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Lowell (Massachusetts, United States) (search for this): chapter 6
eeley's New Yorker ) a superlative dolt and the common mark of scorn and contempt of every well-informed American ; and so did Webb, when he pronounced the novelist a base-minded caitiff who had traduced his country. Not being able to reach his English opponents, Cooper turned on these Americans, and spent years in attacking Webb and others through the courts, gaining little and losing much through the long vicissitudes of petty local lawsuits. The fact has kept alive their memory; but for Lowell's keener shaft, Cooper has written six volumes to show he's as good as a lord, there was no redress. The arrow lodged and split the target. Like Scott and most other novelists, Cooper was rarely successful with his main characters, but was saved by his subordinate ones. These were strong, fresh, characteristic, human; and they lay, as I have already said, in several different directions, all equally marked. If he did not create permanent types in Harvey Birch the spy, Leather-Stocking
Burlington (New Jersey, United States) (search for this): chapter 6
V. James Fenimore Cooper Cooper, whose name is with his country's woven First in her ranks; her Pioneer of mind. These were the words in which Fitz-Greene Halleck designated Cooper's substantial precedence in American novel-writing. Apart from this mere priority in time,--he was born at Burlington, New Jersey, September 15, 1789, and died at Cooperstown, New York, September 14, 1851,--he rendered the unique service of inaugurating three especial classes of fiction,--the novel of the American Revolution, the Indian novel, and the sea novel. In each case he wrote primarily for his own fellow countrymen, and achieved fame first at their hands; and in each he produced a class of works which, in spite of their own faults and of the somewhat unconciliatory spirit of their writer, have secured a permanence and a breadth of range unequaled in English prose fiction, save by Scott alone. To-day the sale of his works in his own language remains unabated; and one has only to look
Wallingford (Connecticut, United States) (search for this): chapter 6
as known to refuse to have his works even noticed in a newspaper for which he wrote, the New York patriot. He never would have consented to review his own books, as both Scott and Irving did, or to write direct or indirect puffs of himself, as was done by Poe and Whitman. He was foolishly sensitive to criticism, and unable to conceal it; he was easily provoked to a quarrel; he was dissatisfied with either praise or blame, and speaks evidently of himself in the words of the hero of Miles Wallingford, when he says: In scarce a circumstance of my life that has brought me in the least under the cognizance of the public have I ever been judged justly. There is no doubt that he himself-or rather the temperament given him by nature — was to blame for this, but the fact is unquestionable. Add to this that he was, in his way and in what was unfortunately the most obnoxious way, a reformer. That is, he was what may be called a reformer in the conservative direction,--he belabored his fe
Cooperstown (New York, United States) (search for this): chapter 6
V. James Fenimore Cooper Cooper, whose name is with his country's woven First in her ranks; her Pioneer of mind. These were the words in which Fitz-Greene Halleck designated Cooper's substantial precedence in American novel-writing. Apart from this mere priority in time,--he was born at Burlington, New Jersey, September 15, 1789, and died at Cooperstown, New York, September 14, 1851,--he rendered the unique service of inaugurating three especial classes of fiction,--the novel of the American Revolution, the Indian novel, and the sea novel. In each case he wrote primarily for his own fellow countrymen, and achieved fame first at their hands; and in each he produced a class of works which, in spite of their own faults and of the somewhat unconciliatory spirit of their writer, have secured a permanence and a breadth of range unequaled in English prose fiction, save by Scott alone. To-day the sale of his works in his own language remains unabated; and one has only to look
Europe (search for this): chapter 6
spirit of their writer, have secured a permanence and a breadth of range unequaled in English prose fiction, save by Scott alone. To-day the sale of his works in his own language remains unabated; and one has only to look over the catalogues of European booksellers in order to satisfy himself that this popularity continues, undiminished, through the medium of translation. It may be safely said of him that no author of fiction in the English language, except Scott, has held his own so well forrly tactless; and inasmuch as the point of view he took was one requiring the very greatest tact, the defect was hopeless. As a rule, no man criticises American ways so unsuccessfully as an American who has lived many years in Europe. The mere European critic is ignorant of our ways and frankly owns it, even if thinking the fact but a small disqualification; while the American absentee, having remained away long enough to have forgotten many things and never to have seen many others, may have
Castile, N. Y. (New York, United States) (search for this): chapter 6
r,--of a kind not known to human society. This is doubtless aggravated by the frequent use of thee and thou, yet this, which Professor Lounsbury attributes to Cooper's Quaker ancestry, was in truth a part of the formality of the old period, and is found also in Brockden Brown. And as his writings conform to their period in this, so they did in other respects: describing every woman, for instance, as a female, and making her to be such as Cooper himself describes the heroine of Mercedes of Castile to be when he says, Her very nature is made up of religion and female decorum. Scott himself could also draw such inane figures, yet in Jeanie Deans he makes an average Scotch woman heroic, and in Meg Merrilies and Madge Wildfire he paints the extreme of daring self-will. There is scarcely a novel of Scott's where some woman does not show qualities which approach the heroic; while Cooper scarcely produced one where a woman rises even to the level of an interesting commonplaceness. She m
Palfrey (search for this): chapter 6
woodsman, Long Tom Coffin the sailor, Chingachgook the Indian, then there is no such thing as the creation of characters in literature. Scott was far more profuse and varied, but he gave no more of life to individual personages, and perhaps created no types so universally recognized. What is most remarkable is that, in the case of the Indian especially, Cooper was not only in advance of the knowledge of his own time, but of that of the authors who immediately followed him. In Parkman and Palfrey, for instance, the Indian of Cooper vanishes and seems wholly extinguished; but under the closer inspection of Alice Fletcher and Horatio Hale, the lost figure reappears, and becomes more picturesque, more poetic, more thoughtful, than even Cooper dared to make him. The instinct of the novelist turned out more authoritative than the premature conclusions of a generation of historians. It is only women who can draw the commonplace, at least in English, and make it fascinating. Perhaps on
Greeley (search for this): chapter 6
s of both countries. The English, he thought, had a national propensity to blackguardism, and certainly the remarks he drew from them did something to vindicate the charge. When the London Times called him affected, offensive, curious, and ill-conditioned, and Fraser's magazine, a liar, a bilious braggart, a full jackass, an insect, a grub, and a reptile, they clearly left little for America to say in that direction. Yet Park Benjamin did his best, or his worst, when he called Cooper (in Greeley's New Yorker ) a superlative dolt and the common mark of scorn and contempt of every well-informed American ; and so did Webb, when he pronounced the novelist a base-minded caitiff who had traduced his country. Not being able to reach his English opponents, Cooper turned on these Americans, and spent years in attacking Webb and others through the courts, gaining little and losing much through the long vicissitudes of petty local lawsuits. The fact has kept alive their memory; but for Lowe
English (search for this): chapter 6
ediately followed him. In Parkman and Palfrey, for instance, the Indian of Cooper vanishes and seems wholly extinguished; but under the closer inspection of Alice Fletcher and Horatio Hale, the lost figure reappears, and becomes more picturesque, more poetic, more thoughtful, than even Cooper dared to make him. The instinct of the novelist turned out more authoritative than the premature conclusions of a generation of historians. It is only women who can draw the commonplace, at least in English, and make it fascinating. Perhaps only two English women have done this, Jane Austen and George Eliot; while in France George Sand has certainly done it far less well than it has been achieved by Balzac and Daudet. Cooper never succeeded in it for a single instant, and even when he has an admiral of this type to write about, he puts into him less of life than Marryat imparts to the most ordinary midshipman. The talk of Cooper's civilian worthies is, as Professor Lounsbury has well said,
Americans (search for this): chapter 6
bilious braggart, a full jackass, an insect, a grub, and a reptile, they clearly left little for America to say in that direction. Yet Park Benjamin did his best, or his worst, when he called Cooper (in Greeley's New Yorker ) a superlative dolt and the common mark of scorn and contempt of every well-informed American ; and so did Webb, when he pronounced the novelist a base-minded caitiff who had traduced his country. Not being able to reach his English opponents, Cooper turned on these Americans, and spent years in attacking Webb and others through the courts, gaining little and losing much through the long vicissitudes of petty local lawsuits. The fact has kept alive their memory; but for Lowell's keener shaft, Cooper has written six volumes to show he's as good as a lord, there was no redress. The arrow lodged and split the target. Like Scott and most other novelists, Cooper was rarely successful with his main characters, but was saved by his subordinate ones. These were
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