Title: The American historical novel (on American themes) before 1860 : the early novels of James Fenimore Cooper (1821-1831)
Author: Leisy, Ernest Erwin
Language: English
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                     THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL NOVEL
                          (ON AMERICAN THEMES)
                              BEFORE 1860

                          THE EARLY NOVELS OF
                         JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
                              (1821–1831)


                                   BY

                           ERNEST ERWIN LEISY
                    A.B., University of Kansas, 1913
                   A.M., University of Chicago, 1919


                        AN ABSTRACT OF A THESIS

          SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
                 FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
                  IN ENGLISH IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF
                    THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, 1923

                            URBANA, ILLINOIS

[Illustration]



THE EARLY NOVELS OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1821–1831)


James Fenimore Cooper--so the popular legend runs--was a man who
wrote stories about idealized Indians and the wilderness, now read
mainly by boys; who created Leatherstocking, the man without a cross;
and who spent an irascible old age winning petty lawsuits. Further
reflection may call to mind that he was enamored of the sea as well
as of the wilderness, and that one of his stories had something to
do with a spy. All this, of course, is true; but that Cooper did
much more than this, has been discovered comparatively recently. The
explanation is to be found, in part, in the fact that after Cooper’s
death in 1851, the vogue of his type of romance having passed also,
his popularity suffered a decline reaching its lowest ebb between
1870 and 1880. Another reason is that the novelist’s dying injunction
that no biography be authorized was carried out so literally by his
oldest daughter and literary executrix that many family papers of value
were destroyed. She afterwards published in the _Atlantic Monthly_
for 1887 two reminiscent articles about her father, but these are
rambling and uninformative in character. In 1883--thirty years after
the death of the novelist--Professor Lounsbury succeeded surprisingly
well in piecing together the outward facts of Cooper’s life.[1] The
“Correspondence of Cooper,” just published,[2] reveals little about the
workmanship or about the personality of the novelist, except by way of
emphasizing the fact that his social and political ideas meant more
to him than his art. Cooper’s own introductions, added to his works
in 1849, the articles by his daughter, and the results of Lounsbury
must suffice for the external evidence on Cooper’s work; whatever
conclusions are reached on internal evidence may be modified when
materials still in the possession of the Cooper family are given up to
the public.

Of the critical writings concerning Cooper the best is an essay by
W. C. Brownell in _American Prose Masters_ (1909), in which he applies
the canons of criticism to the works of Cooper _in toto_ under the
captions: Form and Substance, Defective Art, Romantic Realism, Indians,
Characters, Women, and Patriotism. John Erskine in _Leading American
Novelists_ (1910), pp. 51–130, has taken up in greater detail the
leading works, using the critical-historical method. Carl Van Doren in
_The Cambridge History of American Literature_, I, 293–306, and _The
American Novel_ (1921), Chapter 2, follows somewhat the same method
as Erskine. W. L. Cross in _The Development of the English Novel_
(1899) has a brief but pointed six pages on Cooper and his relation
to Scott and his successors. These critics think highly of Cooper’s
work but have been interested primarily in Cooper’s results rather
than in the history of how Cooper produced his results. Only Brownell
and Erskine incidentally, and Cross briefly, touch upon Cooper as an
historical novelist. Leaving Cooper’s other historical work out of
account, they concentrate upon _The Spy_, declaring it an historical
novel of adventure, as Cooper had not the background for genuine
historical work and did not test his fictitious characters in great
historical crises such as in _Kenilworth_ or _The Abbot_. This seems a
too arbitrary restriction of the term “historical,” for which Brownell
makes some amends when he declares that the alliance of romance with
reality in Cooper’s tales, “his general and personal interest in the
life he depicted makes his account of it solider art, gives his romance
even more substance and meaning than Scott’s historiography.”[3] How
extensively and well Cooper portrayed the setting of a past time, how
he related his work to his public, what connection it had with the work
of his predecessors and contemporaries, the consequent originality of
his contribution, and the nature and extent of his influence on the
historical novel have received insufficient attention.

Considering the results of the experiments with native material
outlined in the preceding chapter, Cooper might well have entered
with diffidence upon the task of writing an “American” novel. That
he was in any definite sense aware of the work of his predecessors
in the field of the American novel seems doubtful. His had been a
frontiersman’s boyhood, followed, after an erratic two years at Yale,
by apprenticeship at sea and a decade as a country squire. Then by the
merest chance he fell into authorship. To make good his boast that he
could write a better book than the novel of English society life which
he was at that time reading, he wrote _Precaution_, a story of earls
and dukes. But knowing how devout an American Cooper was, some of his
friends made it a matter of reproach that he should have written a
novel foreign in substance and feeling. He acknowledged the justice of
the imputation and resolved to atone by inflicting upon the world and
himself, as he said, a second book,[4] _The Spy_, the patriotic nature
of which should admit of no cavil.

From the writing of _Precaution_, Cooper carried over very little save
ability to manipulate a story. It taught him nothing in the way of
adapting the formula of the current novel to the treatment of native
material. He had still to learn to conform to the principles of the
Waverley novels and at the same time to find a tractable American
theme. What was the nature of the historical novel then current?

“Scott had gathered up,” says Dr. Loshe,[5] “and recombined, according
to formulas of his own, many elements present in the fiction of his
day,--the tendency to localized or national tales with that interest
in humble personages on whom local characteristics are most deeply
impressed, which appears most plainly in Miss Edgeworth’s Irish
stories; the interest in romantic landscape and word-painting of
natural scenery which found its most striking expression in Mrs.
Radcliffe’s theatrical yet impressive scenes; the tale of adventure
reinforced by the revived interest in travel and antiquarian taste
for old buildings and trappings; and the eagerness for an imaginative
interpretation of history which had expressed itself in many would-be
historical tales, whose hopeless inaccuracies had a naive honesty of
good intention.”

These ingredients which Scott had mixed in varying proportions in his
different works, it occurred to Cooper, might be adapted to native
manners and conditions.

The essential requirement of the Scottish novels--conflict, patriotic
association, and difference in social manners--obviously suggested
to Cooper the American Revolution as the scene for his novel. The
details of that warfare, particularly as they were related by the aged
participants in Westchester County, New York, where he was at this
time living, Cooper had listened to with that intelligent interest
with which a seaman may follow strategy on land as well. He knew
this neutral ground, between the British in New York City and the
American army in the highlands of the Hudson, over which the tide of
battle had ebbed and flowed, as Scott knew his native heath. As he
turned over in his mind the possibilities afforded by this setting he
recalled an anecdote which his neighbor John Jay had related years
before concerning a shrewd, unselfishly patriotic spy employed by
him during the war. This “legend” became the nucleus of his story.
Judging from internal evidence, Cooper must have been delighted with
the possibilities of the subject for was it not still a matter of
record how the sensibilities of the public had been wrought upon by the
fate of Hale and of Andre?[6] Was not his friend, Dunlap attracting
multitudes to his play, entitled _Andre_? It next occurred to him
to present his spy in the guise of a pedlar such as Edie Ochiltree,
who had fascinated readers of _The Antiquary_. So vividly did Cooper
realize his conception of Harvey Birch that the romance had all the
semblance of a memoir.

The public veneration for Washington required that he be introduced
somehow. In 1780 the patriot army, under General Washington, occupied
a line of connecting positions extending from Philadelphia across
northern New Jersey, to the fortified post of West Point on the Hudson.
Along the Hudson River, the American lines extended to Peekskill,
and outposts patrolled the country as far south as Tarrytown. From
this point to the channels which separate Manhattan Island from the
mainland, a distance of about forty miles, lay the “neutral ground,”
the No Man’s Land of the Revolution. It was the object of the patriot
army to prevent the British forces from drawing supplies from this
region, but Congress would not permit devastation. Consequently, the
“neutral ground,” swept by constant raids, and exposed to the unchecked
evils of civil war, became the abode of the lawless and adventurous
spirits who flourish best in times of upheaval and disorder. The fall
of Charleston, the treason of Arnold, and dissensions among officers
of the Continental Army made a general disintegration of that military
force which was the sole support of the patriot cause seem at hand. The
Revolution was in danger, not only from avowed Tories but from lukewarm
followers anxious to keep on the winning side. This combination of
circumstances suggested to Cooper the military situation in 1780 in the
Neutral Ground as the most suitable background for his story.

Romantic themes were for Cooper more important and interesting than
restoration of the historic past. The instinctive Toryism that made it
natural for Scott to poetize history had no counterpart in Cooper’s
rationalized liberalism.[7] But it was not necessary for his mind to
be saturated with history as was that of Scott. Compared with Europe,
America had little history, and that little Cooper knew, particularly
as it pertained to New York. In the present instance, he had his
information from eye-witnesses and from nine years’ residence on the
scenes. It was decidedly to Cooper’s advantage to have a “legend,” or
the outline of a plot, suggested to him, since, with this in mind, he
could in unfolding a story give to it all the illusion of reality.
“Perhaps by chance,” says Carl Van Doren, “Cooper here hit upon a
type of plot at which he excelled, a struggle between contending
forces, not badly matched, arranged as a pursuit in which the pursued
are, as a rule, favored by the author and reader.”[8] High and low
characters could easily be borrowed, in fact, his public expected
that. The Wharton family, consisting of a high-spirited young blond,
a faded elder daughter, a young officer, and a feeble father was the
conventional novel family; the pedlar as the central link of the action
came from _The Antiquary_; Dr. Sitgreaves was an imitation of Scott’s
pedants; Betty Flanagan, the sutler, partook of the nature of Miss
Edgeworth’s Irish characters of low life; the negro was an adaptation
of the court fool; the remaining characters were be-captained and
be-majored as was fitting in a tale of love and war.

As much of his public was Tory, and as even English readers might be
appealed to, Cooper faced the problem of writing his story so as to
please the patriot and to enlist the interest of these others besides.
Fortunately for Cooper, and for art in American historical fiction,
his training under an Anglican tutor and his marriage into a Tory
family restrained him from such partiality for the Americans as the
first historical novelist might easily have indulged in and thereby
set the standard for succeeding writers. Cooper’s solution in taking
a house divided against itself, in a section supposedly neutral but
actually overrun by skirmishing parties of either side, supplied also
the essential element of conflict. He added suspense by the uncertainty
he created in the reader’s mind as to which party the spy served and
by having him persecuted equally by bands of Skinners and by Cowboys.
With the sketch of the depredations of the Skinners he enlisted Tory
approval of the veracity of the picture. The first volume was in fact
as inviting to loyalist as to patriot. The mysterious Harper, though
he inspired considerable awe, had little in his reticent demeanor to
indicate that he was the commander-in-chief of the continental troops.
But the patriotic purpose of the book was not to be lost sight of. In
his very persecutions the spy was becoming heroic, and there could be
no mistake as to his position in the outcome. By making the heroine,
regardless of her Tory family, espouse the American cause, and by
exposing as a bigamist the English colonel, with whom her sister was in
love, the author further won the favor of the patriot. Here and there
he added touches of piety which might bring his fable into favor with
the reader.

The handling of historical matter, particularly the treatment of
Washington, presented a problem of peculiar difficulty. According to
Scott’s practice up to this time, an historical character must have
a minor role. This should have simplified the problem but Washington
was too much venerated to be simply disposed of. Cooper hit upon the
solution of introducing him as the shadowy Mr. Harper, who looms
somewhat gigantically through his disguise, and is revealed, in the
end, as the ally of the spy and the patriot leader. While Cooper
displayed a gift for historical portraiture, he fell victim to the
contemporary notion of Washington and portrayed him as the sobered and
aged President rather than as the General of the Continental Army.
His stiffness _en famille_ and his melodramatic skulking about the
highlands and in caves were later by Cooper himself acknowledged a
mistake. But to the general historical facts of his story Cooper was
true. Truer, in fact, than the historians. And this, as has never been
pointed out, constitutes _The Spy_ a document of historical value. For
the Whig historians, following the Revolution, had misrepresented the
war as a united uprising against the mother country instead of the
civil conflict, which, according to the best modern criticism, it in
large part was. The intense Whig tradition begun by Andrews and Gordon,
who based the earliest histories of the Revolution on Burke’s yearly
summaries of the events in the Annual Register, persisted not only in
Weem’s _Life of Washington_ but in Marshall’s also, and was influential
through the ten editions of Botta’s translation. The federalism of
Hildreth (1849) carried on this bias; and when Bancroft in 1852
reached the Revolution, he broke all records for a violently partisan
and timorously defensive history of the Revolution.[9] For leaving a
distinct impression of the fratricidal nature of the strife, when a
just version of the struggle seemed impossible, Cooper deserves credit
hitherto not accorded him.

_The Spy_, as I have tried to indicate, was in every sense an
experiment. If it succeeded, others of its kind might follow; if it
failed, the American novel would have to wait, for Irving, Cooper’s
only possible competitor, “deliberately chose short stories to avoid
any rivalry with Scott.”[10] But so well had Cooper estimated the
tastes of the public that the experiment was from the first a success.
In three months it was in its third edition. It won the “respect of the
generally contemptuous English critics,[11] and the American press,
which had liked the book by instinct, was pleased with the mild praise
as though it were a national tribute.”[12] The happy issue of the
experiment inspirited other native writers; it encouraged Cooper in
particular.

For a novitiate like Cooper to follow up at once the career
unexpectedly opened up to him by the success of _The Spy_, required
that he draw upon material already in hand. His acquaintance with
Westchester county he had used felicitously; there remained his boyhood
at Cooperstown, and his years at sea. Affection for the pioneer village
among the forest-clad hills surrounding Otsego pressed for utterance
and Cooper began “a descriptive tale” which he named _The Pioneers;
or, the Sources of the Susquehanna_ (1823). With a few Cooperstown
characters and the outlines of a situation in mind, Cooper launched
upon the improvisation of his story. He transcribed and generalized[13]
for the purposes of fiction his memories of the hunter, Shipman, who
came to his father’s, Judge Cooper’s, Hall to present his game; the
motley characters and nationalities of the early settlement; the town
itself as it was forty years ago, with its raw street of wooden houses;
the drunken Indian at the inn; the snowy congregation crowding to the
fire at the church; the seasonal sports of the rough people; the virgin
lake and wilderness, the forest conflagration, ushering out with grim
reality the period of romance. Cooper was too downright to obscure
the grossness of the picture. Derelicts and scoundrels he well knew
were associated with a new society as much as its idealists, and he
brought them in. Representatives of various social units were made to
aid in the evolution of the plot. Judge Temple, empire-builder, with
his daughter just home from school, and an insurgent young Effingham
were given the center of the stage; Natty Bumppo, protagonist of the
advancing civilization, his companion Chingachgook, christened John,
and various frontier types, were grouped about these.

In this work, Cooper showed a more aggressively American spirit,
derived no doubt from the favorable reception accorded _The
Spy_. In both the subject-matter and in his presentation of it
he was independent of Scott,--seeking in the picture of American
empire-building and American prodigality to set his country honorably
before foreign readers. As was fitting in an avowedly “descriptive
tale,” he laid aside the “pursuit-rescue” scheme for a set of
sportsman’s sketches not unreminiscent of Irving. Life in the American
Bracebridge Hall[14] was exhibited, with its Christmas abundance not to
be outdone by Irving’s sketch of an English Christmas, and its sports
like the turkey-match, the shooting of myriads of wild-pigeons, the
seining or spearing of bass, the deer-chase on the lake, maple-sugaring
in spring, and sleighing-parties in winter, each carrying its peculiar
appeal. But there was also dramatic tension and an interest in a theme
suggesting Greek fatalism: the law of nature, embodied in the uncouth
old hunter and the Great Serpent, is seen in conflict with the law of
man represented by the Judge. In the end the law of nature yields to
the stocks and the fire which civilization brought, and the only escape
is a reluctant departure toward the setting sun. A conventional plot
was introduced by Cooper as a concession to his readers, but it is
of secondary importance. A wrong done by Judge Temple to Effingham’s
father is righted by the slightly complicated love-match of Miss Temple
with young Effingham, in fiction a favorite method of restitution.
The girl’s excessive sensibility, the episode of the panther, the
appearance of a sybil, and of a gold-digger, the hero’s clouded
ancestry cleared up in the penultimate chapter, all are to us dregs in
the old wine but gave the story the flavor it needed in order to sell;
the new wine that Cooper introduced has ripened to modern taste: it is
the “essential wonder of pioneer life” as it is presented in this epic
of the wilderness.

_The Pioneers_ has never received consideration as an historical novel.
Van Doren speaks of it[15] as Cooper’s first “realistic presentation
of American manners.” Yet a novel of manners it is not. That life in
the frontier town was not what it had been and never would be again,
Cooper realized definitely.[16] Susan Fenimore Cooper says,[17] “The
new narrative, like that which preceded it, was, in one sense, to be
connected with the history of the country; it should follow the first
steps of civilization in its conquests over the wilderness.” The
conceivable contention that more than forty years must elapse between
the time of the action and the date of composition is invalid: forty
years is exactly the length of time by which _The Spy_, generally
acknowledged an historical novel, is separated from its events; and
_The Antiquary_ is remote only twenty-one years. In America, moreover,
changes in manner, customs and outward appearances are so great in
a single generation that the historical romancer need not revert to
antiquity.[18] It might, further, be argued that no actual historical
character appears in the book. But the contemporary imagination did
not heed to be reminded that here was the story of Daniel Boone, for
to it the story had become a legend.[19] There is abundant evidence
that its readers regarded it as an historical novel. So well did Cooper
understand the passing nature of this pioneer life and so effectively
did he characterize it here, that with subsequent writers the novel
of pioneer community life became the characteristic type of American
historical novel.[20]

In _The Pilot_ (1823) Cooper drew upon his experiences at sea. How
thoroughly he was at home here his biographers have remarked, but how
thoroughly he viewed life from a seaman’s point of view, they have not
insisted upon.[21] When it was apparent that Yale would do him no good,
Cooper’s father shipped him before the mast, and here on his first
voyage, which was long and stormy, occurred an unforgettable chase by
pirates and a search by a British man-of-war. Such adventures were
ordinarily discussed over a cob-pipe, on a wharf-barrel, or, at most,
got into chap books, but no one thought to put them into a novel, for
who but landsmen read novels? Smollett, to be sure, had had sailors
but the detailed maneuvers of vessels and the tang of the old salt he
had not given. Nor was it done, to Cooper’s thinking, in _The Pirate_,
which had just appeared anonymously. When he asserted that it was the
work of a landsman and not a of sailor, he was challenged to make good
his contention by writing a story from the seaman’s point of view. His
pugnacious temper was as ready to take the dare as it had been when it
first tripped him into the authorship of _Precaution_.

Not unmindful of the experimental character of the venture, and wise
through the unexpected success of _The Spy_, Cooper determined to blend
nautical fiction and history. “It was conceived necessary,” says his
daughter,[22] “to connect with the narrative some historical name which
should give it importance, and for the same reason, the period of the
Revolution was chosen as the date of the tale. The nautical annals of
that time were brief, and a rapid glance was sufficient to show that
among the historical figures that of the bold adventurer, Paul Jones,
stood prominent as one of the few adapted to a work of fiction. His
cruise in The Ranger suggested the plot of _The Pilot_.”

The historical facts in brief were these. Jones, after receiving a
lieutenant’s commission in the navy, suggested that the American
vessels, which were few and inferior in comparison with those of the
enemy, should be used as privateers. In the “Ranger” he captured
several trading vessels in the Irish channel; he attacked his home town
of Whitehaven on the coast of Cumberland, and burned one vessel; he
sacked Lord Selkirk’s castle, and defeated and captured the “Drake,” an
English sloop-of-war, with the loss of only eight men.

Cooper chose the northeastern coast of England as the setting for his
story. This gave him the two-fold advantage of exploiting sea maneuvers
which _The Pirate_ lacked, and of complicating these with a love story
in the castle, which readers of Abbey romances cherished. In their
eagerness to point out its novelty as a sea tale, students of Cooper
have overlooked the Gothic tradition which _The Pilot_ continued. In
the management of the story there was not so much that was new as might
be supposed, for in its general outlines it was _The Spy_ done in terms
of the sea. The skirmishes of the Neutral Ground became chases between
frigates and men of war, the devotion of Harvey Birch was supplanted
by Long Tom Coffin’s love for the sea, and an incognito Paul Jones
replaced an incognito Washington. But such economy of creative effort
was justifiable and perhaps necessary for Cooper if he should lavish
upon the details the interpretative sympathy that he was fitted to
give. It was the sailor in him that led the frigate through the channel
in masterful manner and that made his seamen such likeable fellows.
He knew how good sea-dogs would itch for a fight or boast of their
prowess. “Their ships were handled,” says Captain Mahan, “as ships then
were and act as ships still would under the circumstances.”[23] Joseph
Conrad has been glad to acknowledge[24] that Cooper taught him profound
sympathy and artistic insight into the sublimity and mystery of the sea.

Cooper’s choice of the “Father of the American Navy” as the historical
figure with which to connect his sea tale was peculiarly happy in view
of public enthusiasm following the success of the navy in the War of
1812.[25] But in portraying this character he has been considered no
more successful than he had been with Washington. The statuesque pose
of Mr. Gray becomes, through reiteration, an affectation which it is
hard to reconcile with the fiery Scotchman of history. Cooper himself
at a later date expressed dissatisfaction with the unreality of the
portrait.[26] It becomes clear in the course of this story that Cooper
regards Paul Jones as a free-lance whose devotion to America proceeded
from his desire of personal distinction. “A large part of his behavior
might be called Byronic,” Erskine has suggested, “since it appears to
be learned in the general school of the Giaour and the Corsair.”[27]
As an historical document _The Pilot_ has worth because it faithfully
portrays the sea life of the time of the Revolution and because it has
called attention to a phase of the war historians have been inclined to
neglect.

The favor with which Cooper’s three historical novels had been received
convinced him that here lay his field. How seriously Cooper considered
himself an historical novelist and how auspicious were the times for
a national romancer has not been understood. The fiftieth anniversary
of the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill was at hand. The
spirit of nationalism was intense. President Monroe had promulgated his
Doctrine, General LaFayette (a personal friend of Cooper’s) had come
to tour the country he had helped to save, and Daniel Webster in his
Bunker Hill oration was trying to put into pleasing phrase the popular
mood. Cooper, in the blush of popularity, conceived a plan for a series
of historical romances, on a national scale, to be called “Legends of
the Thirteen Republics,” the scenes of which should be laid in the
various colonies that had shared in the Revolution. The first of this
series was devoted to Massachusetts, and was entitled, _Lionel Lincoln,
or the Leaguer of Boston_ (1825).[28]

“Nothing that industry could do,” says Lounsbury,[29] “was spared by
Cooper to make this work a success. In the preparation of it he studied
historical authorities, he read state papers, he pored over official
documents of all kinds and degrees of dreariness. To have his slightest
assertions in accordance with facts, he examined almanacs, and searched
for all the contemporary reports as to the condition of the weather.
He visited Boston in order to go over in person the ground he was to
make the scene of his story.” He built his story around the battles of
Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. The entrance of a vessel through
the patrolled part of Boston, carrying young Lincoln, an officer in
the British service; the journey past old North Church, the Province
House, and Faneuil Hall to the heart of the city; the state of unrest
among the citizenry, along with the doubt among the British whether
the rabble will fight; the organization of the Sons of Liberty and the
news of the coming of Clinton, Burgoyne, and Howe; a spirited account
of the running fight from Lexington to Concord; the uprising of a
hundred thousand men under leaders like Warren, Putnam, and Gage; and
at length an account of the Battle of Bunker Hill, in which the hero
is wounded, were put into the first volume. In the second, history was
practically cast to the winds, and the private fortunes of the hero
were related,--his recovery under the tender ministrations of a girl,
his marriage to her, amid ominous portents, and the disclosure through
the spectacular machinery of Gothic romance of what had been clouded
regarding his ancestry.

For the first time in his treatment of American history, Cooper had a
subject in which he was obliged to substitute for personal experience
painstaking research. Not having been very successful in handling
character that required adherence to historical fact, it was a question
whether his mind could assimilate the results of his investigations in
a way to stimulate rather than to hamper his imagination. For better
or for worse, he made no attempt to delineate an historical character.
Warren, Gage, and Putnam he mentioned but their possibilities as
literary material he did not recognize; Burgoyne, Howe, and Clinton
he misrepresented in the few pages he allotted to them. With the
historical background in and about Boston he was more successful,
giving according to Bancroft, an effective and truthful rendering. As
heretofore, his sympathy with the losing side equalized the contest
and made it a worthy struggle. For the critical reader none of his
books has a more inviting opening. But Cooper soon found the attempt to
blend his complicated plot of domestic intrigue with history irksome,
and shifted attention to the melodramatic fortunes of his hero. It is
difficult to understand why he should have made an unheroic English
Major the hero of an American story. It can hardly be explained on the
ground of Cooper’s established antipathy to the New England character,
although the fact that he was too little at home in Massachusetts may
have caused him to piece out the story by giving it a melodramatic
turn in keeping with what was popular on the stage of the day. Mr.
Van Doren’s remark[30] that the book “failed to please as his earlier
novels had done” must be accepted with qualification, as contemporary
reviews vouch for its own popularity as well as for that of _The
Leaguer of Boston_, a play based upon it.[31] It would seem that the
“Gothicism” of the story as manifested in the character of Ralph
with his sudden and apparently unaccountable appearances and his
almost supernatural power over the Byronic Lionel, the spectacular
apparition of an overshadowing arm on the wall of King’s Chapel during
the marriage ceremony, and the sudden death of the simpleton at the
hands of his maniac father who dies with him, was an element in the
historical novel that gave it a contemporary appeal which has been lost
in an age of other critical standards.

When Cooper abandoned after the first attempt his cycle of thirteen
romances of the Revolution, he did not give up his career in the field
of historical fiction. In his next work, _The Last of the Mohicans, a
Narrative of 1757_ (1826), he went back even farther into his country’s
past. In _The Pioneers_ he had sharpened his tools at frontier material
and he now wished to execute a design in which Indian life should be
presented in detail. But comparatively little was known about the red
man at the time. Before the Revolution he had inspired terror but more
recently his melancholy fate was to a greater or less degree upon
the white man’s conscience. Chateaubriand had given currency to the
tradition of the noble savage, but only an ethnologist like Gallatin
or Duponceau had inquired into his origin, language, religion, ethics,
government, habits and manners, with a sense of their scientific
value. Cooper’s own knowledge of the race was limited to an occasional
meeting with an Indian at Otsego Hall, or a delegation at New York or
Washington. This personal acquaintance he now supplemented, according
to his daughter, by a study of Heckewelder, Colden, Penn, and Smith.[32]

The setting of his story came to Cooper while in 1824 with a party of
English friends he was on a visit to the Lake Champlain region. At
Glenn Falls one of the party directed his attention to the caverns in
the river as a suitable location for a romance. The suggestion pleased
the novelist, and when the ruins of Fort William Henry nearby came to
mind, it occurred to him to use the episode of the siege and massacre
at the fort during the French and Indian War as the basis of the story.
For the adventures of his fictitious characters with which Cooper came
more and more to occupy the second volume of his novels, he here fell
back upon his “pursuit-rescue” scheme. He managed this scheme with
sufficient adroitness to display, incidentally, a great variety of
Indian customs and traditions.

It is not generally known that Cooper’s Indian was drawn in large part
from Heckewelder.[33] This venerable man had been a Moravian missionary
among the Delawares and published some years later an account which
rather idealized them. In view of this fact, Cooper deserves credit for
representing the Indian as cunning and treacherous as well as generous.
When it was objected that he gave a more favorable picture of the red
man than he deserved, Cooper said:

“It is the privilege of all writers of fiction, more particularly
when their works aspire to the elevation of romances, to present
the beau-ideal of their characters to the reader. This it is which
constitutes poetry and to suppose that the red-man is to be represented
only in the squalid misery or in the degraded moral state that
certainly more or less belongs to his condition, is, we apprehend,
taking a very narrow view of an author’s privileges. Such criticism
would have deprived the world of even Homer.”[34]

What Cooper noted about the red men was their acute senses, developed
through woodcraft and warfare, their belief in omens and their tortoise
and beaver worship, their mummery, their stoiclism, especially when
enduring torture at the stake, their “gift” of revenge, their war
dance, their love of baubles, their respect for the feeble-minded or
the aged, their chaste attitude toward female captives, the silence
of the young, their funeral customs and deference to the mound for
the dead, their councils of war and fierce tribal pride, their use of
metaphorical speech, and the crafty eloquence of their orators.

In order to show the antitheses in Indian character, Cooper created in
Uncas a noble savage, in conformity with the philosophy of nature then
in vogue, and bestowed upon Magua the deceit and treachery associated
with the Indian when he was a menace. With his customary repetition
of types,[35] Cooper was inclined to reintroduce the hunter and his
Indian comrade from _The Pioneers_. But they were old there and had
fallen upon evil days. Yet he resolved to take the risk. It was a
stroke of genius not only to set them back nearly forty years, but to
shown them in the vigor of manhood undeniably the same individuals. The
other characters--an old man with his motherless two daughters, one of
whom is given in marriage to a representative of the British army for
his devoted services to the family and the other, a quadroon, whose
kidnapping by the Indian villain motivates the pursuit of the second
volume--were redolent of the make-up box and the property-room. The
bore, however, represents a variation from type, as Cooper intended the
half-witted Connecticut psalm-singer for a modern adaptation of the
ministrel of medieval romance.[36] The character whose possibilities
Cooper now first realized and upon whom he lavished his devotion was
Natty Bumppo. Upon his Christian stock he grafted many of the virtues
of savage life. It seems to me as if, without consciously doing so,
he has blended in him reminiscences of Sir Charles Grandison and the
natural man of Chateaubriand. In him the historical novel gained a
new type of hero with whose simplicity, downrightness, competence,
unsophistication, and virgin prejudice the natural American has for
Europeans come to be identified.[37] How indigenous he was appears
when he is compared with Rip Van Winkle and the characters of Irving.
Thackeray declared _La Longue Carabine_ one of the great prizemen of
fiction. “He ranks,” said he, “with your Uncle Toby, Sir Roger de
Coverley, Falstaff ... and the artist has deserved well of his country
who devised them.”[38]

The historical element centering about the siege of Fort William
Henry and the subsequent massacre, Cooper might have gotten up in
an hour’s reading. Perhaps its scant basis of fact accounts for the
truth of the picture. Colonel Munro, the English commander, was
“elaborated according to the needs of the plot and Cooper’s idea of
the British soldier of the period,” says Erskine. “As a soldier he
is of course brave, but not astute. Cooper lets him stand for the
usual British incapacity to cope with the Indians which Braddock so
fatally illustrated.”[39] It is not likely that any of Cooper’s readers
would have impugned the conception. The portrait of Montcalm is, in
my judgment, Cooper’s best picture of an historical character.[40]
Deeply regretting that history would perpetuate only his glorious
death on the Plains of Abraham,[41] Cooper without pronouncing final
judgment upon his conduct, represented Montcalm as putting policy above
moral principle when he did not, by restraining his Indian allies,
prevent the massacre which followed the capitulation of the English.
In this position he was in accord with Timothy Dwight,[42] a careful
historian, who remembered the event as a child and expressed the view
which prevailed in New England and New York. The massacre itself, with
its opportunity for pageantry in Scott’s vein, did not fire Cooper’s
imagination.

What Cooper did in _The Last of the Mohicans_ that he had not done so
well in his previous historical novels, was to make the central theme,
the conquest of the Indian by the white, turn upon and be explained by
the chief historical event of the book, the savagery of the red men
at Fort William Henry. He achieved a skillful blend of research and
fabrication that has resulted in its being regarded the best treatment
of the ominous theme of race conflict. Whatever case the critics may
have made against his Indians, and of late they have rather deferred
to him, his conception of the red man has been effective and is not
likely now to be replaced. When people wish to know what it was to live
in the days when the aborigines were in power, it is to this story of
disastrous chances, of hair-breadth ’scapes, and moving accidents by
flood and field, that the imagination naturally turns.

So well was _The Last of the Mohicans_ received at home and abroad
that Cooper was moved to write at once another tale of the Indians.
The character of Leatherstocking had grown upon him and he was ready
to hazard a third venture with him. The popular mind had followed
the removal of his prototype, Daniel Boone, to the plains beyond
the Mississippi and the report of his recent death there. In that
mysterious Louisiana Purchase, moreover, new pioneers were seeking to
satisfy their hunger for land. Cooper also knew, though this has not
been pointed out before, that the public mind was further directed to
this frontier by the proposal by act of Congress to remove the Indians
to this territory. These considerations caused Cooper, although he had
never seen the plains, to determine upon a western setting for his next
story, _The Prairie_ (1827).

“During the spring of 1826 Cooper followed a deputation of Pawnee
and Sioux from New York to Washington to study their origin for _The
Prairie_.”[43] The sources which he drew upon Cooper never indicated
directly but it may be pretty safely inferred that he looked into
the Journals of Lewis and Clarke, that he used Long, and perhaps saw
Mackenzie.[44] From these he learned of the wild horses, the buffalo
herds, the prairie dogs, flocks of migratory birds, prairie fires,
and mounted Pawnee, Tetons, Konzas, Omahas, and Osages that were to
be found on these endless plains. Among these he placed a squatter
from Kentucky, treking with his family and brother-in-law by prairie
schooner across the Nebraska prairie.[45] As Cooper knew nothing of the
life at first hand he was obliged to draw upon his imagination more
largely than heretofore. This he did as easily in Paris where he was at
the time residing as he might have done at home in New York. As usual
he reintroduced many of his characters from his preceding work. Hawkeye
reappeared as the aged trapper, given somewhat more to moralizing.[46]
Mahtoree was a slightly milder Magua mounted on horseback. The Pawnee
Hard Heart was another Uncas, and the psalmist became a pedant in
search of genus and species. The lovers were already married and were
kept in the background. The “pursuit-rescue” device to advance the
plot was continued but was employed with less vigor. In every way the
tone of the story is a more subdued one. Only an assault by Indians, a
stampede by buffalo, the prairie fire, and the consternation over the
treachery of the brother-in-law disturb the author’s brooding over the
epic-vastness of the plains.

Whatever Cooper may have owed to Scott at the beginning of his
career, he owed little to him now. His poetical rendering of the
prairie landscape with its elemental figures was a far cry from the
landscapes of Scott in the style of Mrs. Radcliffe and from his
treatment of characters. Perhaps the greatest change of all was in
Cooper’s central figure, the squatter. Instead of making him heroic,
Cooper showed him untroubled by vision, restless to shake off the
restraints of law and society. His wife, “a shabby, inarticulate
prairie Hecuba,” was Cooper’s first attempt to depict the wife or
mother, and has remained, with Ruth in _The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_, his
most noteworthy portrait of a woman. Although Cooper’s story went back
but twenty-three years, its manners were those of a time and condition
remote from his own. Constructed as it was from historical sources it
has further qualification for inclusion here. Its poetic rendering
of the atmosphere of that time and place has given an effective if
not accurate idea of the prairie, an idea which Easterners have until
recently retained.

Cooper’s next novel, _The Red Rover_ (1828), was perhaps his best
sea tale but it was not historical, all details having been invented
“without looking for the smallest aid from traditions or facts.” Hard
upon it came another Indian tale, _The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_ (1829).
In this novel Cooper turned aside from his Leatherstocking series,
for such his Indian tales had come to be, to the red man’s last stand
against his white opponent in New England in the seventeenth century.
Some of his imitators,[47] Miss Child, Mrs. Cheney, and Miss Sedgwick,
had directed attention to early New England life, and Cooper now turned
in the same direction, selecting the period of King Philip’s war as the
basis for his novel of Puritan life. The account of Eunice Williams’s
Indian captivity at Deerfield had become classic, and Increase Mather
and Hubbard had each given his narrative of the Indian war with the
bias of those who knew the “heathen” chiefly as an enemy. Irving’s
short tale, _Philip of Pokanoket_ (1814) had served as a corrective
to this legend. The episode of Goffe, the regicide, had been treated
by Stiles in his _History of the Judges_. In fiction, James McHenry,
one of Cooper’s earliest imitators, had dealt with Goffe in a Gothic
romance, _The Spectre of the Forest_ (1823). Scott in his _Peveril
of the Peak_ (1823), had called attention to it.[48] As a national
romancer, Cooper doubtless felt it incumbent upon him to make yet
another excursion into New England material.

In the arrangement of his story, Cooper reversed his usual plan, by
making the first half almost wholly fictitious, and putting into
the last half the historical material concerning Goffe, and the
extermination of Philip’s Indian cohorts. The leading episode of the
first volume, an Indian assault upon a settler’s block-house, was
probably suggested by the analogous attack on the feudal castle in
_Ivanhoe_. Cooper found it difficult to supply a central character as
the Puritans were to him uncongenial. In Captain Heathcote he created
a man of piety, forced to the Connecticut frontier by disagreeable and
petty religious squabbles. The story deals with his domestic life, his
constant fear of attack, and the final assault of Indians who destroyed
his home and kidnapped his daughter. It also treats of a general
renewal of hostilities after an interval of several years during which
American enterprize built up the village of Hartford; of the timely
warning by the mysterious stranger, resulting in the overthrow of
Philip; and of the restitution of the wept-for daughter who clings
to her Indian mate. For the historical background Cooper selected,
probably from Trumbull,[49] a few items regarding the early settlement
of Hartford in 1635, which he used for the openings of his volumes; and
then, omitting the early years of the war as unsuited to his purpose,
selected for the dramatic climax the final hounding and defeat of
Canonchet in 1675. A mysterious stranger, introduced as Submission,
is employed in the _dénouement_ to warn the villagers of the final
assault in which he meets his death. The reader of _The Spy_ and _The
Pilot_, already acquainted with Cooper’s _method_ of introducing
historical characters, had no difficulty in recognizing Goffe, the
regicide.

As an historical novel, _The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_ was a failure.
Cooper was too much a victim of his early bigoted training to
enter with sympathy into the life of the Puritans. Their religious
fanaticism combined with worldly discretion in exploiting the natives
he illustrated repeatedly. The head and front of their offending he
attributed to their hypocritical pastor, the Reverend Meek Wolfe, who
may or may not have been intended as a caricature of Cotton Mather.
On this incapacity of Cooper’s to depict the founders of New England,
Professor Lounsbury has said: “Paradoxical as the assertion may seem,
he was too much like the Puritans to do them justice;”[50] which
Professor Erskine has wisely corrected by adding,[51] “In so far as
Puritanism coincided with his nature, he portrayed it admirably in this
novel; he lets the reader see the practical vigor, the exalted piety,
and the domestic affection of Mark Heathcote and his comrades, for
these virtues he can recognize, as he could recognize the common piety
and the common sense of _The Pilgrim’s Progress_. But the mastering
vision that burns like flame in the Puritan temper, impelling it to
strenuous action, was entirely hidden to Cooper, if we can judge by
his writings....” What further contributed to its failure, and is not
so apparent unless approached from the standpoint of the historical
novel is Cooper’s infelicity in dealing with manners so remote in
time. What people wore, apart from broadswords, he failed to mention.
His Wampanoags were fundamentally not different from the Hurons he
presented in _The Last of the Mohicans_. As in no previous book he
frequently lapsed into a strained circumlocutory style that appears to
have been meant for the picturesque language of old romance.[52] The
braggadocio with which the second volume, written in Paris, opened,
together with the ill-temper displayed toward the Puritan type, was to
bring Cooper into disfavor at home and abroad. As the next decade of
his work was controversial, or upon European subjects, this chapter
may well come to a close here, deferring the discussion of Cooper’s
later, regional novels until some other time.

In the decade from 1821 to 1831--his most fruitful period--Cooper was
more consistently an historical novelist than has been recognized.
In _The Spy_ he represented more fairly than contemporary historians
the actual nature of the Revolutionary conflict. _The Pioneers_
immortalized the passing of the frontier, while _The Pilot_ was our
first historical novel of the sea. _Lionel Lincoln_ was an earnest of
national romance, to which he returned in _The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_.
In _The Last of the Mohicans_ he set down memorably the passing of the
first American. America was his theme, nothing more, nothing less. For
this task he lacked the historical acumen of Scott. Of American history
in general and of New York history, in particular, he had a tolerable
understanding. His life had fortunately been sufficiently varied and
representative not to necessitate getting up his local coloring with
infinite toil. In one or two cases--so rapid were social changes--he
could depend on aged eye-witnesses for a reasonably accurate idea of a
former day.

His American predecessors taught him practically nothing. From Scott
he learned the general formula for his work. Like him he turned to
native scene as the groundwork for his romance. From him, also, he
learned to give larger place to romantic theme than to restoration of
the past. From him he borrowed the ultraromantic hero and most of the
conventional types of character that he repeated with little variation
in successive novels.

But all this was at the beginning. Once started he was less influenced
by foreign authors and subjects than any of his contemporaries. In
his first book he substituted for lairds, a pedlar, and in place of
a castle he used the Wharton farm-house. Save for his delineation of
certain types, his second book was completely indigenous. In his third,
he outdid the Scotchman himself in giving the very life of the sea.
The Gothic tradition which ran through much of Scott, Cooper retained
only in _Lionel Lincoln_, finding a more rational substitute in the
terror inspired by the Indians; and, in the mystery of the sea and the
wilderness, a new source of awe. Because he was not steeped in history
and because America’s brief existence did not make it necessary to
delve into antiquity, he substituted adventure for archaism. He showed
that “ivied walls, time-worn castles and gloomy dungeons, were not
necessary to make a land of romance; that the war of the revolution
rivalled, in romantic interest, the war of the crusaders; that the
Indian warrior equally with the turbaned Saracen, was the theme of
the romancer; and that heroes need not always be clad in iron mail,
nor heroines have only knightly lovers sighing at their feet, or
breaking lances and heads to attest their devotion.”[53] His was the
romantic tale of adventure. That is not to say, however, that “his
invention was not without a solid basis; he is not to be neglected as
an historian.... No one fixed the current heroic traditions of his day
more firmly to actual places.”[54]

Cooper was prolix, as Scott was prolix, but that, it has been said, was
a secret of his illusion. In technical faults Cooper’s work abounded;
what he enjoyed was to walk cross-country, and little he cared whether
his boots were polished or no. At its best his style had the rapid
motion and color so much needed in the historical novel of action.
Naturally a fighter, he could give his story the fire and life which
such a novel should have. He wrote far better than was required of him.

While he was not the historical novelist that Scott was, he was Scott’s
most influential successor, and as Thackeray said, his country deserves
well of him. For the epitome in fiction of early American life one
goes not to Irving or Hawthorne but to Cooper. His representation of
it as the conquest of nature by the pioneer has been considered so
characteristic that the historical novel as he conceived it dominated
the writing of American fiction practically up to the Civil War.



VITA


The author of this dissertation, Ernest E. Leisy, was born on a farm
near Mound Ridge, Kansas, December 22, 1887. He was graduated from
the two-year course of the Mound Ridge High School in 1906, taught
public school the following year, attended Bethel College Academy at
Newton, Kansas, from which he was graduated in 1909, taught public
school in 1910–11, attended the University of Kansas, receiving
his bachelor’s degree from this institution in 1913. He received a
University Scholarship at Harvard where he did graduate work in English
in 1913–14. From 1914 to 1918 he was Professor of English at Bethel
College, Newton, Kansas, taking out one year, however, for graduate
work in English at the University of Chicago, from which institution
he received his Master’s degree. Since 1918 he has been an Instructor
in English at the University of Illinois, devoting his spare time to
study toward the doctor’s degree. He has published reviews in several
journals and a short article in _Modern Language Notes_, but nothing of
importance.



FOOTNOTES


[1] Any discussion of Cooper must go back to Lounsbury, T. R. _James
Fenimore Cooper_, American Men of Letters series, Boston, 1883. W. B.
Clymer’s _Cooper_ is mainly an abridgment of Lounsbury. _James Fenimore
Cooper_ (1913) by Mary E. Philips supplies anecdotal information and
pictures.

[2] _Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper._ Edited by his Grandson,
James Fenimore Cooper. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1922.

[3] Brownell, W. C. _American Prose Masters_, New York, 1909, p. 18.

[4] How little encouragement was held out is best related by himself:
“So little was expected from the publication of an original work of
this description, at the time that it was written, that the first
volume of _The Spy_ was actually printed several months before the
author felt a sufficient inducement to write a line of the second....
As the second volume was slowly printing, from manuscript that was
barely dry when it went into the compositor’s hands, the publisher
intimated that the work might grow to a length that would consume
the profits. To set his mind at rest, the last chapter was actually
written, printed, and paged, several weeks before the chapters which
preceded it were even thought of.”

[5] Loshe, L. D. _The Early American Novel_, New York, 1907, pp. 83–84.

[6] See Riverside edition, p. 21. “The recent fate of Andre has created
much irritation on both sides.” Cf. also pp. 68, 208, 298, 301.

[7] Brownell, W. C. _op. cit._, p. 14.

[8] Van Doren, Carl, _op. cit._, p. 28.

[9] See Fisher, Sidney G. _The Legendary and Myth-Making Process in
Histories of the American Revolution_; Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Soc., Vol. LI, No. 204, April–June, 1912. See also
references in footnote 29, page 27 of this thesis.

[10] Van Doren, Carl, _op. cit._, p. 15.

[11] For the attitude of English critics toward American writings see
Cairns, W. B. _British Criticisms of American Writings, 1815–1833_,
University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 14.
Madison, 1922.

[12] Erskine, John, _op. cit._, p. 65.

[13] _The Pioneers_ (Houghton Mifflin ed.). Introduction, xxxiii,
states Cooper’s intention to generalize; it further states his theory
of fiction: “Rigid adhesion to truth, an indispensable requisite in
history and travels, destroys the charm of fiction; for all that is
necessary to be conveyed to the mind by the latter had better be done
by delineations of principles, and of characters in their classes, than
by a too fastidious attention to originals.”

[14] Richard Jones, a hanger-on, who conceals his dependent state by a
kind of horse-play raillery of his patron and occasionally mixes toddy
evidently was taken over from the bachelor in _Bracebridge Hall_.

[15] Van Doren, _op. cit._, p. 30.

[16] _Introduction_, xxxvii, note: “Though forests still crown the
mountains of Otsego, the bear, the wolf, and the panther are nearly
strangers to them.” See also p. 35.

[17] Introduction to _The Pioneers_, i.

[18] That this was already realized may be seen from the review in _The
North American Review_, 15:250.

[19] _Portifolio_ 15 (1823) 230: “Natty Bumppo, ... we think, has been
modelled from the effigies of old Daniel Boone, who abandoned the
society of his kindred and built a hut among the Indians; and persisted
in moving further into the interior as civilization invaded his wild
domains.... It might indeed be called _historical_; for the historian
can scarcely find a more just and vivid delineation of the first
settlements of our wilderness.”

[20] See Chapter V.

[21] Not only did he write five sea novels, a _History of the Navy_,
and articles about the navy, but even in his land novels sailors were
frequently introduced, and _The Prairie_, for example, is viewed as a
sea of sand upon which the prairie schooners sail. _The Pathfinder_
makes use of his experiences upon Lake Ontario.

[22] Introduction to _The Pilot_, xv.

[23] _Atlantic Monthly_, 100:337.

[24] Conrad, Joseph. _Notes on Life and Letters_ (1921), p. 78. The
entire article, “Tales of the Sea,” should be read for its tribute to
Cooper’s insight into the poetry of the sea.

[25] _North American Review_, 1824:314, “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.”

[26] Introduction, xxii.

[27] Erskine, _op. cit._, p. 71. As early as 1800 there had appeared
_The Life and History of Paul Jones, the English Corsair_. See Seitz,
Don C. _Paul Jones, a complete bibliography_. New York (1917).

[28] How much this book has been neglected may be inferred from the
fact that Lounsbury gives it but two paragraphs: Erskine cuts these
down to one, and others are content with one condemnatory sentence.

[29] Lounsbury, T. R. _op. cit._, p. 49.

[30] Van Doren, _op. cit._, p. 32.

[31] _Southern Literary Messenger_, 1838:375, speaks of _Lionel
Lincoln’s_ popularity as unprecedented. “It was this production that
created in Boston and throughout New England, a popularity for Mr.
Cooper’s works, at one period so great, as to become among novel
readers, almost a mania.” Cf. _U. S. Literary Gazette_ I:340; _North
American Review_ 23:154.

[32] Introduction to _The Last of the Mohicans_, p. xviii. How
seriously the subject took hold of Cooper his daughter elsewhere
records: In her childhood there was nearly always an Indian book on her
father’s table.

[33] _North American Review_, 26:373.

[34] Preface to _The Deerslayer_.

[35] See Appendix C.

[36] _Last of the Mohicans_, Riverside ed., p. 133.

[37] _The Nation_, 112:255.

[38] _Roundabout Papers._

[39] Erskine, pp. 80–81. This view is suggested by Cooper’s own note to
his text, Riverside ed., p. 4.

[40] Erskine, p. 81. “A beautiful conception of old-world grace and
courtliness, which Cooper must have drawn with affection,” Erskine
remarks, “yet with all of Montcalm’s adroitness, his management of the
Indians and his tact in treating with a conquered foe--the reader is
made to feel the moral slipperiness which the hearty Englishman resents
with a national distrust of French traditional perfidy.”

[41] Riverside ed. _Last of the Mohicans_, pp. 211–12. Cooper’s only
comment that I can find on the relation of the sister muses.

[42] Dwight, Timothy. _Travels in New England and New York_ (1821),
III, 362–376. After stating that Montcalm made no reasonable effort to
check the Indians, he emphasizes the timidity and imbecility of Webb
who lay at Fort Edward with 6,000 men, doing nothing. Dwight narrates
as from Captain Noble, who was present, that when Sir William Johnson
would gather volunteers from Webb’s garrison to proceed to Munroe’s
assistance, Webb forbade it. Cooper’s rendering of the massacre is
sharply criticized by Martin in his _Montcalm en Canada_, chaps. 4 and
5. Cf. also Rameau, _La France aux Colonies_, II, p. 306; _N. H. Prov.
Papers_, VI, 604, 605, and Stone, W. L. _Life and Times of Johnson_.

[43] Phillips, Mary E. _James Fenimore Cooper_ (1912), p. 129.

[44] Introduction to _Last of the Mohicans_, p. xviii.

[45] The analogy which the spectacle afforded in Cooper’s mind to the
conquest of Canaan, has not been commented upon, but a case can be
made for it from the biblical names he for the first time applied to
nearly all the characters; from the bee-hunter in his land of honey,
the encounters with the “Ishmaelites of the plains,” the Sioux, the
stampede of the buffalo furnishing the terror of wild beasts, and the
problem of the Red Sea transformed into that of prairie fire, with
Leatherstocking the Moses to show how to circumvent this difficulty.

[46] This was fitting for an old man. Thackeray pronounced
Leatherstocking the greatest character created in Fiction since the
_Don Quixote_ of Cervantes and he thought the death scene in _The
Prairie_, in which the old trapper said “Here!” as surpassing anything
he had met in English literature. Phillips, 1621. Thackeray imitated
this scene in Colonel Newcome’s “Adsum!”

[47] For a full discussion of these, see next chapter.

[48] Like many other romantic stories, it rests upon insufficient
authority, Cf. Fiske, John. _The Beginnings of New England_, p.
218; “The story rests chiefly upon the statements of Hutchinson, an
extremely careful and judicious writer.... Goffe kept a diary which
came into Hutchinson’s possession.... A paramount regard for Goffe’s
personal safety would quite account for the studied silence of
contemporary writers like Hubbard and Increase Mather.”

[49] _The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_, Preface. (Houghton Mifflin ed.), p.
xi.

[50] Lounsbury, _op. cit._, p. 75.

[51] Erskine, _op. cit._, p. 92.

[52] For example, “the kine had yielded their nightly tribute,” used
four times. “Smoke” is called “the vapor that rolled upward;” a child
is always spoken of as “the cherub,” etc.

[53] _Southern Literary Messenger_, 1838:373.

[54] _The Cambridge History of American Literature_, I, p. 306.



Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.

Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of the pages that referenced them,
have been collected and placed at the end of the book.

The illustration on the Title page is the university press's logo.




*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The American historical novel (on American themes) before 1860 : the early novels of James Fenimore Cooper (1821-1831)" ***

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