W. C. Bryant's Discourse on the Life, Genius, and Writings of James
Fenimore Cooper,
Delivered at Metropolitan Hall, N.Y., February 25, 1852.
It is now somewhat more than a year, since the friends of JAMES FENIMORE
COOPER, in this city; were planning to give a public dinner to his honor.
It was intended as an expression both of the regard they bore him
personally, and of the pride they took in the glory his writings had
reflected on the American name. We thought of what we should say in his
hearing; in what terms, worthy of him and of us, we should speak of the
esteem in which we held him, and of the interest we felt in a fame which
had already penetrated to the remotest nook of the earth inhabited by
civilized man.
To-day we assemble for a sadder purpose: to pay to the dead some part of
the honors then intended for the living. We bring our offering, but he is
not here who should receive it; in his stead are vacancy and silence;
there is no eye to brighten at our words, and no voice to answer. "It is
an empty office that we perform," said Virgil, in his melodious verses,
when commemorating the virtues of the young Marcellus, and bidding flowers
be strewn, with full hands, over his early grave. We might apply the
expression to the present occasion, but it would be true in part only. We
can no longer do anything for him who is departed, but we may do what will
not be without fruit to those who remain. It is good to occupy our
thoughts with the example of great talents in conjunction with great
virtues. His genius has passed away with him; but we may learn, from the
history of his life, to employ the faculties we possess with useful
activity and noble aims; we may copy his magnanimous frankness, his
disdain of everything that wears the faintest semblance of deceit, his
refusal to comply with current abuses, and the courage with which, on all
occasions, he asserted what he deemed truth, and combated what he thought
error.
The circumstances of Cooper's early life were remarkably suited to confirm
the natural hardihood and manliness of his character, and to call forth
and exercise that extraordinary power of observation, which accumulated
the materials afterwards wielded and shaped by his genius. His father,
while an inhabitant of Burlington, in New Jersey, on the pleasant banks of
the Delaware, was the owner of large possessions on the borders of the
Otsego Lake in our own state, and here, in the newly-cleared fields, he
built, in 1786, the first house in Cooperstown. To this home, Cooper, who
was born in Burlington, in the year 1789, was conveyed in his infancy, and
here, as he informs us in his preface to the _Pioneers_, his first
impressions of the external world were obtained. Here he passed his
childhood, with the vast forest around him, stretching up the mountains
that overlook the lake, and far beyond, in a region where the Indian yet
roamed, and the white hunter, half Indian in his dress and mode of life,
sought his game,--a region in which the bear and the wolf were yet hunted,
and the panther, more formidable than either, lurked in the thickets, and
tales of wanderings in the wilderness, and encounters with these fierce
animals, beguiled the length of the winter nights. Of this place, Cooper,
although early removed from it to pursue his studies, was an occasional
resident throughout his life, and here his last years were wholly passed.
At the age of thirteen he was sent to Yale College, where, notwithstanding
his extreme youth,--for, with the exception of the poet Hillhouse, he was
the youngest of his class, and Hillhouse was afterwards withdrawn,--his
progress in his studies is said to have been honorable to his talents. He
left the college, after a residence of three years, and became a
midshipman in the United States navy. Six years he followed the sea, and
there yet wanders, among those who are fond of literary anecdote, a story
of the young sailor who, in the streets of one of the English ports,
attracted the curiosity of the crowd by explaining to his companions a
Latin motto in some public place. That during this period he made himself
master of the knowledge and the imagery which he afterwards employed to so
much advantage in his romances of the sea, the finest ever written, is a
common and obvious remark; but it has not been so far as I know, observed
that from the discipline of a seaman's life he may have derived much of
his readiness and fertility of invention, much of his skill in surrounding
the personages of his novels with imaginary perils, and rescuing them by
probable expedients. Of all pursuits, the life of a sailor is that which
familiarizes men to danger in its most fearful shapes, most cultivates
presence of mind, and most effectually calls forth the resources of a
prompt and fearless dexterity by which imminent evil is avoided.
In 1811, Cooper, having resigned his post as midshipman, began the year by
marrying Miss Delaney, sister of the present bishop; of the diocese of
Western New York, and entered upon a domestic life happily passed to its
close. He went to live at Mamaroneck, in the county of Westchester, and
while here he wrote and published the first of his novels, entitled
_Precaution_. Concerning the occasion of writing this work, it is related,
that once, as he was reading an English novel to Mrs. Cooper, who has,
within a short time past, been laid in the grave beside her illustrious
husband, and of whom we may now say, that her goodness was no less eminent
than his genius, he suddenly laid down the book, and said, "I believe I
could write a better myself." Almost immediately he composed a chapter of
a projected work of fiction, and read it to the same friendly judge, who
encouraged him to finish it, and when it was completed, suggested its
publication. Of this he had at the time no intention, but he was at length
induced to submit the manuscript to the examination of the late Charles
Wilkes, of this city, in whose literary opinions he had great confidence.
Mr. Wilkes advised that it should be published, and to these circumstances
we owe it that Cooper became an author.
I confess I have merely dipped into this work. The experiment was made
with the first edition, deformed by a strange punctuation--a profusion of
commas, and other pauses, which puzzled and repelled me. Its author, many
years afterwards, revised and republished it, correcting this fault, and
some faults of style also, so that to a casual inspection it appeared
almost another work. It was a professed delineation of English manners,
though the author had then seen nothing of English society. It had,
however, the honor of being adopted by the country whose manners it
described, and, being early republished in Great Britain, passed from the
first for an English novel. I am not unwilling to believe what is said of
it, that it contained a promise of the powers which its author afterwards
put forth.
Thirty years ago, in the year 1821, and in the thirty-second of his life,
Cooper published the first of the works by which he will be known to
posterity, the _Spy_. It took the reading world by a kind of surprise; its
merit was acknowledged by a rapid sale; the public read with eagerness and
the critics wondered. Many withheld their commendations on account of
defects in the plot or blemishes in the composition, arising from want of
practice, and some waited till they could hear the judgment of European
readers. Yet there were not wanting critics in this country, of whose
good opinion any author in any part of the world might be proud, who spoke
of it in terms it deserved. "Are you not delighted," wrote a literary
friend to me, who has since risen to high distinction as a writer, both in
verse and in prose, "are you not delighted with the _Spy_, as a work of
infinite spirit and genius?" In that word genius lay the explanation of
the hold which the work had taken on the minds of men. What it had of
excellence was peculiar and unborrowed; its pictures of life, whether in
repose or activity, were drawn, with broad lights and shadows, immediately
from living originals in nature or in his own imagination. To him,
whatever he described was true; it was made a reality to him by the
strength with which he conceived it. His power in the delineation of
character was shown in the principal personage of his story, Harvey Birch,
on whom, though he has chosen to employ him in the ignoble office of a
spy, and endowed him with the qualities necessary to his
profession,--extreme circumspection, fertility in stratagem, and the art
of concealing his real character--qualities which, in conjunction with
selfishness and greediness, make the scoundrel, he has bestowed the
virtues of generosity, magnanimity, an intense love of country, a fidelity
not to be corrupted, and a disinterestedness beyond temptation. Out of
this combination of qualities he has wrought a character which is a
favorite in all nations, and with all classes of mankind.
It is said that if you cast a pebble into the ocean, at the mouth of our
harbor, the vibration made in the water passes gradually on till it
strikes the icy barriers of the deep at the south pole. The spread of
Cooper's reputation is not confined within narrower limits. The _Spy_ is
read in all the written dialects of Europe, and in some of those of Asia.
The French, immediately after its first appearance, gave it to the
multitudes who read their far-diffused language, and placed it among the
first works of its class. It was rendered into Castilian, and passed into
the hands of those who dwell under the beams of the Southern Cross. At
length it passed the eastern frontier of Europe, and the latest record I
have seen of its progress towards absolute universality, is contained in a
statement of the _International Magazine_, derived, I presume, from its
author, that in 1847 it was published in a Persian translation at Ispahan.
Before this time, I doubt not, they are reading it in some of the
languages of Hindostan, and, if the Chinese ever translated anything, it
would be in the hands of the many millions who inhabit the far Cathay.
I have spoken of the hesitation which American critics felt in admitting
the merits of the _Spy_, on account of crudities in the plot or the
composition, some of which, no doubt, really existed. An exception must be
made in favor of the _Port Folio_, which, in a notice written by Mrs.
Sarah Hall, mother of the editor of that periodical, and author of
_Conversations on the Bible_, gave the work a cordial welcome; and Cooper,
as I am informed, never forgot this act of timely and ready kindness.
It was perhaps favorable to the immediate success of the _Spy_, that
Cooper had few American authors to divide with him the public attention.
That crowd of clever men and women who now write for the magazines, who
send out volumes of essays, sketches, and poems, and who supply the press
with novels, biographies, and historical works, were then, for the most
part, either stammering their lessons in the schools, or yet unborn. Yet
it is worthy of note, that just about the time that the _Spy_ made its
appearance, the dawn of what we now call our literature was just breaking.
The concluding number of Dana's _Idle Man_, a work neglected at first, but
now numbered among the best things of the kind in our language, was issued
in the same month. The _Sketch Book_ was then just completed; the world
was admiring it, and its author was meditating _Bracebridge Hall_. Miss
Sedgwick, about the same time, made her first essay in that charming
series of novels of domestic life in New England, which have gained her so
high a reputation. Percival, now unhappily silent, had just put to press a
volume of poems. I have a copy of an edition of Hallock's _Fanny_,
published in the same year; the poem of _Yamoyden,_ by Eastburn and Sands,
appeared almost simultaneously with it. Livingston was putting the
finishing hand to his _Report on the Penal Code of Louisiana,_ a work
written with such grave, persuasive eloquence, that it belongs as much to
our literature as to our jurisprudence. Other contemporaneous American
works there were, now less read. Paul Allen's poem of _Noah_ was just laid
on the counters of the booksellers. Arden published, at the same time, in
this city, a translation of Ovid's _Tristia_, in heroic verse, in which
the complaints of the effeminate Roman poet were rendered with great
fidelity to the original, and sometimes not without beauty. If I may speak
of myself, it was in that year that I timidly intrusted to the winds and
waves of public opinion a small cargo of my own--a poem entitled _The
Ages,_ and half a dozen shorter ones, in a thin duodecimo volume, printed
at Cambridge.
We had, at the same time, works of elegant literature, fresh from the
press of Great Britain, which are still read and admired. Barry Cornwall,
then a young suitor for fame, published in the same year his _Marcia
Colonna_; Byron, in the full strength and fertility of his genius, gave
the readers of English his tragedy of _Marino Faliero_, and was in the
midst of his spirited controversy with Bowles concerning the poetry of
Pope. The _Spy_ had to sustain a comparison with Scott's _Antiquary_,
published simultaneously with it, and with Lockhart's _Valerius_, which
seems to me one of the most remarkable works of fiction ever composed.
In 1823, and in his thirty-fourth year, Cooper brought out his novel of
the _Pioneers_, the scene of which was laid on the borders of his: own
beautiful lake. In a recent survey of Mr; Cooper's works, by one of his
admirers, it is intimated that the reputation of this work may have been,
in some degree factitious. I cannot think so; I cannot see how such a work
could fail of becoming, sooner or later, a favorite. It was several years
after its first appearance that I read the _Pioneers_, and I read it with
a delighted astonishment. Here, said I to myself, is the poet of rural
life in this country--our Hesiod, our Theocritus, except that he writes
without the restraint of numbers, and is a greater poet than they. In the
_Pioneers_, as in a moving picture, are made to pass before us the hardy
occupations and spirited, amusements of a prosperous settlement, in, a
fertile region, encompassed for leagues around with the primeval
wilderness of woods. The seasons in their different aspects, bringing with
them, their different employments; forests falling before the axe; the
cheerful population, with the first mild; day of spring, engaged in the
sugar orchards; the chase of the deer through the deep woods, and into the
lake; turkey-shooting, during the Christmas holidays, in which the Indian
marksman vied for the prize of skill with the white man; swift sleigh
rides under the bright winter sun, and, perilous encounters with wild
animals in the forests; these, and other scenes of rural life, drawn, as
Cooper knew how to draw them, in the bright and healthful coloring of
which he was master are interwoven with a regular narrative of human
fortunes, not unskilfully constructed; and how could such a work be
otherwise than popular?
In the _Pioneers_, Leatherstocking; is first introduced--a philosopher of
the woods, ignorant of books, but instructed in all that nature, without
the aid of, science, could reveal to the man of quick senses and inquiring
intellect, whose life has been passed under the open sky, and in
companionship with a race whose animal perceptions are the acutest and
most cultivated of which there is any example. But Leatherstocking has
higher qualities; in him there is a genial blending of the gentlest
virtues of the civilized man with the better nature of the aboriginal
tribes; all that in them is noble, generous, and ideal, is adopted into
his own kindly character, and all that is evil is rejected. But why should
I attempt to analyse a character so familiar? Leatherstocking is
acknowledged, on all hands, to be one of the noblest, as well as most
striking and original creations of fiction. In some of his subsequent
novels, Cooper--for he had not yet Attained to the full maturity of his
powers--heightened and ennobled his first conception of the character,
but in the _Pioneers_ it dazzled the world with the splendor of novelty;
His next work was the _Pilot_, in which he showed how, from the
vicissitudes of a life at sea, its perils and escapes, from the beauty and
terrors of the great deep, from the working of a vessel on a long voyage,
and from the frank, brave, and generous but peculiar character of the
seaman, may be drawn materials of romance by which the minds of men may be
as deeply moved as by anything in the power of romance to present. In this
walk, Cooper has had many disciples but no rival. All who have since
written romances of the sea have been but travellers in a country of which
he was the great discoverer; and none of them all seemed to have loved a
ship as Cooper loved it, or have been able so strongly to interest all
classes of readers in its fortunes. Among other personages drawn with
great strength in the _Pilot_, is the general favorite, Tom Coffin, the
thorough seaman with all the virtues and one or two of the infirmities of
his profession, superstitious, as seamen are apt to be, yet whose
superstitions strike us as but an irregular growth of his devout
recognition of the Power who holds the ocean in the hollow of his hand;
true-hearted, gentle, full of resources, collected in danger, and at last
calmly perishing at the post of duty, with the vessel he has long guided,
by what I may call a great and magnanimous death. His rougher and coarser
companion, Boltrope, is drawn with scarcely less skill, and with a no less
vigorous hand.
The _Pioneers_ is not Cooper's best tale of the American forest, nor, the
_Pilot_, perhaps, in all respects, his best tale of the sea; yet, if he
had ceased to write here, the measure of his fame would possibly have been
scarcely less ample than it now is. Neither of them is far below the best
of his productions, and in them appear the two most remarkable creations
of his imagination--two of the most remarkable characters in all fiction.
It was about this time that my acquaintance with Cooper began, an
acquaintance of more than a quarter of a century, in which his deportment
towards me was that of unvaried kindness. He then resided a considerable
part of the year in this city, and here he had founded a weekly club, to
which many of the most distinguished men of the place belonged. Of the
members who have since passed away, were Chancellor Kent, the jurist;
Wiley the intelligent and liberal bookseller; Henry D. Sedgwick, always
active in schemes of benevolence; Jarvis, the painter, a man of infinite
humor, whose jests awoke inextinguishable laughter; De Kay, the
naturalist; Sands, the poet; Jacob Harvey whose genial memory is cherished
by many friends. Of those who are yet living was Morse, the inventor of
the electric telegraph; Durand, then, one of the first of engravers, and
now no less illustrious as a painter; Henry James Anderson, whose
acquirements might awaken the envy of the ripest scholars of the old
world; Halleck, the poet and wit; Verplanck, who has given the world the
best edition of Shakspeare for general readers; Dr. King, now at the head
of Columbia College, and his two immediate predecessors in that office. I
might enlarge the list with many other names of no less distinction. The
army and navy contributed their proportion of members, whose names are on
record in our national history. Cooper when in town was always present,
and I remember being struck with the inexhaustible vivacity of his
conversation and the minuteness of his knowledge, in everything which
depended upon acuteness of observation and exactness of recollection. I
remember, too, being somewhat startled, coming as I did from the seclusion
of a country life, with a certain emphatic frankness in his manner, which,
however, I came at last to like and to admire. The club met in the hotel
called Washington Hall, the site of which, is now occupied by part of the
circuit of Stewart's marble building.
_Lionel Lincoln_, which cannot be ranked among the successful productions
of Cooper, was published in 1825; and in the year following appeared the
_Last of the Mohicans_ which more than recovered the ground lost by its
predecessor. In this work, the construction of the narrative has signal
defects, but it is one of the triumphs of the author's genius that he
makes us unconscious of them while we read. It is only when we have had
time to awake from the intense interest in which he has held us by the
vivid reality of his narrative, and have begun to search for faults in
cold blood, that we are able to find them, In the _Last of the Mohicans,_
we have a bolder portraiture of. Leatherstocking than in the _Pioneers_.
This work was published in 1826, and in the same year Cooper sailed with
his family for Europe. He left New York as one of the vessels of war,
described in his romances of the sea, goes out of port, amidst the thunder
of a parting salute from the big guns on the batteries. A dinner was given
him just before his departure, attended by most of the distinguished men
of the city, at which Peter A. Jay presided, and Dr. King addressed him in
terms which some then thought too glowing, but which would now seem
sufficiently temperate, expressing the good wishes of his friends, and
dwelling on the satisfaction they promised themselves in possessing so
illustrious a representative of American literature in the old world.
Cooper was scarcely in France when he remembered his friends of the weekly
club, and sent frequent missives to be read at its meetings; but the club
missed its founder went into a decline, and not long afterwards quietly
expired.
The first of Cooper's novels published after leaving America: was the
_Prairie_, which appeared early in 1827, a work with the admirers of which
I wholly agree. I read it with a certain awe, an undefined sense of
sublimity, such as one experiences on entering, for the first time, upon
those immense grassy deserts from which the work takes its name. The
squatter and his family--that brawny old man and his large-limbed sons,
living in a sort of primitive and patriarchal barbarism, sluggish on
ordinary occasions, but terrible when roused, like the hurricane that
sweeps the grand but monotonous wilderness in which they dwell--seem a
natural growth of ancient fields of the West. Leatherstocking, a hunter in
the _Pioneers_, a warrior in the _Last of the Mohicans_, and now, in his
extreme old age, a trapper on the prairie, declined in strength, but
undecayed in intellect, and looking to the near close of his life, and a
grave under the long grass, as calmly as the laborer at sunset looks to
his evening slumber, is no less in harmony with the silent desert in which
he wanders. Equally so are the Indians, still his companions, copies of
the American savage somewhat idealized, but not the less a part of the
wild nature in which they have their haunts.
Before the year closed, Cooper had given the world another nautical tale,
the _Red Rover_, which, with many, is a greater favorite than the _Pilot_,
and with reason, perhaps, if we consider principally the incidents, which
are conducted and described with a greater mastery over the springs of
pity and terror.
It happened to Cooper while he was abroad, as it not unfrequently happens
to our countrymen, to hear the United States disadvantageously compared
with Europe. He had himself been a close observer of things both here and
in the old world, and was conscious of being able to refute the detractors
of his country in regard to many points. He published in 1828, after he
had been two years in Europe, a series of letters, entitled _Notions of
the Americans, by a Travelling Bachelor_, in which he gave a favorable
account of the working of our institutions, and vindicated his country
from various flippant and ill-natured misrepresentations of foreigners. It
is rather too measured in style, but is written from a mind full of the
subject, and from a memory wonderfully stored with particulars. Although
twenty-four years have elapsed since its publication, but little of the
vindication has become obsolete.
Cooper loved his country and was proud of her history and her
institutions, but it puzzles many that he should have appeared, at
different times, as her eulogist, and her censor. My friends, she is
worthy both of praise and of blame, and Cooper was not the man to shrink
from bestowing either, at what seemed to him the proper time. He defended
her from detractors abroad; he sought to save her from flatterers at home.
I will not say that he was in as good humor with his country when he
wrote _Home at Found_, as when he wrote his _Notions of the Americans_,
but this I will say that whether he commended or censured, he did it in
the sincerity of his heart, as a true American, and in the belief that it
would do good. His _Notions of the Americans_ were more likely to lessen
than to increase his popularity in Europe, inasmuch as they were put forth
without the slightest regard to European prejudices.
In 1829, he brought out the novel entitled the _Wept of Wishton-Wish_, one
of the few of his works which we now rarely hear mentioned. He was engaged
in the composition of a third nautical tale, which he afterwards published
under the name of the _Water-Witch,_ when the memorable revolution of the
Three Days of July broke out. He saw a government, ruling by fear and in
defiance of public opinion, overthrown in a few hours, with little
bloodshed; he saw the French nation, far from being intoxicated with their
new liberty, peacefully addressing themselves to the discussion of the
institutions under which they were to live. A work which Cooper afterwards
published, his _Residence in Europe_, gives the outline of a plan of
government for France furnished by him at that time, to La Fayette, with
whom he was in habits of close and daily intimacy. It was his idea to give
permanence to the new order of things by associating two strong parties in
its support, the friends of legitimacy and the republicans. He suggested
that Henry V. should be called to the hereditary throne of France, a youth
yet to be educated as the head of a free people, that the peerage should
be abolished, and a legislature of two chambers established, with a
constituency of at least a million and a half of electors; the senate to
be chosen by the general vote, as the representative of the entire nation,
and the members of the other house to be chosen by districts, as the
representatives of the local interests. To the middle ground of politics
so ostentatiously occupied by Louis Philippe at the beginning of his
reign, he predicted a brief duration, believing that it would speedily be
merged in despotism, or supplanted by the popular rule. His prophecy has
been fulfilled more amply than he could have imagined--fulfilled in both
its alternatives.
In one of the controversies of that time, Cooper bore a distinguished
part. The _Revue Britannique_, a periodical published in Paris, boldly
affirmed the government of the United States to be one of the most
expensive in the world, and its people among the most heavily taxed of
mankind. This assertion was supported with a certain show of proof, and
the writer affected to have established the conclusion that a republic
must necessarily be more expensive than a monarchy. The partisans of the
court were delighted with the reasoning of the article, and claimed a
triumph over our ancient friend La Fayette, who, during forty years, had
not ceased to hold up the government of the United States as the cheapest
in the world. At the suggestion of La Fayette, Cooper replied to this
attack upon his country in a letter which was translated into French, and,
together with, another from General Bertrand, for many years a resident in
America, was laid before the people of France.
These, two letters provoked a shower of rejoinders, in which, according to
Cooper, misstatements were mingled with scurrility. He commenced a series
of letters on the question in dispute, which were published in the
_National_, a daily sheet, and gave the first evidence of that
extraordinary acuteness in controversy which was no less characteristic of
his mind than the vigor of his imagination. The enemies of La Fayette
pressed into their service Mr. Leavitt Harris, of New Jersey, afterwards
our _chargé d'affaires_ at the court of France, but Cooper replied to Mr.
Harris in the _National_ of May 2d, 1832, closing a discussion in which he
had effectually silenced those who objected to our institutions on the
score of economy. Of these letters, which would form an important chapter
in political science, no entire copy, I have been told, is to be found in
this country.
One of the consequences of earnest controversy is almost invariably
personal ill-will. Cooper was told by one who held an official station
under the French government, that the part he had taken in this dispute
concerning taxation would neither be forgotten nor forgiven. The dislike
he had incurred in that quarter was strengthened by his novel of the
_Bravo_, published in the year 1831, while he was in the midst of his
quarrel with the aristocratic party. In that work, of which he has himself
justly said that it was thoroughly American in all that belonged to it,
his object was to show how institutions, professedly created to prevent
violence and wrong, become, when perverted from their natural destination,
the instruments of injustice; and how, in every system which makes power
the exclusive property of the strong, the weak are sure to be oppressed.
The work is written with all the vigor and spirit of his best novels; the
magnificent city of Venice, in which the scene of the story is laid,
stands continually before the imagination; and from time to time the
gorgeous ceremonies of the Venetian republic pass under our eyes, such as
the marriage of the Doge with the Adriatic, and the, contest of the
gondolas for the prize of speed. The Bravo himself and several of the
other characters are strongly conceived and distinguished, but the most
remarkable of them all is the spirited and generous-hearted daughter of
the jailer.
It has been said by some critics, who judge of Cooper by his failures,
that he had no skill in drawing female characters. By the same process,
it might, I suppose, be shown that Raphael was but an ordinary painter. It
must be admitted that when Cooper drew a lady of high breeding, he was apt
to pay too much attention to the formal part of her character, and to make
her a mere bundle of cold proprieties. But when he places his heroines in
some situation in life which leaves him nothing to do but to make them
natural and true, I know of nothing finer, nothing more attractive or more
individual than the portraitures he has given us.
_Figaro_, the wittiest of the French periodicals, and at that time on the
liberal side, commended the _Bravo_; the journals on the side of the
government censured it. _Figaro_ afterwards passed into the hands of the
aristocratic party, and Cooper became the object of its attacks. He was
not, however, a man to be driven from any purpose which he had formed,
either by flattery or abuse, and both were tried with equal ill success.
In 1832 he published his _Heidenmauer_, and in 1833 his _Headsman of
Berne_, both with a political design similar to that of the _Bravo_,
though neither of them takes the same high rank among his works.
In 1833, after a residence of seven years in different parts of Europe,
but mostly in France, Cooper returned to his native country. The welcome
which met him here was somewhat chilled by the effect of the attacks made
upon him in France, and remembering with what zeal, and at what sacrifice
of the universal acceptance which his works would otherwise have met, he
had maintained the cause of his country against the wits and orators of
the court party in France, we cannot wonder that he should have felt this
coldness as undeserved. He published, shortly after his arrival in this
country, _A Letter to his Countrymen_ in which he complained of the
censures cast upon him in the American newspapers, gave a history of the
part he had taken in exposing the misstatements of the _Révue
Britannique_, and warned his countrymen against the too common error of
resorting, with a blind deference, to foreign authorities, often swayed by
national or political prejudices, for our opinions of American authors.
Going beyond this topic, he examined and reprehended the habit of applying
to the interpretation of our own constitution maxims derived from the
practice of other governments, particularly that of Great Britain. The
importance of construing that instrument by its own principles, he
illustrated by considering several points in dispute between parties of
the day, on which he gave very decided opinions.
The principal effect of this pamphlet, as it seemed to me, was to awaken
in certain quarters a kind of resentment that a successful writer of
fiction should presume to give lessons in politics. I meddle not here with
the conclusions to which he arrived, though must be allowed to say that
they were stated and argued with great ability. In 1835 Cooper published
_The Monnikins_, a satirical work, partly with a political aim; and in the
same year appeared his _American Democrat_, a view of the civil and social
relations of the United States, discussing more gravely various topics
touched upon in the former work, and pointing out in what respects he
deemed the American people in their practice to have fallen short of the
excellence of their institutions.
He found time, however, for a more genial task--that of giving to the
world his observations on foreign countries. In 1836 appeared his
_Sketches of Switzerland_, a series of letters in four volumes, the second
part published about two months after the first, a delightful work,
written in a more fluent and flexible style than his _Notions of the
Americans_. The first part of _Gleanings in Europe,_ giving an account of
his residence in France, followed in the same year; and the second part of
the same work, containing his observations on England, was published in
April, 1837. In these works, forming a series of eight volumes, he relates
and describes with much of the same distinctness as in his novels; and his
remarks on the manners and institutions of the different countries, often
sagacious, and always peculiarly his own, derive, from their frequent
reference to contemporary events, an historical interest.
In 1838 appeared _Homeward Bound_ and _Home as Found_, two satirical
novels, in which Cooper held up to ridicule a certain class of conductors
of the newspaper press in America. These works had not the good fortune to
become popular. Cooper did not, and, because he was too deeply in earnest,
perhaps would not, infuse into his satirical works that gaiety without
which satire becomes wearisome. I believe, however, that if they had been
written by anybody else they would have met with more favor; but the world
knew that Cooper was able to give them something better, and would not be
satisfied with anything short of his best, Some childishly imagined that
because, in the two works I have just mentioned, a newspaper editor is
introduced, in whose character almost every possible vice of his
profession is made to find a place, Cooper intended an indiscriminate
attack upon the whole body of writers for the newspaper press, forgetting
that such a portraiture was a satire only on those to whom it bore a
likeness We have become less sensitive and more reasonable of late, and
the monthly periodicals make sport for their readers of the follies and
ignorance of the newspaper editors, without awakening the slightest
resentment; but Cooper led the way in this sort of discipline, and I
remember some instances of towering indignation at his audacity expressed
in the journals of that time.
The next year Cooper made his appearance before the public in a new
department of writing; his _Naval History of the United States_ was
brought out in two octavo volumes at Philadelphia, by Carey and Lea. In
writing his stories of the sea, his attention had been much turned to this
subject, and his mind filled with striking incidents from expeditions and
battles in which our naval commanders had been engaged. This made his task
the lighter; but he gathered his materials with great industry, and with a
conscientious attention to exactness, for he was not a man to take a fact
for granted, or allow imagination to usurp the place of inquiry He
digested our naval annals into a narrative, written with spirit it is
true, but with that air of sincere dealing which the reader willingly
takes as a pledge of its authenticity.
An abridgment of the work was afterwards prepared and published by the
author. The _Edinburgh Review_, in an article professing to examine the
statements both of Cooper's work and of _The History of the English Navy_,
written by Mr. James, a surgeon by profession, made a violent attack upon
the American historian. Unfortunately, it took James's narrative as its
sole guide, and followed it implicitly. Cooper replied in the _Democratic
Review_ for January, 1840, and by a masterly analysis of his statements,
convicting James of self-contradiction in almost every particular in which
he differed from himself, refuted both James and the reviewer. It was a
refutation which admitted of no rejoinder.
Scarce anything in Cooper's life was so remarkable, or so strikingly
illustrated his character, as his contest with the newspaper press. He
engaged in it after provocations, many and long endured, and prosecuted it
through years with great energy, perseverance, and practical dexterity,
till he was left master of the field. In what I am about to say of it, I
hope I shall not give offence to any one, as I shall speak without the
slightest malevolence towards those with whom he waged this controversy.
Over some of them, as over their renowned adversary, the grave has now
closed. Yet where shall the truth be spoken, if not beside the grave?
I have already alluded to the principal causes which provoked the
newspaper attacks upon Cooper. If he had never meddled with questions of
government on either side of the Atlantic, and never satirized the
newspaper press, I have little doubt that he would have been spared these
attacks. I cannot, however, ascribe them all, or even the greater part of
them, to personal malignity. One journal followed the example of another,
with little reflection, I think, in most cases, till it became a sort of
fashion, not merely to decry his works, but to arraign his motives.
It is related that, in 1832, while he was at Paris, an article was shown
him in an American newspaper, purporting to be a criticism on one of his
works, but reflecting with much asperity on his personal character. "I
care nothing," he is reported to have said, "for the criticism, but I am
not indifferent to the slander. If these attacks on my character should be
kept up five years after my return to America, I shall resort to the New
York courts for protection." He gave the newspaper press of this state the
full period of forbearance on which he had fixed, but finding that
forbearance seemed to encourage assault, he sought redress in the courts
of law.
When these litigations were first begun, I recollect it seemed to me that
Cooper had taken a step which would give him a great deal of trouble, and
effect but little good. I said to myself--
"Alas! Leviathan is not so tamed!"
As he proceeded, however, I saw that he had understood the matter better
than I. He put a hook into the nose of this huge monster, wallowing in his
inky pool and bespattering the passers-by; he dragged him to the land and
made him tractable. One suit followed another; one editor was sued, I
thinly half-a-dozen times; some of them found themselves under a second
indictment before the first was tried. In vindicating himself to his
reader, against the charge of publishing one libel, the angry journalist
often floundered into another. The occasions of these prosecutions seem to
have been always carefully considered, for Cooper was almost uniformly
successful in obtaining verdicts. In a letter of his, written in February,
1843, about five years, I think, from the commencement of the first
prosecutions, he says, "I have beaten every man I have sued, who has not
retracted his libels."
In one of these suits, commenced against the late William L. Stone of the
_Commercial Advertiser_, and referred to the arbitration of three
distinguished lawyers, he argued himself the question of the authenticity
of his account of the battle of Lake Erie, which was the matter in
dispute. I listened to his opening; it was clear, skilful, and persuasive,
but his closing argument was said to be splendidly eloquent. "I have heard
nothing like it," said a barrister to me, "since the days of Emmet."
Cooper behaved liberally towards his antagonists, so far as pecuniary
damages were concerned, though some of them wholly escaped their payment
by bankruptcy. After, I believe, about, six years of litigation, the
newspaper press gradually subsided into a pacific disposition towards its
adversary, and the contest closed with the account of pecuniary profit and
loss, so far as he was concerned, nearly balanced. The occasion of these
suits was far from honorable to those who provoked them, but the result
was I had almost said, creditable to all parties; to him, as the
courageous prosecutor, to the administration of justice in this country,
and to the docility of the newspaper press, which he had disciplined into
good manners.
It was while he was in the midst of these litigations, that he published,
in 1840, the _Pathfinder_. People had begun to think of him as a
controversialist, acute, keen, and persevering, occupied with his personal
wrongs and schemes of attack and defence. They were startled from this
estimate of his character by the moral duty of that glorious work--I must
so call it; by the vividness and force of its delineations, by the
unspoiled love of nature apparent in every page, and by the fresh and warm
emotions which everywhere gave life to the narrative and the dialogue.
Cooper was now in his fifty-first year, but nothing which he had produced
in the earlier part of his literary life was written with so much of what
might seem the generous fervor of youth, or showed the faculty of
invention in higher vigor. I recollect that near the time of its
appearance I was informed of an observation made upon it by one highly
distinguished in the literature of our country and of the age, between
whom and the author an unhappy coolness had for some years existed. As he
finished the reading of the Pathfinder, he exclaimed, "They may say what
they will of Cooper; the man who wrote this book is not only a great man,
but a good man."
The readers of the _Pathfinder_ were quickly reconciled to the fourth
appearance of Leatherstocking, when they saw him made to act a different
part from any which the author had hitherto assigned him--when they saw
him shown as a lover, and placed in the midst of associations which
invested his character with a higher and more affecting heroism. In this
work are two female characters, portrayed in a masterly manner,--the
corporal's daughter, Mabel Dunham, generous, resolute, yet womanly, and
the young Indian woman, called by her tribe the Dew of June, a
personification of female truth, affection, and sympathy, with a strong
aboriginal cast, yet a product of nature as bright and pure as that from
which she is named.
_Mercedes of Castile_, published near the close of the same year, has none
of the stronger characteristics of Cooper's genius; but in the
_Deerslayer_, which appeared in 1841, another of his Leatherstocking
tales, he gave us a work rivalling the Pathfinder. Leatherstocking is
brought before us in his early youth, in the first exercise of that keen
sagacity which is blended so harmoniously with a simple and ingenuous
goodness. The two daughters of the retired freebooter dwelling on the
Otsego lake, inspire scarcely less interest than the principal personage;
Judith, in the pride of her beauty and intellect, her good impulses
contending with a fatal love of admiration, holding us fascinated with a
constant interest in her fate, which, with consummate skill, we are
permitted rather to conjecture than to know; and Hetty, scarcely less
beautiful in person, weak-minded, but wise in the midst, of that weakness
beyond the wisdom of the loftiest intellect, through the power of
conscience and religion. The character of Hetty would have been a
hazardous experiment in feebler hands, but in his it was admirably
successful.
The _Two Admirals_ and _Wing-and-Wing_ were given to the public in 1842,
both of them taking a high rank among Cooper's sea-tales. The first of
these is a sort of naval epic in prose; the flight and chase of armed
vessels hold us in breathless suspense, and the sea-fights are described
with a terrible power. In the later sea-tales of Cooper, it seems to me
that the mastery with which he makes his grand processions of events pass
before the mind's eye is even greater than in his earlier. The next year
he published the _Wyandotte or Hutted Knoll_, one of his beautiful
romances of the woods, and in 1844 two more of his sea-stories, _Afloat
and Ashore_ and _Miles Wallingford_its sequel. The long series of his
nautical tales was closed by _Jack Tier or the Florida Reef,_ published in
1848, when Cooper was in his sixtieth year, and it is as full of spirit,
energy, invention, life-like presentation of objects and events--
The vision and the faculty divine--
as anything he has written.
Let me pause here to say that Cooper, though not a manufacturer of verse,
was in the highest sense of the word a poet; his imagination wrought nobly
and grandly, and imposed its creations on the mind of the reader for
realities. With him there was no withering, or decline, or disuse of the
poetic faculty; as he stepped downwards from the zenith of life, no shadow
or chill came over it; it was like the year of some genial climates, a
perpetual season of verdure, bloom, and fruitfulness. As these works came
out, I was rejoiced to see that he was unspoiled by the controversies in
which he had allowed, himself to become engaged; that they had not given
to these better expressions of his genius, any tinge of misanthropy, or
appearance of contracting and closing sympathies any trace of an interest
in his fellow-beings less large and free than in his earlier works.
Before the, appearance of his _Jack Tier_, Cooper published, in 1845 and
the following year, a series of novels relating to the Anti-rent question,
in which he took great interest. He thought that the disposition
manifested in certain quarters to make con cessions, to what he deemed a
denial of the rights of property was a first step in a most dangerous
path. To discourage this disposition, he wrote _Satanstoe, The
Chainbearer,_ and _The Redskins_. They are didactic in their design, and
want the freedom of invention which belongs to Cooper's best novels; but
if they had been written by anybody but Cooper,--by a member of Congress,
for example, or an eminent politician of any class,--they would have made
his reputation. It was said, I am told, by a distinguished jurist of our
state, that they entitled the author to as high a place in law as his
other works had won for him in literature.
I had thought, in meditating the plan of this discourse, to mention all
the works of Mr. Cooper, but the length to which I have found it extending
has induced me to pass over several written in the last ten years of his
life, and to confine myself to those which best illustrate his literary
character. The last of his novels was _The Ways of the Hour_, a work in
which the objections he entertained to the trial by jury in civil causes
were stated in the form of a narrative.
It is a voluminous catalogue--that of Cooper's published works--but it
comprises not all he wrote. He committed to the fire, without remorse,
many of the fruits of his literary industry. It was understood, some years
since, that he had a work ready for the press on the _Middle States of the
Union_, principally illustrative of their social history; but it has not
been found among his manuscripts, and the presumption is that he must have
destroyed it. He had planned a work on the _Towns of Manhattan_, for the
publication of which he made arrangements with Mr. Putnam of this city,
and a part of which, already written, was in press at the time of his
death. The printed part has since been destroyed by fire, but a portion of
the manuscript was recovered. The work, I learn, will be completed by one
of the family, who, within a few years past, has earned an honorable name
among the authors of our country. Great as was the number of his works,
and great as was the favor with which they were received, the pecuniary
rewards of his success were far less than has been generally
supposed--scarcely, as I am informed, a tenth part of what the common
rumor made them. His fame was infinitely the largest acknowledgment which
this most successful of American authors received for his labors.
_The Ways of the Hour_ appeared in 1850. At this time his personal
appearance was remarkable. He seemed in perfect health, and in the highest
energy and activity of his faculties. I have scarcely seen any man at that
period of life on whom his years sat more lightly. His conversation had
lost none of its liveliness, though it seemed somewhat more genial and
forbearing in tone, and his spirits none of their elasticity. He was
contemplating, I have since been told, another Leatherstocking tale,
deeming that he had not yet exhausted the character; and those who
consider what new resources it yielded him in the _Pathfinder_ and the
_Deerslayer_, will readily conclude that he was not mistaken.
The disease, however, by which he was removed, was even then impending
over him, and not long afterwards his friends here were grieved to learn
that his health was declining. He came to New York so changed that they
looked at him with sorrow, and after a stay of some weeks, partly for the
benefits of medical advice returned to Cooperstown, to leave it no more.
His complaint gradually gained strength, subdued a constitution originally
robust, and finally passed into a confirmed dropsy. In August, 1851, he
was visited by his excellent and learned friend, Dr. Francis, a member of
the weekly club which he had founded in the early part of his literary
career. He found him bearing the sufferings of his disease with manly
firmness, gave him such medical counsels as the malady appeared to
require, prepared him delicately for its fatal termination, and returned
to New York with the most melancholy anticipations. In a few days
afterwards, Cooper expired, amid the deep affliction of his family, on the
14th of September, the day before that on which he should have completed
his sixty-second year. He died, apparently without pain, in peace and
religious hope. The relations of man to his Maker, and to that state of
being for which the present is but a preparation, had occupied much of his
thoughts during his whole lifetime, and he crossed, with a serene
composure, the mysterious boundary which divides this life from the next.
The departure of such a man, in the full strength of his faculties,--on
whom the country had for thirty years looked as one of the permanent
ornaments of its literature, and whose name had been so often associated
with praise, with renown, with controversy, with blame, but never with
death,--diffused a universal awe. It was as if an earthquake had shaken
the ground on which we stood, and showed the grave opening by our path. In
the general grief for his loss, his virtues only were remembered; and his
failings forgotten.
Of his failings I have said little; such as he had were obvious to all the
world; they lay on the surface of his character; those who knew him least
made the most account of them. With a character so made up of positive
qualities--a character so independent and uncompromising, and with a
sensitiveness far more acute than he was willing to acknowledge, it is not
surprising that occasions frequently arose to bring him, sometimes into
friendly collision, and sometimes in to graver disagreements and
misunderstandings with his fellow-men. For his infirmities, his friends
found an ample counterpoise in the generous sincerity of his nature. He
never thought of disguising his opinions, and he abhorred all disguise in
others; he did not even deign to use that show of regard towards those of
whom he did not think well, which the world tolerates, and almost demands.
A manly expression of opinion, however different from his own, commanded
his respect. Of his own works, he spoke with the same freedom as of the
works of others; and never hesitated to express his judgment of a book for
the reason that it was written by himself: yet he could bear with
gentleness any dissent from the estimate lie placed on his own writings.
His character was like the bark of the cinnamon, a rough and astringent
rind without, and an intense sweetness within. Those who penetrated below
the surface found a genial temper, warm affections, and a heart with ample
place for his friends, their pursuits, their good name, their welfare.
They found him a philanthropist, though not precisely after the fashion of
the day; a religious man, most devout where devotion is most apt to be a
feeling rather than a custom, in the household circle; hospitable, and to
the extent of his means liberal-handed in acts of charity. They found,
also, that though in general he would as soon have thought of giving up an
old friend as of giving up an opinion, he was not proof against testimony,
and could part with a mistaken opinion as one parts with an old friend who
has been proved faithless and unworthy. In short, Cooper was one of those
who, to be loved, must be intimately known.
Of his literary character I have spoken largely in the narrative of his
life, but there are yet one or two remarks which must be made to do it
justice. In that way of writing in which he excelled, it seems to me that
he united, in a pre-eminent degree, those qualities which enabled him to
interest the largest number of readers. He wrote not for the fastidious,
the over-refined, the morbidly delicate; for these find in his genius
something too robust for their liking--something by which their
sensibilities are too rudely shaken; but he wrote for mankind at
large--for men and women in the ordinary healthful state of feeling--and
in their admiration he found his reward. It is for this class that public
libraries are obliged to provide themselves with an extraordinary number
of copies of his works: the number in the Mercantile Library in this city,
I am told, is forty. Hence it is, that he has earned a fame, wider, I
think, than any author of modern times--wider, certainly, than any author,
of any age, ever enjoyed in his lifetime. All his excellences are
translatable--they pass readily into languages the least allied in their
genius to that in which he wrote, and in them he touches the heart and
kindles the imagination with the same power as in the original English.
Cooper was not wholly without humor; it is sometimes found lurking in the
dialogue of Harvey Birch, and of Leatherstocking but it forms no
considerable element in his works; and if it did, it would have stood in
the way of his universal popularity; since of all qualities, it is the
most difficult to transfuse into a foreign language. Nor did the effect he
produced upon the reader depend on any grace of style which would escape a
translator of ordinary skill. With his style, it is true, he took great
pains, and in his earlier works, I am told, sometimes altered the proofs
sent from the printer so largely that they might be said to be written
over Yet he attained no special felicity, variety, or compass of
expression. His style, however, answered his purpose; it has defects, but
it is manly and clear, and stamps on the mind of the reader the impression
he desired to convey. I am not sure that some of the very defects of
Cooper's novels do not add, by a certain force of contrast, to their power
over the mind. He is long in getting at the interest of his narrative. The
progress of the plot, at first, is like that of one of his own vessels of
war, slowly, heavily, and even awkwardly working out of a harbor. We are
impatient and weary, but when the vessel is once in the open sea, and
feels the free breath of heaven in her full sheets, our delight and
admiration is all the greater at the grace, the majesty, and power with
which she divides and bears down the waves, and pursues her course, at
will, over the great waste of waters.
Such are the works so widely read, and so universally admired, in all the
zones of the globe, and by men of every kindred and every tongue; works
which have made of those who dwell in remote latitudes, wanderers in our
forests, and observers of our manners, and have inspired them with an
interest in our history. A gentleman who had returned from Europe just
before the death of Cooper, was asked what he found the people of the
Continent doing. "They all are reading Cooper," he answered; "in the
little kingdom of Holland, with its three millions of inhabitants, I
looked into four different translations of Cooper in the language of the
country." A traveller, who has seen much of the middle classes of Italy,
lately said to me, "I found that all they knew of America, and that was
not little, they had learned from Cooper's novels; from him they had
learned the story of American liberty, and through him they had been
introduced to our Washington; they had read his works till the shores of
the Hudson, and the valleys of Westchester, and the banks of Otsego lake,
had become to them familiar ground."
Over all the countries into whose speech this great man's works have been
rendered by the labors of their scholars, the sorrow of that loss which we
deplore is now diffusing itself. Here we lament the ornament of our
country, there they mourn the death of him who delighted the human race.
Even now, while I speak, the pulse of grief which is passing through the
nations has haply just reached some remote neighborhood; the news of his
death has been brought to some dwelling on the slopes of the Andes, or
amidst the snowy wastes of the North, and the dark-eyed damsel of Chile,
or the fair-haired maid of Norway, is sad to think that he whose stories
of heroism and true love have so often kept her for hours from her pillow,
lives no more.
He is gone! but the creations of his genius, fixed in living words,
survive the frail material organs by which the words were first traced.
They partake of a middle nature, between the deathless mind and the
decaying body of which they are the common offspring, and are, therefore,
destined to a duration, if not eternal, yet indefinite. The examples he
has given in his glorious fictions, of heroism, honor, and truth, of large
sympathies between man and man, of all that is good, great, and excellent,
embodied in personages marked with so strong an individuality that we
place them among our friends and favorites; his frank and generous men,
his gentle and noble women, shall live through centuries to come, and only
perish with our language. I have said with our language; but who shall say
when it may be the fate of the English language to be numbered with the
extinct forms of human speech? Who shall declare which of the present
tongues of the civilized world will survive its fellows? It may be that
some one of them, more fortunate than the rest, will long outlast them, in
some undisturbed quarter of the globe, and in the midst of a new
civilization. The creations of Cooper's genius, even now transferred to
that language, may remain to be the delight of the nations through another
great cycle of centuries, beginning after the English language and its
contemporaneous form of civilization shall have passed away.