All this is, in itself, of slight importance when set off against positive merits…. There are imperfections far more serious than these mistakes in language. He rarely attained to beauty of style. The rapidity with which he wrote forbids the idea that he ever strove earnestly for it. Even the essential but minor grace of clearness is sometimes denied him…. These are imperfections that have led to the undue depreciation of Cooper among highly cultivated men. Taken by themselves they might seem enough to ruin his reputation beyond redemption. It is a proof of his real greatness that he triumphs over defects which would utterly destroy the fame of a writer of inferior power…. The more uniform excellence of Cooper, however, lies in the pictures he gives of the life of nature.

  We are not without peculiar types; not without characters, not without incidents, stories, heroisms, inequalities; not without the charms of nature in infinite variety; and human nature is the same here that it is in Spain, France, and England. Out of these materials Cooper wrote romances, narratives stamped with the distinct characteristics of American life and scenery, that were and are eagerly read by all civilized peoples, and which secured the universal verdict which only breadth of treatment commands.

  He has had few rivals in this power of breathing into phantoms of the brain the breath of life. His fame in the description of natural scenery under new and striking aspects is world-wide. His portraiture, without warm and varied coloring, is remarkable for fidelity and strength.

  Though he could draw very well a sailor’s sweetheart, like Mary Pratt, or a soldier’s daughter, like Mabel Dunham, yet of fine women he had only a chivalrous notion, and painted them from a respectful distance. They were delicate creatures, to be handled like porcelain. Dressed out and beautified, they were to be protected and worshiped. They walk through the halls of his heroes, and take seats at the upper end to distribute the prizes after the tournament.

  With all his foibles, Cooper was inspired by an intense patriotism, and he had a bold, vigorous, aggressive nature. He freed his talents at a stroke, and giving them full play attained at once a world-wide reputation, which no man of colonial mind could ever have dreamed of reaching. Yet his countrymen, long before his days of strife and unpopularity, seem to have taken singularly little patriotic pride in his achievements, and the well bred and well educated shuddered to hear him called the “American Scott;” not because they thought the epithet inappropriate and misapplied, but because it was a piece of irreverent audacity toward a great light of English literature. Cooper was the first, after the close of the war of 1812, to cast off the colonial spirit and take up his position as a representative of genuine American literature.

  James Fenimore Cooper, whose writings are instinct with the spirit of nationality, stands at the head of American novelists.

  No Hamlets or Werthers or Renés or Childe Harolds were allowed to tenant his woods or appear on his quarter-decks. Will, and the trained sagacity and experience directing will, were the invigorating elements of character which he selected for romantic treatment. Whether the scene be laid in the primitive forest or on the ocean, his men are always struggling with each other or with the forces of nature. This primal quality of robust manhood all men understand, and it shines triumphantly through the interposing fogs of French, German, Italian, and Russian translations. A physician of the mind could hardly prescribe a more efficient tonic for weak and sentimental natures than a daily diet made up of the most bracing passages in the novels of Cooper. Another characteristic of Cooper, which makes him universally acceptable, is his closeness to nature. He agrees with Wordsworth in this, that in all his descriptions of natural objects he indicates that he and nature are familiar acquaintances, and, as Dana says, have “talked together.”

  But the reader always feels that within the mountain of solid flesh and bone that Cooper offers to the eye, there is a love of beauty, goodness and pure ideals. The things this author most loves and reverences are revered and loved by all men: he never strikes an unsympathetic note of emotion or principle. And when he is afloat on his quarter-deck, or immersed in the untrodden wilderness of the Western Continent, he gives us an enjoyment new in kind, as well as of compelling interest. To plunge into one of his great books brings a refreshment only to be likened to that of the sea and forest which they describe. We proceed majestically from one stirring event to another; and though we never move faster than a contemplative walk, we know, like the man on his way to the scaffold, that nothing can happen till we get there. It is one of Cooper’s most remarkable feats that, in spite of his weakness in dialogue, he should have created a number of characters as solid and recognizable as any in American fiction. Indeed, it would be difficult to find anywhere in the literature of the century creatures of imagination having a firmer hold on popular sympathy and belief than Natty Bumppo, Long Tom Coffin, and many of their associates. We know them, as we see them and we can even hear them between the lines, as it were, that the author gives them to speak. He has fashioned them so well that they cease to appear as puppets, and seem to come to independent life. As soon as Cooper left the realm of his imagination, his genius deserted him. The moment he began to wrangle, to exhort or to instruct, he failed.

  One of the very greatest characters in fiction, the old woodsman, Natty Bumppo…. The five tales vary in value, no doubt, but taken altogether they reveal a marvelous gift of narration, and an extraordinary fullness of invention…. Time may be trusted safely to make a final selection from any author’s works, however voluminous they may be, or however unequal. Cooper died almost exactly in the middle of the nineteenth century; and already it is the “Spy” and the “Leatherstocking Tales” and four or five of the “Sea Tales” which survive, because they deserve to survive, because they were at once new and true when they were written, because they remain to-day the best of their kind. Cooper’s men of the sea, and his men of the forest and the plain, are alive now though other fashions in fiction have come and gone. Other novelists have a more finished art nowadays, but no one of them all succeeds more completely in doing what he tried to do than did Cooper at his best. And he did a great service to American literature by showing how fit for fiction were the scenes, the characters, and the history of his native land.

  When the “Red Rover” appeared, I succeeded, on a Saturday evening, in obtaining a copy at the circulating library I patronized, and when the church bells on the following morning rang for nine o’clock, as they did at that time, I had just finished the last volume.

  The strength of a creative artist is unlike that of a chain; it lies in the strongest, not in the weakest link…. Men forget his failures, as they have forgotten his altercations; but he still speaks that universal language which the young and the people of all lands comprehend, and the boyhood of American literature bids fair, in Cooper’s tales, to preserve a long-enduring youth.

  It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper. Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in “Deerslayer,” and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record. There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In “Deerslayer” Cooper violated eighteen of them…. Cooper’s gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leather Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.

  His long introductions he shared with the other novelists of the day, or at least with Scott, for both Miss Austen and Miss Edgeworth are more modern in this respect and strike more promptly into the tale. His loose-jointed plots are also shared with Scott, but he knows as surely as Scott how to hold the reader’s attention when once grasped. Like Scott’s, too, is his fearlessness in giving details, instead of the vague generalizations which were then in fashion, and to which his academical critics would have confined him…. Balzac, who risked the details of buttons and tobacco pipes as fearlessly as Cooper, said of “The Pathfinder,” “Never did the art of writing tread closer upon the art of the pencil. This is the school of study for literary landscape painters.” He says elsewhere: “If Cooper had succeeded in the painting of character to the same extent that he did in the painting of the phenomena of nature, he would have uttered the last word of our art.” Upon such praise as this the reputation of James Fenimore Cooper may well rest.

  As a master of healthy and manly fiction, deserves to be better remembered than he seems to be at the present day, especially as the novel of romantic adventure has, for the time at least, regained its vogue…. On reading over the Leather-Stocking Series afresh, I have sometimes been struck with the absence of all wild animal-life in the forests, especially birdlife, in which, according to Audubon and Wilson, the western woodlands were particularly rich…. Cooper was true to nature in not representing Leather-Stocking as taking that interest in zoology which belongs rather to a state of advanced civilisation. He might however, one would think, have made some use of materials which would have greatly enhanced the effect of many of his scenes. The gloomy croak of the raven, supposed by so many races of mankind to be an omen of evil, and the hideous wail of the horned owl heard in the forest solitude, must often have startled the watchers during those nights of terror so graphically described in these novels. But we see no trace in Cooper of any of those tastes or sympathies which would have led him to seek fresh elements of interests in the sources here indicated. The want of them is more apparent now than it would have been eighty years ago; but perhaps even now such accessories will be little missed by the great majority of his readers.

  The gist of the matter is that Cooper was not a verbal artist, and that his endowment of what we are pleased to call literary conscience was scant. With no special training as a writer, when, at thirty or thereabout, it accidentally came into his head to try his hand at a novel, he struck boldly out, not particularly considering whither. Some of his early books, written for his own pleasure, brought him popularity which surprised no one more than himself. The art of writing engaged his attention far less than the panorama and the story. Robust and impetuous, he disdained details of style and academic standards. To apply to him academic standards is as if one should inquire whether Hard-Heart’s horsemanship conforms to the rules of the riding-school; for nobody cares. It is to miss the point that, heaven knows how or why, he struck—Heaven be praised!—a new trail which, admitting all the shortcomings in style that any one may choose to allege, the world is not yet weary of following. The indisputable, the essential fact is that, entering unheralded and possessing the land, he founded a realm, and became by divine right king of American fiction.

  Great as was his success at home and in England, indeed, it is sometimes said to have been exceeded by that which he has enjoyed throughout continental Europe. For this there is a reason which has been little remarked. The mere number and bulk of Cooper’s works bear evidence to the fact that he must have written with careless haste. He had small literary training and little more tact in the matter of style than he displayed in his personal relations with people who did not enjoy his respect. Cooper’s English, then, is often ponderous and generally clumsy. An odd result follows. His style is frequently such as could hardly be altered except for the better. A translator into whatever language can often say what Cooper said in a form more readable and agreeable than Cooper’s own. Many of the minor passages in his writings seem more felicitous in French translation than in his own words. Yet his own words, though even in his best work impaired by clumsiness and prolixity, are well worth reading.