and sparkling glance’ played havoc with the hearts of impressionable
ladies. But Peyton was true, and loved but one. More to the modern
taste are the humors of Lawton and Sitgreaves, of Sergeant Hollister
and Betty Flanagan. ‘Mr. Harper’ is impressive, and the mystery of his
character well sustained. The ladies of ‘The Locusts’ have the quaint
charm inseparable from other-day manners and costume. To be sure one of
them, who seems likely to die of love, is mercifully killed by a random
bullet, and another becomes a maniac. Novel-readers wanted a deal for
their money in 1821. But Frances Wharton is a likable little creature,
though her talk does not in the least resemble that of Miss Clara
Middleton.
As an Irish bishop said of _Gulliver’s Travels_, the book contains
improbabilities. The device of a masque which converts young Henry
Wharton into the counterfeit presentment of an old gray-headed negro is
far-fetched. _The Spy_ was not intended to be a realistic novel.
Cooper projected another story on the background of the Revolution.
_Lionel Lincoln_, for all the work put on it, was not a success. It had
merits among which the merit of spontaneity is not conspicuous. Had the
failure been less apparent, the novelist might have been tempted to
continue the ‘Legends of the Thirteen Republics.’
V
THE LEATHER-STOCKING TALES AND OTHER INDIAN STORIES
A French critic once remarked that nothing was so like a _chanson
de geste_ as another _chanson de geste_. Readers have deplored the
fact that nothing was so like a Leather-Stocking tale as another
Leather-Stocking tale. But _The Pioneers_, the first of the series in
order of composition, bears little resemblance to the others, and as
a picture of life in a New York village at the end of the Eighteenth
Century has a historical value. The narrative is firm in texture.
The characters are thirty in number, and every man in his humor. The
Judge, Cousin Richard, Mr. Grant the clergyman, all the town oddities,
Monsieur Le Quoi, Major Hartmann, Doolittle, Kirby, and Benjamin
are real and humanly interesting. The dialogue is fresh, racy, and
appropriate. There is no effort at compression; winter evenings were
long in 1824.
The book holds one by the scenes and characters rather than by the
‘fable.’ The mystery of ‘Edwards,’ and the coming to life of old Major
Effingham, are well enough; but the strength of the story is in the
episodes, such as that where Hiram Doolittle, supported by Jotham
and Kirby, tries to serve the warrant on Natty Bumppo, in the trial
of the old hunter, or the capital scene where Natty is put into the
stocks, and the chivalrous major-domo, Benjamin, insists on sharing his
punishment, and cheering the heart-broken old man with comfortable and
picturesque words. Presently Doolittle came to enjoy the fruit of his
victory. Venturing too near, he found himself in the tenacious grasp of
the irate major-domo. Benjamin’s legs were stationary, but his fists
were free, and he proceeded to work away with ‘great industry’ on Mr.
Doolittle’s face, ‘using one hand to raise up his antagonist, while
he knocked him over with the other;’ he scorned to strike a fallen
adversary.
_The Pioneers_ would merit a high place in American fiction were
it only on account of that original character, Natty Bumppo, or
‘Leather-Stocking.’ He is natural, easy, attractive. In the other books
(always excepting _The Prairie_), there is more of invention. Putting
it in another way, the first Natty Bumppo is like a study from life,
while the others often leave the impression of being studies from the
first study.
By changing the background, the costume, the accessories, and making
his hero younger or older, Cooper found him available for more exciting
dramas than that played in Templeton.
Leather-Stocking next appears as ‘Hawkeye,’ the scout, in _The Last
of the Mohicans_, a narrative based on the massacre of Fort William
Henry in 1757, and, all things considered, the most famous of Cooper’s
novels. It is an out-and-out Indian story, good for boys and not
bad for men, being vigorous, brilliant, and packed with adventure.
The capture, by a band of Montcalm’s marauding Iroquois, of the two
daughters of the old Scottish general, their rescue by Hawkeye,
Chingachgook, and Uncas, their recapture, the pursuit and the thrilling
events in the Indian villages, form the staple of a book which without
exaggeration may be called world-renowned.
If _The Last of the Mohicans_ suffers from one fault more than another,
it is from a superabundance of hair-breadth escapes. The novelist heaps
difficulties on difficulties, all of which appear insurmountable, and
are presently surmounted with an ease that makes the reader half angry
with himself for having worried.
As might have been expected, in growing younger Natty has grown
theatrical; he appears too exactly at the critical moment to perform
the deed of cool bravery expected of him. It could hardly be otherwise;
_The Last of the Mohicans_ is a romance, and in romances such things
must be. Chingachgook, that engaging savage, has for so many years met
the romantic ideal of the American Indian that it is unlikely he will
ever be disturbed in his place in the reader’s esteem. His rôle of
white man’s friend was played in _The Prairie_ by Hard-Heart, the young
Pawnee chief.
_The Prairie_ has an originality all its own. This strange and sombre
tale brings together an oddly assorted group of people, some of
whom--the squatter and his family in particular--are drawn with rude
strength. There are weak points in the plot. The carefully guarded tent
with its hidden occupant is a poor device for compelling attention. Dr.
Battius, endlessly talkative about genus and species, is a tiresome
personage. The justification of the story as a work of art is to be
sought in the descriptions of the ‘desert,’ in the impressions given of
immeasurable distance and illimitable space, the abode of mystery and
terror. The passages describing the stampede of a herd of buffalo, the
night surprise of the trapper and his friends by the Sioux, the escape
of Hard-Heart from the torture-stake, are all done with a masterly
stroke.
Natty Bumppo figures in _The Prairie_ as an old man of eighty-seven.
His eye has lost its keenness of vision and his hand its steadiness.
But the heart is undaunted (‘Lord, what a strange thing is fear!’) and
the mind fertile in expedients. At times the trapper appears in almost
superhuman proportions; he is mythical, like a hero of antiquity.
The attachment between the ancient hunter and his dog is exquisitely
described. In the beautiful account of Leather-Stocking’s last hour no
touch is more poetic than that where the dying man discovers that the
faithful Hector is dead. He will not say that a Christian can hope to
meet his hound again; but he asks that Hector be buried beside him; no
harm, he thinks, can come of that.
Thirteen years after the publication of _The Prairie_ appeared _The
Pathfinder_, and one year after that _The Deerslayer_. The series was
now complete, forming ‘something like a drama in five acts.’ _The
Pathfinder_ shows Natty in mature manhood, and (for the comfort of
all who require this test of their heroes of fiction) a victim of
unrequited love. Exposed to the wiles of the most treacherous of all
Mingos, Cupid, the quondam hunter, hunted in turn, takes defeat like
the man he is. In _The Deerslayer_ the chronicle is completed with a
group of scenes from Natty’s youth. On the shores of Otsego Lake, while
defending old Hutter’s aquatic home, the young man learns the first
lessons in the art of war.
Cooper wrote yet other Indian stories. Two may be taken note of in this
section: _The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_, a narrative of the Connecticut
settlements in ‘King Philip’s’ time, and _Wyandotté_, an episode of
frontier life in 1775. The latter is realistic. Cooper was on his own
ground and knew the Willoughby Patent and the Hutted Knoll much as
he knew ‘Templeton’ and Otsego Lake. _The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_ is
pure romance. In spite of the labored speech of the Puritan settlers
and the metaphorical flights of Metacom and Conanchet, the story is
enthralling. That is a genuinely pathetic scene where Ruth Heathcote
seeks to awaken in the mind of Narramattah, her lost daughter, now the
wife of the Narragansett chief, some faint memory of her childhood,
and the account of Conanchet’s death at the hands of the Mohicans is a
strong and dramatic piece of writing.
VI
THE SEA STORIES
FROM _THE PILOT_ TO _MILES WALLINGFORD_
_The Pilot_ is an imaginary episode in the life of John Paul Jones.
Cooper has given his hero a poetic character. ‘Mr. Gray’ applies
science to the problem before him up to the critical moment, and then
trusts to intuition, to his genius, and finds wind and wave owning
him their master. The new note is in the vivid descriptive passages,
couched in terms of practical seamanship, but so graphically put
that the most ignorant of lubbers can be depended on to read with a
quickened pulse. Notable among these are the rescue of the frigate from
the shoals, and the fight between the ‘Alacrity’ and ‘Ariel.’
There is much human nature in the speech of the men if not of the
women. The dialogue between Borroughcliffe and Manual would not shame
books more celebrated for humor than _The Pilot_. Vast refreshment
can be found in the racy and picturesque talk of Long Tom Coffin, the
most original character in Cooper’s gallery of seamen; also in that
of Boltrope, who from an early ‘prejudyce’ against knee-breeches (he
somehow always imagined Satan as wearing them) never became fully
reconciled to the ship’s chaplain until that worthy left off ‘scudding
under bare poles’ and garbed himself like other men. Dillon, the
lawyer, is too obviously the scoundrel. As the ‘Cacique of Pedee,’
however, he serves a good end. His kinsman, Colonel Howard, walks the
stage with dignity, a worthy specimen of the loyalist of the American
Revolution, and typical of the class for whom Cooper had much sympathy.
The young women are far from being lay figures. They have beauty,
intelligence, courage, even audacity. That they are too perfect in
feature, form, manner, was a defect common to all fiction of the time;
the art of making a heroine of a plain woman was in its infancy.
Cooper, who could describe a girl, had always a deal of trouble to
make her talk. Did he never listen to the conversation of those
interesting creatures known, in the parlance of his day, as ‘females’?
Would Alice Dunscombe, meeting her lover after a separation of six
years, have used the phrases Cooper put into her lips? All these young
women might with justice have complained that the speaking parts
assigned them were not representative. But they were at the author’s
mercy and did as they were told.
Cooper’s principal biographer, to whom we are all vastly indebted, says
that ‘the female characters of his earlier novels are never able to do
anything successfully but faint.’ This is unfair. Katherine Plowden,
a brunette beauty, whom Professor Lounsbury has allowed himself to
forget, goes habited _en garçon_ to seek her lover, and does not faint
when she finds him, only laughs like the gay Rosalind she is.
The story of ‘Mr. Gray the pilot’ is good, but _The Red Rover_
is better. Cooper gave the public something new in pirates. The
old-fashioned corsair, in theatrical phrase, looked his part. He swore
horribly, was awful to behold, black-whiskered, visibly blood-stained,
a walking stand of arms, like the monsters described in Esquemeling’s
_Buccaneers of America_. Unlike L’Olonnois, of evil memory, the
captain of the ‘Dolphin’ is almost a Brummell; his cabin is a boudoir,
and he has the wit to eschew the old-fashioned device of skull and
cross-bones. One is inclined, however, to laugh when the pirate ‘throws
his form on a divan’ and bids music discourse. The Rover was somewhat
given to posing, and in moments of deep thought wore a ‘look of faded
marble.’
There is nothing fantastic in Wilder, the young captain, and nothing to
be desired in his handling of the ‘Royal Caroline.’ The description of
the flight before the strange cruiser is a splendidly nervous piece of
writing. From the moment when the Bristol trader disentangles herself
from the slaver’s side in the harbor of Newport until she becomes
a wreck on the high seas and the diabolical pursuer passes like a
hurricane, the interest is cumulative.
The book has its quota of garrulous old salts, some of whom talk too
much, others not enough. ‘Mister Nightingale’ promises well, but has
little of value to say after his discourse anent the quantity of sail
a ship may carry in a white squall off the coast of Guinea. The reader
will find amusement in the other characters, notably Fid and that
strange being, Scipio Africanus.
_The Water-Witch_ concerns a mysterious and beautiful smuggling
brigantine with a wonderful gift for eluding Her Majesty’s revenue
cruiser under command of Captain Ludlow. The time is the close of Lord
Cornbury’s administration, the scene, New York harbor and the adjacent
estuaries. The story is fantastic and melodramatic, and the dialogue
stilted, even for Cooper. Compared with _The Red Rover_, a romance like
_The Water-Witch_ is hard reading. With such characters as Alderman Van
Beverout, Alida de Barbérie, and ‘Seadrift’ with her epicene beauty, it
is not surprising that _The Water-Witch_ should have been dramatized.
_The Two Admirals_ is an engaging picture of manly affection. He who
has made the acquaintance of Sir Gervaise Oakes and his friend Richard
Bluewater is to be congratulated, for a more sterling-hearted pair of
worthies is seldom to be found. Other pleasant company may be had for
the asking; the aged baronet Sir Wycherly Wychecombe, hospitable to
excess, bemoaning the inconvenience of not having a satisfactory heir,
and wondering why his brother never married, though he had never given
himself the trouble to undergo the discipline of wedlock. Agreeable
in their several ways are Mildred Dutton, Wycherly Wychecombe the
young Virginian, and Galleygo the top man turned steward, he of the
picturesque language. The story has a conventional plot, and one is
supposed to be eager to know the validity of the Virginian’s claim to
the ancient estate of the Wychecombes. The plot is in danger of being
forgotten when Cooper carries his people to sea, and describes the
action between French and English fleets off Cape la Hogue.
_Wing-and-Wing_ relates the adventures of a French privateer in
the Mediterranean in 1798. One has not to read far before becoming
enamoured of the diabolical little lugger and her audacious captain.
As creatures of romance go, the good-humored and handsome Raoul
Yvard (alias ‘Sir Smees’) is real and attractive. His arguments
with Ghita (they talk theology not at all after the manner of Mrs.
Humphry Ward’s characters) move one to turn the pages hurriedly. Raoul
may be forgiven; Ghita drove him to it, being orthodox and fond of
proselyting. One can always take refuge with the vice-governatore and
the podestà. These worthies are long-winded, but it were unfair to call
them dull.
Ithuel Bolt, that long-legged, loose-jointed son of the Granite State,
is new in Cooper’s gallery of seamen. He makes an interesting figure
in the wine-shop at Porto Ferrajo, his chair, creaking under his
weight, tipped back on two legs against the wall, the uprights digging
into the plaster, his knees apart, ‘you fancy how,’ and his long
arms over the backs of neighboring chairs, giving him a resemblance
to a spread eagle. Next to the wine of the country, which he abuses
while succumbing to its influence, he detests the saints. Filippo,
the Genoese sailor, undertakes a feeble defence. Says the Yankee: ‘A
saint is but a human--a man like you and me, after all the fuss you
make about ’em. Saints abound in my country, if you’d believe people’s
account of themselves.’ Cooper says that Bolt, after his return to
America, became a deacon. This is no more incredible than the statement
that he also became a teetotaler.
The pages of old reviews would probably show how Cooper’s delineation
of Englishmen affected English readers. Our cousins over the water
must have been difficult if they quarrelled with the spirit in which
the portraits of Cuffe, Griffin, Winchester, and Clinch were painted,
all being good men and true in their various capacities. In describing
Nelson and the ‘Lady Admiraless’ the novelist undertook a difficult
task. He was adroit enough to avoid bringing the famous beauty too
often on the stage.
_Afloat and Ashore_ and _Miles Wallingford_ form a continuous story
of almost a thousand pages. There is a mixture of love and adventure,
the love being depicted as Cooper usually does it, neither better nor
worse, and the sea-episodes as only Cooper could do them.
A capital passage in _Afloat and Ashore_ is that describing the
encounter with the savages off the coast of South America. Even more
spirited are those chapters of _Miles Wallingford_ in which the young
captain of the ‘Dawn’ relates how he was overhauled successively by a
British man-of-war, a French privateer, and a piratical lugger, and how
he escaped them all only to be wrecked at last in the Irish Sea. Among
a dozen or so of characters Marble is a typical Cooper seaman, a man
of many resources, as witness how he outwitted Sennit. He was patriotic
too, and on his first visit to London was chagrined at being obliged to
admit that St. Paul’s was better than anything they had in Kennebunk.
VII
OLD-WORLD ROMANCE AND NEW-WORLD SATIRE
_THE BRAVO_, _THE HEIDENMAUER_, _THE HEADSMAN_, _HOMEWARD BOUND_, _HOME
AS FOUND_
_The Bravo_ was the first of a group of stories on themes suggested
to their author during his stay on the Continent. It deals with
Venetian life during the decline of the Republic. Jacopo Frontoni, the
reputed bravo, becomes party to the iniquitous system which conceals
crimes committed in the interest of the oligarchy, by throwing the
suspicion on himself, all to the end that he may save his aged father,
unjustly imprisoned by the state. Under this odium Jacopo lives until
life becomes unendurable. At the moment he is meditating flight he
is himself enmeshed in the toils and dies by the hand of the public
executioner. A power which holds that it can do no wrong has a short
way with servants who might betray its tortuous policy.
Jacopo comes too near to being a saint. He would have been more
lifelike had he been guilty of one at least of the twenty-five murders
laid at his door. Even a hired assassin of the Fifteenth Century might
show filial piety.
His fate more or less involves that of the old fisherman of the
lagoons, Antonio, a representative of that helpless, oppressed class
which is without rights save the right of being punished if it does
not obey. Antonio is a nobly pathetic character, one of the finest to
which Cooper’s imagination has given being. His patience, his love for
the grandchild taken from him by the state to serve in the galleys, his
courage in pleading before the Doge and even in the dread presence of
the Council of Three that the boy may be given back to him until he has
been formed in habits of virtue, are strong and beautiful traits.
Violetta and Don Camillo furnish the love motive, without which a
romance of Venice were barren. We sympathize with them and rejoice in
their escape. More than this the author could not ask.
That the story contains anachronisms admits of no doubt. It may be
that the arraignment of the oligarchy is too unrelieved. On the other
hand, the virtues of the narrative are many. The movement is rapid, the
sentences clear, the various strands of interest artfully woven, and
the conclusion inevitable and dramatic.
_The Heidenmauer_ deals with the manners and the antagonisms of the
time when the schism of Luther was undermining the Church. Far less
engrossing than its predecessor and weighted with a cumbrous style,
the book has its right valiant warriors and militant churchmen, its
burghers, peasants, and other dramatis personæ of German romance. There
are characters like Gottlob and old Ilse whose speech is always fresh
and agreeable. The French abbé is voluble and might have been wittier.
That one does not sit down to a table spread with an intellectual feast
like that served in _The Monastery_ or _The Abbot_, is no reason for
disdaining the fare served in _The Heidenmauer_.
In _The Headsman_ we follow the story of a highborn girl who has given
her heart to a young soldier of fortune only to discover in him the son
of that most loathed of beings, the official executioner of Berne. The
office is hereditary, and were the youth’s real condition known the
odious duties would in time fall on him. It is a foregone conclusion
that Sigismund shall be found to be of noble birth, and Adelheid’s
reward proportioned to the greatness of her soul. This is but one
thread of a fairly complicated and romantic plot. The interest of the
narrative is well sustained and the denouement unanticipated. None of
these three romances is, strictly speaking, a novel of purpose, and
the least attractive deserves friendlier critical treatment than is
commonly accorded it.
In the same group may be placed _Mercedes of Castile_, which, if
it cannot hold the attention by reason of the loves of Don Luis de
Bobadilla and Mercedes, and the fate of the unfortunate Ozema, may be
read (by whoever can take history well diluted with fiction) for the
story of Columbus’s first voyage.
_The Monikins_ contrasts the ways of men with the ways of monkeys,
much to the disadvantage of men. Really it is no duller than some of
the professed satire of the present day; it is merely longer and more
desperately serious.
_Homeward Bound_ and _Home as Found_ form two parts of a single
novel. The satire of the first part is forgotten in the movement
of the narrative, the sea-chase, the wreck off the African coast,
the fight with the Arabs. The second part is a diatribe on New York
and Cooperstown in particular, and America in general. The chief
characters, the Effinghams, mean well, but ‘they have an unfortunate
manner,’ and their disagreeable traits are not so piquant as to be
entertaining. Steadfast Dodge, the editor, is almost as unreal as
the Effinghams. Captain Truck is a genuine brother man, resourceful
as master of the ‘Montauk,’ and not helpless when figuring (without
his connivance) as a great English author, at Mrs. Legend’s literary
soirée.
Horatio Greenough had the ‘Effingham’ books in mind when he wrote to
Cooper: ‘I think you lose hold on the American public by rubbing down
their shins with brickbats as you do.’
VIII
TRAVELS, HISTORY, POLITICAL WRITINGS AND LATEST NOVELS
Cooper was a giant of productivity. Some brief comment has been made
on twenty-three of his novels. It is impossible in the limits of this
study to do much beyond giving the titles of his remaining books.
_The History of the Navy of the United States of America_ begins with
‘the earliest American sea-fight’ (May, 1636), when John Gallop in a
sloop of twenty tons captured a pinnace manned by thieving Indians,
and closes with the War of 1812. The noteworthy features of the book
are accuracy, independence, severity of style, and freedom from
spread-eagleism. The brief _Chronicles of Cooperstown_, written in a
plain way, has the natural interest attaching to the subject and the
author.
_A Letter to his Countrymen_, partly autobiographical, is absorbing
in its bitter earnestness. _The Travelling Bachelor_ purports to be
the letters of a cosmopolite, a man of fifty, to various members
of his club, recounting his travels in the United States. The book
is historical, statistical, argumentative. It treats of government,
manners, art, literature, of fashions in dress and of peculiarities of
speech. As an attempt on the part of a man of strong prejudices to take
an objective view of his own country, it is singularly interesting.
Were its seven hundred closely printed pages lightened with humor or
relieved by any grace of expression, _The Travelling Bachelor_ would be
a vastly entertaining work.