C

II

THE SPIRIT OF ROMANCE

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

OOPER belongs among the world's great Romantics-Scott, Dumas, Victor Hugo, Stevenson, Sienkiewicz. He has survived the arrows of outrageous criticism, and survived what is even more deadly, the crushing bulk of his own work. He brought to the gates of immortality an enormous amount of excess baggage. He himself, however, is on the right side of the gates, though only a small portion of his works have followed him. Just why so careless and hasty a writer has outlived so many meticulous artists, is an interesting question. I shall endeavour to suggest an answer.

Cooper was born in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. This turbulent time was a fitting matrix for the appearance of one of the most independent, fiery, challenging, and combative men in American literature. His life-motto might have been Venienti Occurrite Morbo; he was always looking for trouble. He was born in Burlington, New Jersey. I wish that I knew exactly what was in the mind of Dr. Johnson when he wrote, in his Life of Waller, "Benjamin, the eldest son, was disinherited, and sent to New Jersey as wanting common understanding." We know that Johnson had no great

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admiration for Americans, for he remarked, "Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging." But in so general a condemnation, why this special tribute to New Jersey? However this may be, Cooper did not long remain in the vicinity of his natal town. He moved to the lake region of central

New York at the age of one.

Cooper entered Yale College in the class of 1806. With one exception, he was the youngest student in the institution. By paying little attention to the curriculum, he received considerable attention from the Faculty; so much indeed, that in his Junior year he was expelled. He was not dissipated, he was insubordinate.

He became by far the most famous man-of-letters who ever attended Yale, but in his case the Faculty may be pardoned for not detecting his genius. The college library owns a silhouette taken of him in his undergraduate days-the profile of a boy in which the chief expression seems to be determination. In the twentieth century, four of his greatgrandsons were graduated from Yale. One of them, James Fenimore Cooper, lost his life in the World War, and left behind him a volume of original poems, which have been published under the title Afterglow.

Finding the discipline of the college professors too strict, Cooper, in the autumn of 1806, discovered the actual meaning of the word. It was always characteristic of him, that if he found an obstacle which he could not surmount, he immedi

ately sought one more difficult. If he were too tired to climb a hill, he attacked a mountain. He went before the mast on a merchant vessel, and saw London and the Mediterranean. On the first of January 1808, he became a Midshipman in the United States Navy, little dreaming what use he would eventually make of his knowledge and experience.

In 1811 he resigned from the Navy, was married, and found the chief happiness of his life in his home. He soon went back to the old estate at Cooperstown, one of the most beautiful places in America, and which he was to make forever a resort for literary pilgrims. He subsequently lived for a time in Westchester County, the famous "neutral ground" where the scenes in The Spy were laid; in 1822 he moved to New York City, and in 1826 went to Europe with his family and remained seven years. From 1833 until his death in 1851 he lived in Cooperstown, now the home of his grandson, James Fenimore Cooper, to whom we owe valuable historical publications dealing with the place, as well as a collection of letters written. by the novelist.

The later years of Cooper's life were unfortunately largely occupied in quarrels with various newspapers, against which he frequently brought suits for libel. Even when he won it was a Pyrrhic victory; for the journals naturally used the weapon of ridicule, and Cooper devoted nights and days to fruitless combat, which he might much better have spent in literary composition, or in contemplating

the beauty of his natural surroundings. The echoes of this inky warfare were heard across the ocean, and in the journalistic amenities of those happy years, the London Times and Fraser's Magazine bestowed upon Cooper's head a blizzard of epithets that sounds like a catalogue of a zoological collection. Greeley's New Yorker tried to destroy him with hard words, which merely increased the hitting power of the designed victim. Cooper always returned to the fray, like the indomitable antagonist he was; he believed in his heart not only in the justice of his cause, but that he was performing a valuable public service. How important, how overwhelmingly important his "case" seemed to him then! Today it is forgotten, and the public knows Cooper only as a novelist. All the time spent on controversy is wasted; if both parties gain by a trade, both parties lose by a fight; and it is more profitable to attack a windmill than a newspaper.

Cooper is more admirable when discussing literature. In 1841 he was asked to contribute to a new magazine, which was to be both big in size and remunerative to its contributors. His letter, which has hitherto not been printed, contains the following: "I never asked or took a dollar in my life, for any personal 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, excuse me for saying it, I think distinction might better now be sought in excellence."

Cooper was so prolific that in writing the above

letter he may have had himself in mind. He was the author of over thirty novels, many books of travel, and masses of polemics.

The decade from 1821 to 1831 was the most fruitful. These were his happiest years; he was famous and the clouds of hostility had not yet obscured the sky. He was welcomed everywhere in Europe as a distinguished novelist, and his letters written abroad, first published by his grandson in 1922, reveal his cheerful activities in composition and his literary friendships. Writing to his wife from Genoa in 1829, he must have thought of the contrast between his first visit to the Mediterranean as a common seaman, and his second visit as a famous man. He, however, looked back to those early days with something of the pleasure that Mark Twain enjoyed in his recollections of the Mississippi. Cooper wrote:

"I am at the Croix de Malta, which looks directly on the harbour. I can scarcely describe to you the pleasure I feel in seeing ships, hearing the cries of seamen, a race everywhere so much alike, and in smelling all the odours of the trade. Yesterday I did the harbour thoroughly, by land and water, floating in the Mediterranean again, after an interval of twenty-one years, with a delight like that of a schoolboy, broke out of his bounds."

Among the authors he met in Paris, was Sir Walter Scott. In a letter to her sister, Mrs. Cooper thus describes him: