Ernest Erwin Leisy

“ Whatever case the critics may have made against his Indians, and of late they have rather deferred to him, his conception of the red man has been effective and is not likely now to be replaced. When people wish to know what it was to live in the days when the aborigines were in power, it is to this story of disastrous chances, of hair-breadth ’scapes, and moving accidents by flood and field, that the imagination naturally turns.
So well was The Last of the Mohicans received at home and abroad that Cooper was moved to write at once another tale of the Indians. ”

“ In The Spy he represented more fairly than contemporary historians the actual nature of the Revolutionary conflict. The Pioneers immortalized the passing of the frontier, while The Pilot was our first historical novel of the sea. Lionel Lincoln was an earnest of national romance, to which he returned in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish. In The Last of the Mohicans he set down memorably the passing of the first American. America was his theme, nothing more, nothing less. For this task he lacked the historical acumen of Scott. ”

“ But Cooper soon found the attempt to blend his complicated plot of domestic intrigue with history irksome, and shifted attention to the melodramatic fortunes of his hero. It is difficult to understand why he should have made an unheroic English Major the hero of an American story. It can hardly be explained on the ground of Cooper’s established antipathy to the New England character, although the fact that he was too little at home in Massachusetts may have caused him to piece out the story by giving it a melodramatic turn in keeping with what was popular on the stage of the day. ”

“ In view of this fact, Cooper deserves credit for representing the Indian as cunning and treacherous as well as generous. When it was objected that he gave a more favorable picture of the red man than he deserved, Cooper said:
“It is the privilege of all writers of fiction, more particularly when their works aspire to the elevation of romances, to present the beau-ideal of their characters to the reader. ”

“ Cooper chose the northeastern coast of England as the setting for his story. This gave him the two-fold advantage of exploiting sea maneuvers which The Pirate lacked, and of complicating these with a love story in the castle, which readers of Abbey romances cherished. In their eagerness to point out its novelty as a sea tale, students of Cooper have overlooked the Gothic tradition which The Pilot continued. In the management of the story there was not so much that was new as might be supposed, for in its general outlines it was The Spy done in terms of the sea. ”

“ Before the Revolution he had inspired terror but more recently his melancholy fate was to a greater or less degree upon the white man’s conscience. Chateaubriand had given currency to the tradition of the noble savage, but only an ethnologist like Gallatin or Duponceau had inquired into his origin, language, religion, ethics, government, habits and manners, with a sense of their scientific value. Cooper’s own knowledge of the race was limited to an occasional meeting with an Indian at Otsego Hall, or a delegation at New York or Washington. ”

“ The essential requirement of the Scottish novels—conflict, patriotic association, and difference in social manners—obviously suggested to Cooper the American Revolution as the scene for his novel. The details of that warfare, particularly as they were related by the aged participants in Westchester County, New York, where he was at this time living, Cooper had listened to with that intelligent interest with which a seaman may follow strategy on land as well. ”

“ The Pioneers has never received consideration as an historical novel. Van Doren speaks of it15 as Cooper’s first “realistic presentation of American manners.” Yet a novel of manners it is not. That life in the frontier town was not what it had been and never would be again, Cooper realized definitely.16 Susan Fenimore Cooper says,17 “The new narrative, like that which preceded it, was, in one sense, to be connected with the history of the country; it should follow the first steps of civilization in its conquests over the wilderness.” ”

“ In this position he was in accord with Timothy Dwight,42 a careful historian, who remembered the event as a child and expressed the view which prevailed in New England and New York. The massacre itself, with its opportunity for pageantry in Scott’s vein, did not fire Cooper’s imagination. ”

“ But there was also dramatic tension and an interest in a theme suggesting Greek fatalism: the law of nature, embodied in the uncouth old hunter and the Great Serpent, is seen in conflict with the law of man represented by the Judge. In the end the law of nature yields to the stocks and the fire which civilization brought, and the only escape is a reluctant departure toward the setting sun. A conventional plot was introduced by Cooper as a concession to his readers, but it is of secondary importance. ”

“ On this incapacity of Cooper’s to depict the founders of New England, Professor Lounsbury has said: “Paradoxical as the assertion may seem, he was too much like the Puritans to do them justice;”50 which Professor Erskine has wisely corrected by adding,51 “In so far as Puritanism coincided with his nature, he portrayed it admirably in this novel; he lets the reader see the practical vigor, the exalted piety, and the domestic affection of Mark Heathcote and his comrades, for these virtues he can recognize, as he could recognize the common piety and the common sense of The Pilgrim’s Progress. ”

“ In that mysterious Louisiana Purchase, moreover, new pioneers were seeking to satisfy their hunger for land. Cooper also knew, though this has not been pointed out before, that the public mind was further directed to this frontier by the proposal by act of Congress to remove the Indians to this territory. These considerations caused Cooper, although he had never seen the plains, to determine upon a western setting for his next story, The Prairie (1827) . ”

“ Colonel Munro, the English commander, was “elaborated according to the needs of the plot and Cooper’s idea of the British soldier of the period,” says Erskine. “As a soldier he is of course brave, but not astute. Cooper lets him stand for the usual British incapacity to cope with the Indians which Braddock so fatally illustrated.”39 It is not likely that any of Cooper’s readers would have impugned the conception. ”

“ Representatives of various social units were made to aid in the evolution of the plot. Judge Temple, empire-builder, with his daughter just home from school, and an insurgent young Effingham were given the center of the stage; Natty Bumppo, protagonist of the advancing civilization, his companion Chingachgook, christened John, and various frontier types, were grouped about these.
In this work, Cooper showed a more aggressively American spirit, derived no doubt from the favorable reception accorded The Spy. ”

“ This it is which constitutes poetry and to suppose that the red-man is to be represented only in the squalid misery or in the degraded moral state that certainly more or less belongs to his condition, is, we apprehend, taking a very narrow view of an author’s privileges. ”

“ In him the historical novel gained a new type of hero with whose simplicity, downrightness, competence, unsophistication, and virgin prejudice the natural American has for Europeans come to be identified.37 How indigenous he was appears when he is compared with Rip Van Winkle and the characters of Irving. Thackeray declared La Longue Carabine one of the great prizemen of fiction. “He ranks,” said he, “with your Uncle Toby, Sir Roger de Coverley, Falstaff ... ”

“ With the historical background in and about Boston he was more successful, giving according to Bancroft, an effective and truthful rendering. As heretofore, his sympathy with the losing side equalized the contest and made it a worthy struggle. For the critical reader none of his books has a more inviting opening. ”