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,

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:

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):

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 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:

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:

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”:

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.