James Fenimore Cooper

________________________________________________
Title:     James Fenimore Cooper
Author: William and Robert Chambers [More Titles by Chambers]

'.... Whose trained eye was keen,
As eagle of the wilderness, to scan
His path by mountain, lake, or deep ravine,
Or ken far friendly huts on good savannas green.'

--CAMPBELL: Gertrude of Wyoming.

On the 14th of last September, America lost the greatest of her novelists in the person of James Fenimore Cooper. He was born on the 15th of that month, 1789; so that, had he lived but a few hours longer, he would have completed his sixty-second year. At the time of his birth, his father, Judge Cooper, resided at Burlington, New Jersey, where the future _littérateur_ commenced his education, and in so doing acquired a decided reputation for talent, which was not tarnished during subsequent years of tutelage at Newhaven and Yale College. At sixteen he exchanged the study of ancient literature and the repose of academic life for the bustling career of a 'middy' in the American navy; continuing for some half-dozen years his connection with those ocean scenes which he then learned to love so well and to describe so vividly. His retirement into private life took place in 1811, soon after which he married Miss de Lancey (whose brother is known to many as one of the New York bishops), and settled at Cooper's Town, his patrimonial estate. Ten years elapsed before his _début_ as an author. In 1821 he presented the public with a novel bearing the perhaps apposite title of _Precaution_--apposite, if the two _lustra_ thus elapsed were passed in preparation for that début, and as being after all anonymously published. The subject was one with which Cooper never shewed himself conversant--namely, the household life of England. Like his latest works, _Precaution_ was a failure, and gave scanty indications of that genius which was to find its true sphere and full scope in the trackless prairies of his native land, and its path upon the mountain-wave he had ridden in buoyant youth. But the same year produced _The Spy_, still considered by many to be his masterpiece, and from that production his fame was secure; and not only America but British voices, exhorted Sir Walter to look to his laurels. Certainly there was a little more reason in calling Cooper the American Scott than in pronouncing Klopstock the German Milton.

The successful novelist visited Europe a few years after this 'sign and seal' of his literary renown, and spent a considerable period among the principalities and powers of Old-World Christendom. In Paris and London especially he was lionised to the top of his bent. Sir Walter met him in the French metropolis in 1826; and in his diary of November 3, after recording a morning visit to 'Cooper the American novelist,' adds: 'this man, who has shewn so much genius, has a good deal of the manners or want of manners peculiar to his countrymen.' Three days later we find the following entry: 'Cooper came to breakfast, but we were _obsédes partout_. Such a number of Frenchmen bounced in successively, and exploded--I mean discharged--their compliments, that I could hardly find an opportunity to speak a word or entertain Mr Cooper at all.'[Footnote: Lockhart's Life of Scott.] The 'illustrious stranger' appears to have spent about ten years in Europe, for which he was, perhaps, in a literary point of view, none the better; as--to use the words of a periodical of the day--'he did not carry back the same fresh spirit that he brought, something of which must be attributed, no doubt, to the years which intervened; but something, too, to his abandonment of that mother-ground which to him, as to the fabled Antaeus, was the source of strength.' The autumn of his life glided quietly on amid the pleasures and pains of literature; its sombre close being pleasantly illuminated by the rays of spring-promise that radiated around the young brow of his daughter, which the dying veteran might well hope would be matured into 'glorious summer by the sun of' time. _Valeat signum_!

In calling Cooper the greatest of American novelists, we have not incurred much risk of contradiction. Others may rival--some surpass him--in this or that province of the art of fiction; but as a master of the art in its broad aspect, he is _facile princeps_. Brockden Brown treads a circle of mysterious power but mean circumference: Washington Irving is admirable at a sketch, one of the liveliest and most graceful of essayists, and quite equal to the higher demands of imaginative prose--witness his _Rip Van Winkle_ and _Sleepy Hollow_--but his forte is in miniature, and the orthodox dimensions of three volumes post-octavo would suit him almost as ill as would the Athenian vesture of Nick Bottom the spruce proportions of royal Oberon: Haliburton is inimitable in his own line of things; his measure of wit and humour--qualities unknown, or nearly so, to Cooper--is 'pressed down, and shaken together, and running over;' but his 'mission' and Cooper's in the tale-telling art are wide as the poles asunder: John Neale had once, particularly by his own appraisement, a high repute as the eccentric author of _Logan_ and _Seventy-six_, but the repute, like the _Seventy-six_, is quite in the preterite tense now; and to review him and his works at this time of day would be suspiciously like a _post-mortem_ examination, resulting possibly in a verdict of temporary insanity--if not, indeed, of _felo de se_--so wilful and wrongheaded were the vagaries of this 'rough, egotistical Yankee,' as he has been called: Herman Melville is replete with graphic power, and riots in the exuberance of a fresh, racy style; but whether he can sustain the 'burden and heat' of a well-equipped and full-grown novel as deftly as the fragmentary autobiographies he loves to indite; remains to be seen: Longfellow's celebrity in fiction is limited to _Hyperion_ and _Kavanagh_--clever, but slight foundations for enduring popularity--as irregular (the former at least) as Jean Paul's nondescript stories, without the great German's tumultuous genius: Hawthorne is probably the most noteworthy of the rising authors of America, and indeed manifests a degree of psychological knowledge and far-sighted, deep-searching observation of which there are few traces or none in Cooper; but the real prowess of the author of _The Scarlet Letter_ is, we apprehend, still undeveloped, and the harvest of his honours a thing of the future. All these distinguished persons--not to dwell on the kindred names of Bird, Kennedy, Ware, Paulding, Myers, Willis, Poe, Sedgwick, &c.--must yield the palm to him who has attracted all the peoples and tongues of Europe[Footnote: And, in _one_ instance at least, of Asia also; for _The Spy_ was translated into Persian!] to follow out the destiny of a Spy on the neutral ground, of a Pilot on the perilous coasts of a hostile race, of a Last of the Mohicans disappearing before the onward tramp of the white man.

As Rob Roy felt the pulses of life quickened when his foot was on his native heath, so Cooper wrote with vigour and _aplomb_ only when his themes were the aboriginal forest and the melancholy main. Pity that, having discovered the fount of his strength--the Samson-lock by which alone he towered above his fellows--he had not restrained himself, and concentrated his efforts within the appointed sphere. He repudiated the oracular counsel which his own consciousness must have approved--_Hoc signo vinces_; and seemed to assume that whatever province he invaded, the bulletin of the campaign would be another _Veni, vidi, vici_. Few things can be more unsatisfactory and insipid than his attempts in the 'silver-fork school' of novel-writing--his dreary commonplaces of fashionable life--his faded sermonisings on domestic, and political, and social economy. Few things can be more inspiriting, more energetic, more impressive, than his pictures of

'A wet sheet and a flowing sea,
A wind that follows fast,
And fills the white and rustling sail,
And bends the gallant mast;'

for we see in every stroke that the world of waters is his home, and that to _his_ ear there is music in the wild piping of the wind, and that _his_ eye beams afresh when it descries tempest in the horned moon, and lightning in the cloud. To him the ocean is indeed 'a glorious mirror,' where the form of the Highest 'glasses itself in tempests;' dear to him it is

------'in all time,
Calm or convulsed--in breeze, or gale, or storm;
....Boundless, endless, and sublime--
The image of Eternity--the throne
Of the Invisible.'

Well might one who had lived six years on her swelling bosom, combine with his love 'of the old sea some reverential fear,' as Wordsworth has it. This compound feeling is highly effective in his marine fictions, so instinct is it with the reality of personal experience. Mr Griswold tells us that Cooper informed him as follows of the origin of _The Pilot_: 'Talking with the late Charles Wilkes of New York, a man of taste and judgment, our author [Cooper] heard extolled the universal knowledge of Scott, and the sea-portions of _The Pirate_ cited as a proof. He laughed at the idea, as most seamen would, and the discussion ended by his promising to write a sea-story which could be read by landsmen, while seamen should feel its truth. _The Pilot_ was the result of that conversation.'[Footnote: 'The Prose-Writers of America.'] Of this tale Scott says, in a letter to Miss Edgeworth: 'I have seen a new work, _The Pilot_, by the author of _The Spy_ and _The Pioneers_. The hero is the celebrated Paul Jones, whom I well remember advancing above the island of Inchkeith, with three small vessels, to lay Leith under contribution.... The novel is a very clever one, and the sea-scenes and characters in particular are admirably drawn; and I advise you to read it as soon as possible.' Still higher panegyric would not have been misbestowed in this instance, which illustrates Mr Prescott's remark, that Cooper's descriptions of inanimate nature, no less than of savage man, are alive with the breath of poetry--'Witness his infinitely various pictures of the ocean; or, still more, of the beautiful spirit that rides upon its bosom, the gallant ship.' Though it is to _The Pilot_, pre-eminently, and _The Waterwitch_, in nearly an equal degree, that these remarks apply, there is many a passage in Cooper's later novels--for example, _The Two Admirals, Homeward Bound, Mark's Reef, Ashore and Afloat_, and _The Sea-Lions_--in which we recognise the same 'cunning' right hand which pencilled the _Ariel_, and its crew, the moody, mysterious pilot, and stalwart Long Tom Coffin.

Nor was he less at home in the backwoods and prairies of his fatherland, than upon the broad seas which divide it from the Old World. Tastes differ; and there are those--possibly the majority of his readers--who prefer the Indian associations of _The Last of the Mohicans, The Pioneers_, &c. to the salt-water scenery of the other class of works. For our part, we prefer his prairies to his savages, his forests to his aborigines, his inanimate to his living sketches of Indian story. His wild men of the woods are often too sentimental, too dreamy, too ideal. In this respect Brockden Brown has the advantage of him; for, as Mr Prescott has pointed out, Brown shews the rude and uncouth lineaments of the Indian character, though he is chargeable with withholding intimations of a more generous nature. While Cooper discards all the coarser elements of savage life, and idealises the portrait. The first of this series of tales of

'Painted chiefs with pointed spears,'

was _The Pioneers_--the materials for which, it seems, were to a considerable extent derived from his father, who had an interest in large tracts of land near the 'sources of the Susquehanna,' where the scene is laid, and allied, therefore, to Campbell's _Gertrude of Wyoming_. It was speedily followed by _The Last of the Mohicans_--not uncommonly pronounced his _chef d'oeuvre_--and _The Prairie_; which, among numerous descriptions of absorbing interest, pervaded throughout by a fine imaginative spirit, contains one of thrilling power--where the squatter discovers and avenges the murder of his son. _The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_--a strange story with a strange title, and which forms (chronologically at least) the climax of Cooper's fame--is justly admired by all who appreciate 'minute painting,' and that pensive monotony which begets a certain 'melancholy charm.' His skill in martial narrative was favorably attested in _Lionel Lincoln_; in which he describes with remarkable spirit and equal accuracy the battles of Lexington and of Bunker's Hill. But to go through in detail the _opera omnia_ of our prolific author would involve us in difficulties with editor and reader too serious to bear anticipation. Passing over, therefore, such of his earlier writings as are better known--like _The Red Rover, The Waterwitch, The Pathfinder_, and _The Deerslayer_--we proceed to notice briefly a select few from the long series produced during the last ten years.

_The Two Admirals_ is of unequal interest--the twin heroes, Sir Gervaise Oakes and Bluewater, engrossing whatever charm it possesses, and reacting disastrously on the tedious scenes wherein they bear no part; but they certainly _do_ walk and talk like sound-hearted sons of Neptune, and there is no resisting the spell of the battle and the breeze which they encounter together, in the _Plantagenet_ and the _Cæsar_. _The Jack o' Lantern, or the Privateer_, was put forth with an expression of the author's conviction that his faculty in this class of fictions was inexhaustible; to which, however, the critics demurred. One of them observed that, following out the fantastical supposition which ascribes especial virtues to certain numbers, or even working out the analogy of the seventh wave, which sea-shore gossips tell us is ampler and stronger than its predecessors, the seventh sea-novel of Mr Cooper's ought to be the most remarkable of the series for force, brilliancy, and movement. But such symbolism was here found defective: the seventh wave broke abruptly on the shore; the Jack o' Lantern's existence has been brief and uncertain as that of the _ignis fatuus_ on the marsh. The story introduces Caraccioli and the Neapolitan court, Nelson and Lady Hamilton; but without striking points. There are some cleverly-drawn characters, however: Clinch, the drunken but winning British tar; Raoul Yvard, brilliant, handsome, and Parisian all over, philosophism included; and Ithuel Bolt, a new (not improved) edition of Long Tom. The plot is ingenious, though perhaps, constrained and far-fetched; and its _dénouement_ makes the reader put down the third volume with increased respect for the novelist's tact. _Wyandotte, or the Hutted Knoll_ (1843), is a quiet yet animated narrative, descriptive of a family of British settlers and their fortunes in their wild Susquehanna home. There is a pleasure, the author observes, in diving into a virgin forest, and commencing the labours of civilisation, that has no exact parallel in any other human occupation; and some refracted share of this pleasure is secured by every intelligent reader while engaged in perusing records so faithful and characteristic as those embodied in this tale. _Ravensnest_, with no lack of scenic embellishments, introduces to us three of the author's happiest characters--always excepting Leatherstocking and Long Tom--namely, the two Littlepages, 'Captain Hugh' and his 'Uncle Ro,' and Mistress Opportunity Newcome. The didactic asperities in which he indulged naturally marred the fortune of a book whose readers, whatever they might be, were pretty safely 'booked' for a scolding. Otherwise, it gleamed with scintillations, neither faint nor few, of the light of other days. But it was evident that Mr Cooper was overwriting himself. He seemed determined not to be outdone in fecundity by the most prolific of his contemporaries--as though it were a safe speculation or a healthy emulation to run against such light horsemen and horsewomen as Mr James and M. Dumas, and Mesdames Gore and Trollope. Hence he might have appropriately echoed the complaint of the slave in Terence:

'Parum succedit quod ago, at facio sedulò.'

In 1847, he produced _Mark's Reef_, a story of the Crusoe genus, but far behind; the desert island being created 'positively for this occasion only,' and being swallowed up in the sea again when it has served Mark Woolston and the novelist's requirements. It is characterised, however, by much glowing description--especially that relating to the crater, with its noble peak, 'ever the same amid the changes of time, and civilisation, and decay; naked, storm-beaten, and familiar to the eye.' The following year he was ready with _The Bee-Hunter_, wherein he sought to revive his pristine successes among American solitudes and Red Indians. Again we hear the palaver of the stately and sentimental Chippewas; and again we watch, with sadly-relaxed attention, the dodging extraordinary of Pale Faces and Red Men. Alas!

'Both of them speak of something that is gone:...
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?'

The Indians have become comparatively seedy and second-hand individuals; the scenery, with occasional exceptions, looks worn; the machinery creaks and betrays itself, no longer possessing the _ars celare artem_. ''Tis true, 'tis pity; pity 'tis, 'tis true.' One novelty, nevertheless, this tale can boast, and that is the very able and interesting sketch of the bee-hunter following his vocation in the 'oak-openings;' nor is the portrait of Buzzing Ben himself an ordinary daub. In 1849 appeared _The Sea-Lions_, a clever but often prolix work, which ought to keep up its interest with the public, if only for its elaborate painting of scenes to which the protracted mystery of Sir John Franklin's expedition has imparted a melancholy charm. The sufferings of sealers and grasping adventurers among 'thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice' are recounted with dramatic earnestness. _The Ways of the Hour_ was both 'nominally' and 'really' Cooper's last novel: he announced it as such; and the announcement was not related to that fallacious category to which belong the 'more last nights' of popular tragedians, and the farewell prefaces of the accomplished author of _Rienzi_. It was not the 'going, going!' but the 'gone!' of the auctioneer. And critics maliciously said: _Tant mieux_. In _The Ways of the Hour_ there was one vigorous portrait, Mary Monson, and several 'moving accidents by flood and field:' but with these positive qualities the reader had to accept an unlimited stock of negatives. Besides the works thus referred to, Cooper wrote at short intervals a 'serried phalanx' of others, from the ranks of which suffice it to name _The Heidenmauer, The Bravo, The Manikins_ (a weak and injudicious tale, quite unworthy of his honourable reputation), _The Headsman of Berne, Mercedes of Castille, Satanstoe, Home as Found, Ashore and Afloat_. In miscellaneous literature his writings include a _History of the Navy of the United States, Lives of Distinguished Naval Officers, Sketches of Switzerland, Gleanings in Europe_, and _Notions of the Americans_.

It is by his early tales of wilderness and ocean life that he will survive. There his genius is fresh, vigorous, natural--uncramped by restraints, undeformed by excrescences, uninterrupted by crotchets, such as injured its aftergrowth--the swaddling-clothes of its second childhood. If we have spoken freely--we hope not flippantly--of these feeblenesses, it is because the renown of Cooper is too tenaciously and permanently rooted to be 'radically' affected thereby, however they may diminish the symmetry and dim the verdure of blossom and branch. His magnificent panoramas of prairie solitude, his billowy expanses of the 'many-voiced sea,' his artistically-grouped figures of red-skins and trappers, sealers and squatters, are among the things which Anglo-Saxon literature in either hemisphere will not willingly let die. By these he is, and long will be, known and read of all men. And if ever Mr Macaulay's New Zealander should ponder over the ruins of Broadway, as well as of St Paul's, he will probably carry in his pocket one of those romances which tell how the Last of the Mohicans came to his end, and which illustrate the closing destinies of tribes which shall then have disappeared before the chill advance of the Pale Face.

[The End] William and Robert Chambers's Essay: James Fenimore Cooper

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN