JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
Cooper's life (1789-1851) was inclosed by Irving's, for he was born
six years later and died eight years earlier. When he was a little
more than a year old his father took his large family--Cooper was
the eleventh of twelve children--to the shore of Otsego Lake, New
York, where he had bought a tract, after the Revolution. It was
uncleared country, but here Judge Cooper laid out what developed into
Cooperstown, established a big estate, and built a pretentious house.
His scheme of life was aristocratic, more like that of the first
Virginia settlers than like that of the Massachusetts Puritans. Here
the boy grew up in an ambitious home, but among primitive frontier
surroundings, until he needed better schooling than Cooperstown could
offer. To prepare for Yale College he was sent to Albany and put in
charge of the rector of St. Peter's Church. Under this gentleman he
gained not only the "book learning" for which he went but also a
further sense of the gentry's point of view--a point of view which
throughout his life made him frankly critical of the defects in America
even while he was passionately loyal to it. At thirteen he was admitted
to Yale. This sounds as if he were a precocious child, but there was
nothing unusual in the performance, for the colleges were hardly more
than advanced academies where most of the students received their
degrees well before they were twenty. This was the institution which
John Trumbull--who had passed his examinations at seven!--had held
up to scorn in his "Progress of Dulness," and where his hero, Tom
Brainless,
Four years at college dozed away
In sleep, and slothfulness and play,
but even from here Cooper's unstudious and disorderly ways caused his
dismissal in his second year. His formal education was now ended, and
in his development as a writer it was doubtless much less important
than his earlier years in the wilderness west of the Hudson River or
those that were to follow on the ocean. In 1806 he was sent to sea
for a year on a merchant vessel, and on his return was commissioned
a midshipman in the United States Navy. His service lasted for three
years, from January 1, 1808, to May, 1811, and was ended by his
marriage to the daughter of a Tory who had fought on the British side
in the Revolutionary War. Then for nine years he settled down to what
seemed like respectable obscurity, living part of the time at his
father-in-law's home, part of the time at Cooperstown, and the last
three years at Scarsdale, New York.
From these first thirty years of his life there seemed to be little
prospect that he was to become a novelist of world-wide and permanent
reputation. There is no record that anyone, even himself, expected him
to be a writer. Yet it is quite evident, as one looks back over it,
that his preparation had been rich and varied. He had lived on land and
on sea, in city and country, in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
He had breathed in the stories of the Revolutionary days, grown up on
the frontier, and been a part of America in the making. And from his
father, his tutor, and his wife and her family, as well as from his
travel, he had learned to see America through critical eyes. He had the
material to write with and the experience to make him use it wisely.
The one apparently missing factor was the most important of all--there
was not the slightest indication that he had either the will or the
power to use his pen.
The story of how he began to write is a familiar one. Out of patience
with the crudity of an English society novel that he had been reading,
he said boastfully that he could write a better one himself. Many
another novel-reader and playgoer has talked with equal recklessness
after a literary disappointment in the library or the theater, but the
remarkable part of the story is that in 1820 Cooper made his boast
good. The resultant novel, "Precaution," was successful in only one
respect--that it started Cooper on his career. It was a colorless
tale with an English plot, located in English scenes of which he had
no first-hand knowledge. It made so little impression on public or
publishers that when his next novel was ready, in 1821, he had to issue
it at his own expense; and he made this next venture, "The Spy," in
part at least because of his friends' comment--characteristic of that
self-conscious period--that he would have been more patriotic to write
on an American theme. To let Cooper tell his own story:
The writer, while he knew how much of what he had done was purely
accidental, felt the reproach to be one that, in a measure, was just.
As the only atonement in his power, he determined to inflict a second
book, whose subject should admit no cavil, not only on the world,
but on himself. He chose patriotism for his theme; and to those who
read this introduction and the book itself, it is scarcely necessary
to add that he [selected his hero] as the best illustration of his
subject.
By means of this story of war times, involving the amazing adventures
of Harvey Birch, the spy, Cooper won his public; a fact which is amply
proven by the sale of 3500 copies of his third novel, "The Pioneer," on
the morning of publication. This story came nearer home to him, for the
scenery and the people were those among whom he had lived as a boy at
Cooperstown. Working with this familiar material, based on the country
and the developing life which was a part of his very self, Cooper wrote
the first of his famous "Leatherstocking" series. The five stories,
taken together, complete the long epic of the American Indian to which
Longfellow was later to supply the earlier cantos in "Hiawatha." For
Cooper took up the chronicle where Longfellow was to drop it (see p.
276):
Then a darker, drearier vision
Passed before me, vague and cloud-like;
I beheld our nation scattered,
All forgetful of my counsels,
Weakened, warring with each other:
Saw the remnants of our people
Sweeping westward, wild and woful,
Like the cloud-rack of a tempest,
Like the withered leaves of Autumn.
It was not a deliberate undertaking, planned from start to finish; it
was not written in the order in which the stories occurred--like the
long series by Winston Churchill; it did not even conceive of the scout
as the central character of the first book, much less of the four which
were to follow it. Cooper did not even seem to appreciate after he had
written "The Pioneer," how rich a vein he had struck, for within the
next two years he wrote "The Pilot" a sea story, and "Lionel Lincoln,
or the Leaguers of Boston," supposed to be the first of a series of
thirteen colonial stories which were never carried beyond this point.
However, in 1826 he came back to Leatherstocking in "The Last of the
Mohicans," second both in authorship and in order of reading, and in
1827 he wrote "The Prairie," the last days of the scout. It was not
till 1840 and 1841 that he completed the series with the first and
third numbers, "The Deerslayer" and "The Pathfinder." To summarize:
the stories deal in succession with Deerslayer, a young woods-man in
the middle of the eighteenth century; then Hawkeye, the hero of "The
Last of the Mohicans," a story of the French and Indian War; next,
Pathfinder; fourth, Leatherstocking, the hero of "The Pioneer," in the
decade just before 1800; and finally, with the trapper, who in 1803
left the farming lands of New York to go westward with the emigrants
who were attracted by the new government lands of "The Prairie."
With the writing of the second of the series, Cooper concluded the
opening period in his authorship. In a little over six years he had
published six novels and had shown promise of all that he was to
accomplish in later life. He had attempted four kinds: stories of
frontier life in which he was always successful; sea tales, for which
he was peculiarly fitted; historical novels, which he did indifferently
well; and studies in social life, in which he had started his career
with a failure but to which he returned again and again like a moth to
the flame.
To "The Last of the Mohicans" the verdict of time has awarded first
place in the long roster of his works. It is the one book written
by Cooper that is devoted most completely to the vanishing race.
Three passages set and hold the key to the story. The first is from
the author's introduction: "Of all the tribes named in these pages,
there exist only a few half-civilized beings of the Oneidas on the
reservation of their people in New York. The rest have disappeared,
either from the regions in which their fathers dwelt, or altogether
from the earth." The second is a speech from Chingachgook to Hawkeye
in the third chapter, where they are first introduced: "Where are the
blossoms of these summers?--fallen, one by one: so all of my family
departed, each in his turn, to the land of the spirits. I am on the
hilltop, and must go down into the valley; and when Uncas follows in my
footsteps, there will no longer be any of the blood of the Sagamores,
for my boy is the last of the Mohicans." The third is the last speech
of the book, by the sage Tamenund: "It is enough," he said. "Go,
children of the Lenape, the anger of the Manitou is not done. Why
should Tamenund stay? The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the
time of the red-men has not yet come again. My day has been too long.
In the morning I saw the sons of Unamis happy and strong; and yet,
before the night has come, have I lived to see the last warrior of the
wise race of the Mohicans."
For many years it was a habit of critics to scoff at Cooper's Indian
characters as romantic and idealized portraits of the red man.
This judgment may have arisen during the period of Cooper's great
unpopularity, when nothing was too unfair to please the American
public; but, once said, it persisted and was quoted from decade to
decade by people who cannot have read his books with any attention.
It was insisted that the woodcraft with which Cooper endowed the
Indians was beyond possibility, yet later naturalists have recorded
time and again marvels quite as incredible as any in Cooper's pages.
It was reiterated that their dignity, self-control, tribal loyalty,
and reverence for age were overdrawn, yet many another authority
has testified to the existence of these virtues. And, finally, it
was charged that they were never such a heroic and superior people
as Cooper made them, though study of his portraits will show that
Cooper did not make them half as admirable as he is said to have
done. Tamenund is simply a mouthpiece; Uncas and Chingachgook are the
only living Indian characters whom he makes at all admirable, but he
acknowledges the differences between their standards and the white
man's in the murder and scalping of the French sentinel after he had
been passed in safety: "'Twould have been a cruel and inhuman act for
a white-skin; but 'tis the gift and natur' of an Indian, and I suppose
it should not be denied." All the other Indians, beneath their formal
ways in family, camp, and council, Cooper presents as treacherous and
bloodthirsty at bottom, a savage people who show their real natures
in the Massacre of Fort William Henry, the chief historical event in
the book. On this ground he partly explains and partly justifies the
conquest of the red men by the white.
The other people of the story are types who appear in all Cooper's
novels. Most important is the unschooled American:
He has drawn you _one_ character, though, that is new,
One wildflower he's plucked that is wet with the dew
Of this fresh Western world.
He is an out-of-door creature, intolerant of town life, skeptical of
any book but the book of nature, a lover of the woods and mountains,
and a worshiper of the God who made them. He has no "theory of life"
or of government or of America, but he is just as truly a product of
American conditions as the mountain laurel or the goldenrod. Natty
Bumppo, central figure of the "Leatherstocking" series, is blood
brother to Harvey Birch in "The Spy," to Long Tom Coffin in "The
Pilot," to Captain Truck in "Homeward Bound" and "Home as Found," and
to a similar man in almost every one of the other stories. Quite in
contrast to this "wildflower" is a potted plant, of whom Cooper is
almost equally fond. This is the polished gentleman of the world, such
as Montcalm, who embodies the culture and manners that the New World
needed. Cooper admired such a man almost to the point of infatuation,
but presented him very badly; he made an idea of him rather than a
living character, a veneer of manners without any solid backing,
superficial, complacent, and hollow. One feels no affection for him and
very little respect. He annoys one by so evidently thanking God that he
is not as other men. Another type is the pedant David Gamut, a man who
is made grotesque by his fondness for his own narrow specialty, David,
a teacher of psalm-singing, bores the other characters by continually
"talking shop," and breaks into melody in and out of season, capping
the climax by chanting so vociferously during the massacre that the
Indians regard him as a harmless lunatic and spare him then and
thereafter. Dr. Sitgreaves of "The Spy," and Owen Bat, the doctor of
"The Prairie," are struck from the same die. Finally, among the leading
types, must be mentioned the "females."
The use of this word, which sounds odd and uncouth to-day, was general
a hundred years ago, when "lady" was reserved to indicate a class
distinction, and "woman" had not become the common noun; but the
change is not merely one of name, for the women of books and the women
of life were far less self-reliant than the women of the twentieth
century. Then they were frankly regarded not only as dependents but as
inferiors. A striking evidence of this can be found in the appropriate
pages in Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations." The majority of the quoted
passages are culled from poets who wrote before the rise of the woman's
movement, and the tone of the passages taken as a whole is distinctly
supercilious and condescending. "Women are lovely at their best," the
poets seemed to agree, "but after all, they are merely--women. And at
less than their best, the least said about them the better." Cooper
was by no means behind his time in his attitude; indeed, he was, if
anything, rather ahead of it. His feeling for them seems to have been
that expressed in the famous passage from "Marmion" of which the first
half is usually all that is quoted:
O woman! in our hours of ease
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
* * * * *
When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!
In the ordinary situations in Cooper's novels his "females" were things
to patronize and flatter,--for flattery never goes unattended by her
sardonic companion,--but in times of stress they showed heroic powers
of endurance. The three introduced in the first chapter of "The Spy"
were endowed, according to the text, with "softness and affability,"
"internal innocence and peace," and expressed themselves by blushes and
timid glances. The two "lovely beings" of "The Last of the Mohicans"
are even more fulsomely described. "The flush which still lingered
above the pines in the western sky was not more bright nor delicate
than the bloom" on Alice's cheeks; and Cora was the fortunate possessor
of "a countenance that was exquisitely regular and dignified, and
surpassingly beautiful." In the passage that follows they are not
referred to simply, but always with a bow and a smile--"the reluctant
fair one," "the dark-eyed Cora," and as they finally disappear on
horseback through the woods, the reader is expected not to laugh at
the final ridiculous tableau of "the light and graceful forms of the
females waving among the trees." Of course the readers to whom Cooper
addressed this did not laugh. They realized that in speaking of women
he was simply using the conventional language of the day, which was
not intended to mean what it said; that he was introducing a pair of
normal, lovely girls, and that the best to be required of a normal girl
was that she should be lovely--"only this and nothing more." There was
no evidence that Cora and Alice had minds; they were not expected to;
instead they had warm hearts and "female beauty." Lowell was probably
not unfair in his comment:
And the women he draws from one model don't vary,
All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie.
But it must be admitted that in Cooper's time the model was a
prevailing one, and that it was only in his old age that women began in
any large numbers to depart from it.
Cooper was all his life a more and more conscious observer and critic
of American character and American conditions. As a result his
stories take hold of the reader for the very simple reason that they
are based on actual life, and real people. They had, moreover, and
still have, the added advantage that they are based on a life that
was fascinatingly unfamiliar to the great majority of his readers,
and so, though realistic in their details, they exert the appeal of
distant romance. All through the eighteenth century, and particularly
through the last third of it, literature had been inclining to dwell
on the joys of life in field and forest. Addison and his followers
had handed on the spell of the old ballads of primitive adventure.
Pope had dabbled with the "poor Indian" and Goldsmith had written his
celebrated line about "Niagara's ... thundering sound." Collins and
Gray had harked back to the romantic past, and Burns and Wordsworth
had confined their poems to the peasantry among whom they lived.
Irving's reply to "English Writers on America" (see p. 120) alluded to
the frequency of books on distant lands and peoples. So when Cooper
began publishing his stories of adventure in untrodden lands, he found
an attentive public not only in America but in England, and not only
in England but all over Europe, where, as soon as his novels appeared,
they were reprinted in thirty-four different places.
With the literary asset of this invaluable material Cooper combined
his ability to tell an exciting story. There is nothing intricate or
skillful about his plots as pieces of composition. In fact they seldom
if ever come up to any striking finish. They do not so much conclude
as die, and as a rule they "die hard." They are made up of strings of
exciting adventures, in which characters whom the reader likes are put
into danger and then rescued from it. "The Last of the Mohicans" has
its best material for a conclusion in the middle of the book, with the
thrilling restoration of Alice and Cora to their father's arms at Fort
William Henry; but the story is only half long enough at that point, so
the author separated them again by means of the massacre and carried
it on more and more slowly to the required length and the deaths of
Cora and the last of the Mohicans. For "The Spy," the last chapter was
actually written, printed, and put into page form some weeks before
the latter part had even been planned. Cooper's devices for starting
and ending the exciting scenes seem often commonplace, partly because
so many later writers have imitated him in using them. Mark Twain,
in "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," said derisively that the
"Leatherstocking Tales" might well have been named "The Broken Twig"
series, because villain and hero so often discover each other as the
result of a misstep on a snapping branch. He might have substituted "A
Shot Rang Out" as his title, on account of the frequency with which
episodes are thus started or finished. Bret Harte's burlesque in his
"Condensed Novels" shows how broadly Cooper laid his methods open to
attack from the scoffers. Yet the fact remains that few who have come
to scoff could have remained to rival Cooper. He has enlisted millions
of readers in dozens of languages; he has fascinated them by the doings
of woodsmen who were as mysteriously skillful as the town-bred Sherlock
Holmes; he has thrilled by the genuine excitement of deadly struggles
and hairbreadth 'scapes; and the sale of his books, a hundred years
after he first addressed the public, would gladden the heart of many a
modern novelist.
As a chapter in the literary history of America there is another side
of Cooper's career which is intensely interesting. It has already been
mentioned that he did not abandon the writing of novels on social life
with the unsuccessful "Precaution." Lowell refers to this fact in the
"Fable for Critics":
There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and that is
That on manners he lectures his countrymen gratis:
Not precisely so either, because, for a rarity,
He is paid for his tickets in unpopularity.
Now he may overcharge his American pictures,
But you'll grant there's a good deal of truth in his strictures;
And I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his present repute for the freedom to think,
And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak,
Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,
Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.
In 1826 Cooper went abroad with his family, staying on the other side
for nearly six and a half years. His reputation was well established,
and he left with the best wishes of his countrymen and the respect of
the many foreigners who knew him through his books. He was an ardent
believer in his own land and in the theory of its government, and at
the same time he was an admirer, as he had been taught to be, of the
dignity and the traditions of the Old World. It was to be expected
that he would grow wiser with travel and that his later works, while
retaining all their interest as stories, would be enriched by a deeper
and mellower feeling for humankind. But he had already displayed one
weakness which was destined to increase in him until it almost wholly
offset his virtues with his readers. He was positive to the last
degree in the opinions he held, and brutally untactful in expressing
them. If he had ever heard of the soft answer that turneth away wrath,
he felt contempt for it. Thus, for example, in the preface to "The
Pioneer" he referred to the least of authors' ills, the contradiction
among critics: "There I am, left like an ass between two locks of
hay; so that I have determined to relinquish my animate nature, and
remain stationary, like a lock of hay between two asses." The fruit
of travel was naturally a more vivid sense of the differences between
American and European ways, a fertile crop of opinions, a belligerent
assertion of them, and an unhappy series of quarrels with all sorts of
Americans--business men, editors, naval officers, congressmen, and the
majority of his readers, a vast army of representatives of the upper
ten thousand and the lower.
During the first three years abroad he went on, under the headway
gained at home, with three novels of American themes--one in the
"Leatherstocking" series, one on Puritan life in New England, and one
sea story. Then he went off on a side issue and sacrificed the next ten
years to controversial books which are very interesting side lights
on literary history but very defective novels. The whole sequence
started with Cooper's resentment at the "certain condescension in
foreigners" which was to make Lowell smart nearly forty years later.
To meet this, and particularly the condescension of the English, he
left the field of fiction to write "Notions of the Americans; Picked
up by a Traveling Bachelor." It failed of its purpose because it was
too complacent about America and now and then too offensive about
England, but the underlying trouble with it was its aggressive tone.
A man could hardly make friends for America when he was in the temper
to write of Englishmen, "We have good reason to believe, there exists a
certain querulous class of readers who consider even the most delicate
and reserved commendations of this western world as so much praise
unreasonably and dishonestly abstracted from themselves." Cooper never
could refrain from "the retort of abuse" against which Irving had
advised in "The Sketch Book." Then followed three novels located in
Venice, Germany, and Switzerland,--"The Bravo," "The Headsman," and
"The Heidenmauer,"--all designed to show how charming was Old World
tradition and how mistaken was its undemocratic scheme of life. They
were failures, like "Precaution," because Cooper could not write an
effective novel which attempted to prove anything. It was his gift to
tell a good story well and to build it out of the material in the midst
of which he had grown up.
By the time he was ready to come back to America he had become kinked
and querulous. The story of his controversies is too long for detailing
in this chapter. The chief literary result of it is the pair of stories
"Homeward Bound" and "Home as Found." The point of them, for they
again were written to prove something, was to expose the crudities of
a commercialized America. There is no question that the country was
crude and raw (see pp. 111-114). A period of such rapid development was
bound to produce for the time poor architecture, bad manners, shifty
business, superficial learning, and questionable politics. Many other
critics, home and foreign, were telling the truth about America to its
great discomfort. Cooper's picture of Aristabulus Bragg was probably
not unfair to hundreds of his contemporaries:
This man is an epitome of all that is good and all that is bad,
in a very large class of his fellow citizens. He is quick-witted,
prompt in action, enterprising in all things in which he has
nothing to lose, but wary and cautious in all things in which he
has a real stake, and ready to turn not only his hand, but his
heart and his principles, to anything that offers an advantage.
With him, literally, "Nothing is too high to be aspired to, nothing
too low to be done." He will run for governor or for town clerk,
just as opportunities occur, is expert in all the practices of his
profession, has had a quarter's dancing, with three years in the
classics, and turned his attention toward medicine and divinity,
before he finally settled down to law. Such a compound of shrewdness,
impudence, common-sense, pretension, humility, cleverness, vulgarity,
kind-heartedness, duplicity, selfishness, law-honesty, moral fraud,
and mother wit, mixed up with a smattering of learning and much
penetration in practical things, can hardly be described, as any one
of his prominent qualities is certain to be met by another quite as
obvious that is almost its converse. Mr. Bragg, in short, is purely a
creature of circumstances.
The weakness of Cooper's criticisms on America is not that they were
unjust, but that they were so evidently ill-tempered and bad-mannered.
He made the utter mistake of locating the returning Europeans, the
accusers of America, in Templeton Hall, which was the name of his own
country place. He involved them in his own quarrel with the villagers
over the use of a picnic ground belonging to him, and thus loaded on
himself all the priggishness which he ascribed to them. The public was
only too ready to take it as a personal utterance when he made one of
them say:
I should prefer the cold, dogged domination of English law, with
its fruits, the heartlessness of a sophistication without parallel,
to being trampled on by every arrant blackguard that may happen to
traverse this valley in his wanderings after dollars.
It is a misfortune that most men and women who are willing to risk
repute for the freedom to think and speak are eccentric in other
respects. They are unusual first of all in having minds so independent
that they presume to disagree with the majority even in silence. They
are more unusual still in having the courage to disagree aloud. When
they have said their say, however, their neighbors begin to carp
at them, respectable people to pass by on the other side, and the
newspapers to distort what they have said and then abuse them for what
they never uttered. The honest and truly reckless talkers, stung to
the quick, feel injured and innocent, talk extravagantly, rely more
and more on their own judgments and less and less on the facts, and
sooner or later lose their influence, if they do not become outcasts.
In the end they have the courage and honesty with which they started,
a few deploring friends, and a thousand enemies who hate them with an
honest and totally unjustified hatred. It is a tragic round which all
but the most extraordinary of free speakers seem doomed to travel. And
Cooper did not escape it. Yet he did have the remarkable strength and
good fortune to pass out of this vale of controversy toward the end of
his life. With 1842 his campaign against the public ceased--and theirs
against him. He spent his last years happily at Cooperstown and slowly
returned into an era of good feeling. It was in these later years
that Lowell paid him the well-deserved tribute quoted above. He was
really a great patriot. If his love of America led him into this sea of
troubles, it was the same love that made him the successful writer of a
masterly series of American stories. It is the native character of the
man that is worth remembering, and the native quality of his books that
earned him a wide and lasting fame.
BOOK LIST
=_Individual Author_=
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. Collected Works. New York. 1854. 33 vols.
These have appeared in many later collected and individual
editions in America, England, and many other lands and languages.
The chief works appeared originally as follows: Precaution,
1820; The Spy, 1821; The Pioneers, 1823; The Pilot, 1823; Lionel
Lincoln, 1825; The Last of the Mohicans, 1826; The Prairie, 1827;
The Red Rover, 1828; Notions of the Americans, 1828; The Wept
of Wish-ton-Wish, 1829; The Water-Witch, 1831; The Bravo, 1831;
The Heidenmauer, 1832; The Headsman, 1833; The Monikins, 1835;
Homeward Bound, 1838; Home as Found, 1838; The Pathfinder, 1840;
Mercedes of Castile, 1840; The Deerslayer, 1841; The Two Admirals,
1842; Wing and Wing, 1842; Wyandotte, 1843; Ned Myers, 1843;
Afloat and Ashore, 1844; Satanstoe, 1845; The Chain Bearer, 1845;
The Redskins, 1846; The Crater, 1847; Jack Tier, 1848; The Oak
Openings, 1848; The Sea Lions, 1849; The Ways of the Hour, 1850.
=Bibliographies=
Good bibliographies in Lounsbury's Life (see below), and
Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 532-534.
=Biography and Criticism=
There is no official biography, Cooper having opposed such a
publication. The best single volume is by T. R. Lounsbury
(_A.M.L. Series_).
BROWNELL, W. C. Cooper. _Scribner's Magazine_, April, 1906. Also
in _American Prose Masters_. 1909.
BRYANT, W. C. A Discourse on the Life and Genius of James
Fenimore Cooper. 1852.
CLEMENS, S. L. (Mark Twain). Fenimore Cooper's Literary
Offenses. _North American Review_, July, 1895. Also in _How to
tell a Story and Other Essays_. 1897.
ERSKINE, JOHN. Leading American Novelists. 1910.
HILLARD, G. S. Fenimore Cooper. _Atlantic Monthly_, January,
1862.
HOWE, M. A. DEW. James Fenimore Cooper. _The Bookman_, March,
1897. Also in _American Bookmen_. 1898.
HOWELLS, W. D. Heroines of Fiction. 1901.
MATTHEWS, B. Fenimore Cooper. _Atlantic Monthly_, September,
1907. Also in _Gateways to Literature_. 1912.
PHILLIPS, MARY E. James Fenimore Cooper. 1913.
SIMMS, W. C. The Writings of J. Fenimore Cooper. _Views and
Reviews._ 1845. _Ser. 1._
STEDMAN, E. C. Poe, Cooper, and the Hall of Fame. _North
American Review_, August, 1907.
TUCKERMAN, H. T. James Fenimore Cooper. _North American Review_,
October, 1859.
VAN DOREN, CARL. Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol.
I, Bk. II, in chap. vi.
VINCENT, L. H. American Literary Masters. 1906.
WILSON, J. G. Cooper Memorials and Memories. _The Independent_,
January 31, 1901.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read Brownell's defense of Cooper's Indian characters in his "Masters
of American Prose" and check his statements by your own observations in
a selected novel.
Read the comments of Brownell in "American Prose Masters," and of
Lounsbury in the _A. M. L. Series_, on Cooper's women, and then arrive
at your own conclusions from the reading of a selected novel.
If you have read two or three of Cooper's novels, see if he has
introduced his usual polished gentleman and his bore or pedant in each,
and see how nearly these characters correspond in themselves and in
their story value.
Make a study of the actual plot and its development in any selected
novel of Cooper's.
Read Mark Twain's essay on "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" and
decide on how far it is fair and how far it was dictated by Mark
Twain's hostility to romantic fiction.
Read Cooper's prefaces to a half-dozen or more novels for the light
they will throw on his belligerency of temper.
Read "Home as Found" for comparison of the topics treated with those in
the "Salmagundi" and "Croaker" papers, for observation on the variety
of American weaknesses presented, for a decision as to how fundamental
or how superficial these weaknesses were, and for a conclusion as to
the amount of evident ill temper in the book.