COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE American author, was born at Burlington, N.J., Sept. 15, 1789. In the next year, the family moved to the lake region of central New York. He entered Yale college in the class of i8o6; a silhouette taken of him in his undergraduate days shows a profile chiefly marked by determination. A boy of 14, he was old enough to display that pugnacity which was later to be one of his chief characteristics; he showed insubordination, and the faculty expelled him, unaware of the fact that he was to be th% most important man of letters ever connected with Yale. He went before the mast on a merchant vessel, and saw Europe for the first time. On Jan. 1, 1808, he became a midshipman in the U.S. navy. He resigned in 1811, was happily married and retired to the beautiful family estate at Cooperstown, where he died Sept. 14, 1851.
In 1826 he took his family to Europe and lived abroad seven years. From 1833 until his death he lived in Cooperstown. The later years were clouded by continual quarrels with the news papers, and by the suits for libel that he brought against them. The echoes of this fight were heard across the ocean, and the London journals joined with those of New York in brutal attacks upon Cooper the controversialist. They never succeeded in fright ening or quieting him, but they took up his time—the time that he might have more profitably employed in writing novels.
Cooper's ideals in literature were not shaken, and his letter to the editor of a new magazine in 1841 is characteristic. The editor had written in boastful terms about the size of the periodical, and the large sums that would be paid to distinguished contrib utors. "I never asked or took a dollar in my life, for any per sonal service, except as an officer in the navy, and for full-grown books. . . . Do you think size as important in a journal as quality? We have so much mediocrity in this country that, ex cuse me for saying it, I think distinction might better now be sought in excellence." Cooper was prolific. He wrote more than 3o novels, many books of travel and several tons of polemics. The wonder is that he sur vived such a mass of production. He came to the gates of im mortality with a vast amount of excess baggage. He himself, however, is on the right side of the gates, although only a small portion of his works followed him.
His happiest years were from 1821 to 1831. He was inter nationally famous and the clear sky of domestic happiness and literary fame had not been stained by clouds of hostility. He was welcomed everywhere in Europe as a distinguished man of letters ; he revisited as a luxurious traveller the scenes he had first witnessed as a common seaman. During this decade, moreover, he composed masterpieces with fluent ease. Very few authors can show in so short a period so splendid an output. In 1821 appeared The Spy, in 1823 The Pioneers and The Pilot (both germinal works), in 1825 Lionel Lincoln, in 1826 The Last of the Mohicans, in 1827 The Prairie and in 1828 The Red Rover.
Cooper never refused a challenge; and it is possible that if he had not been challenged, he would have remained in obscurity. He had reached the age of 3o without any apparent desire to write, when after reading aloud to his wife a novel of English society, he said, "I believe I could write a better story myself." Mrs. Cooper dared him to try. The result was Precaution, one of the worst novels in history, hopelessly bad in style, structure and characters, and disfigured by typographical errors.
If this book had been a success, it is possible that he might never have written another. His temperament was encouraged by success, but inspired by failure. In Browning's phrase, he made the stumbling-block a stepping-stone. The dates are sig nificant : Precaution, 182o; The Spy, 1821. John Jay had told Cooper the story of a spy, and Cooper turned it into one of the most successful novels in literature. Never was a work written with such contemptuous carelessness. The publisher became alarmed at the increasing size of the manuscript as it reached him in instalments, and expressed his misgivings. Cooper immediately wrote the last chapter, told the publisher to have it set up, printed and the pages numbered, so that he might know the ex treme limit of the book. Then Cooper filled the intervening space. The novel scored a prodigious success and deserved it.
From 1821 to the present moment Cooper has been a "house hold word." Russian and Polish children are as familiar with the Leather-stocking Tales as are the boys and girls of America. Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph, wrote (1833) : "I have visited, in Europe, many countries, and what I have asserted of the fame of Mr. Cooper I assert from personal knowledge. In every city of Europe that I visited, the works of Cooper were conspicuously placed in the windows of every bookshop. They are published as soon as he prodaices them in 34 different places in Europe. They have been seen by American travellers in the languages of Turkey and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan." Probably no writer ever showed greater inequalities in his work than Cooper. When he attempted "society" novels, he fell be neath criticism ; on the high seas or in the forest primeval, he is impressive. He could not make ladies and gentlemen seem real; but his men of the wood and of the wave are gloriously alive. His failure was not due to unfamiliarity with the material; he was a gentleman by birth and breeding, and knew the manners of aristocratic society. Why, then, could he not make them seem real? Perhaps because in that field he had no sympathetic imag ination. In the forest and on the ocean he lived with his char acters; they were more real to him than his neighbours; but apparently he could not visualize the children of fashion.
One reason for Cooper's enormous popularity in foreign coun tries is that his tales lend themselves easily to translation. It is not the style but the narrative that gives them distinction. Not only do Cooper's novels lose nothing in translation, they positively gain. Every time they were translated they were improved. French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Turkish and Japanese children hold in their little hands a better book than the original.
American literature began like a child learning to talk, imitating its British parents. Cooper suffers from the same drawback in his novels of social life. But in his masterpieces he was, of all early American writers, the most truly and consistently American. We can see this more clearly than it was perceived by his con temporaries. He created an American literature out of American materials. It had in its robust tones no echoes of Europe. He was less influenced by foreign authors and foreign topics than any other American writer of his time. He was a path-maker.
Apart from the excellence of his best works, he deserves credit as the founder of two great schools of fiction. He was apparently the only man in America who thought a sea story could be made interesting. While he was engaged in the composition of The Pilot, he talked it over with many men and women, and received not one favourable opinion. In a preface to the later edition, dated Aug. 1 o, 1849, Cooper gave an account of the inception of this work and the constantly discouraging comments he had from all sides. "Not a single individual among all those who discussed the merits of the project, within the range of the author's knowl edge, either spoke or looked encouragingly. It is probable that all these persons anticipated a signal failure." The book appeared in 1823. Its success was immediate. It founded a new school in fiction, which has flourished and will flourish indefinitely. One of Cooper's friends declared that the sea could not be made "interesting," but Cooper's followers, Marryat, Melville, Clark Russell, Stevenson and Conrad have had no difficulties in engaging the attention of readers. Seventeen years after The Pilot appeared Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, which re sembled Cooper's work in its accidental entrance into immortality.
Cooper was, is, and will be best known for the Leather-stocking Tales. They have often been called a drama in five acts. There is an orderly development in the character of the hero; the inci dents have a regular and disciplined march; hence it is surprising that no two of the novels appeared in their logical order. Deer slayer, which comes first, was written last ; Mohicans, the second, was written after Pioneers, the fourth; Pathfinder, the third, was written fourth; Pioneers was written first, and the series concluded with Prairie, which was written third. They were published in this order : Pioneers, 1823; Mohicans, 1826; Prairie, 1827; Pathfinder, 184o ; Deerslayer, 1841.
When Cooper wrote The Pioneers, he apparently had no thought of continuation. It was a chance remark by a friend on an ex cursion to Lake George, that emboldened him to make the risky experiment of reviving the hero. The Last of the Mohicans justi fied the adventure. Then he produced The Prairie, and left his scout dead and buried. But the popularity of Hawkeye called for a resurrection; and after 13 years he brought him back in Pathfinder, and then crowned the series by the most difficult feat of all—he wrote Deerslayer and gave the immortal scout not only a new lease of life, but the freshness and glory of early youth.
Cooper's powers developed with his hero. Natty Bumppo, in Pioneers, is an ignorant and almost peevish elderly man, who regrets the advance of civilization. The ideal side is missing. But Hawkeye is alert, adroit, strong, resourceful, rejoicing in the plenitude of his powers. He is an addition to the population of immortals. He will live with D'Artagnan and Cyrano de Bergerac. His is essentially a romantic character; so that attacks on his "naturalness" are of no moment. Cooper knew perfectly well what he was about. He said, "In a moral sense this man of the forest is purely a creation. A leading character in a work of fiction has a fair right to the aid which can be obtained from a poetical view of the subject." Cooper's "noble red man" has often been matter for laughter, but those who know most laugh least. If one will read Franklin's Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America, he will find that the great realist drew as favour able a picture of these people as the great romanticist.
Cooper's chief faults are faults of style ; his English is chron ically bad. His powers of characterization did not include subtlety. But he is a master of action; and his books have in them the principle of life. Balzac said, "If Cooper had succeeded in the painting of character to the same extent that he did in the painting of the phenomena of nature, he would have uttered the last word of our art." chief authorities for the life of Cooper are the biography by T. R. Lounsbury, in the "American Men of Letters" series, the letters in two volumes, edited by James Fenimore Cooper, his grandson ; and Le Roman de Bas-de-Cuir, by Margaret Murray Gibb, published at Paris in 1927. (W. L. P.)