Chapter VIII: Travels, History, Political Writings and Latest Novels

Cooper was a giant of productivity. Some brief comment has been made on twenty-three of his novels. It is impossible in the limits of this study to do much beyond giving the titles of his remaining books.

_The History of the Navy of the United States of America_ begins with ‘the earliest American sea-fight’ (May, 1636), when John Gallop in a sloop of twenty tons captured a pinnace manned by thieving Indians, and closes with the War of 1812. The noteworthy features of the book are accuracy, independence, severity of style, and freedom from spread-eagleism. The brief _Chronicles of Cooperstown_, written in a plain way, has the natural interest attaching to the subject and the author.

_A Letter to his Countrymen_, partly autobiographical, is absorbing in its bitter earnestness. _The Travelling Bachelor_ purports to be the letters of a cosmopolite, a man of fifty, to various members of his club, recounting his travels in the United States. The book is historical, statistical, argumentative. It treats of government, manners, art, literature, of fashions in dress and of peculiarities of speech. As an attempt on the part of a man of strong prejudices to take an objective view of his own country, it is singularly interesting. Were its seven hundred closely printed pages lightened with humor or relieved by any grace of expression, _The Travelling Bachelor_ would be a vastly entertaining work.

_The American Democrat_ is a collection of short essays, forty-five in number, on the American republic, liberty, parties, public opinion, property, the press, demagogues, the decay of manners, individuality, aristocrat and democrat, pronunciation, slavery, etc., etc. The tone of the comments is intentionally censorious, and often proves exasperating. Having been long absent from America, Cooper found himself to a certain degree ‘in the situation of a foreigner in his own country.’ On this account he was prepared to note peculiarities. Praise and blame are mingled. _The American Democrat_ sets forth high ideals, as may be seen, for example, in the suggestive essay on party. The book is courageous but wanting in suavity.

_Sketches of Switzerland_ and _Gleanings in Europe_, comprising ten volumes in the original editions, are studies of Continental and English life. They contain a multitude of spirited, pungent, and true observations. Lacking the ‘antiseptic of style,’ the books are no longer read.

Between 1845 and 1850 Cooper published eight novels. Three of the eight, _Satanstoe_, _The Chainbearer_, and _The Redskins_, are narratives supposed to be drawn from the ‘Littlepage Manuscripts.’ The first is not only the best, but is also one of the most genial of all Cooper’s novels. Corny Littlepage had attractive friends, such as the mettlesome youth Guert Ten Eyck, a splendid specimen of the free-handed, royally generous Dutch-American. Jason Newcome, on the other hand, embodies Cooper’s never latent hostility to New England. The pictures of old days in New York and Albany are brilliant and highly finished, and the encounter with the Indians in Cooper’s most spirited vein.

_The Crater_ is a history of the adventures of Mark Woolston of Bristol, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who was shipwrecked on a volcanic island in the Pacific, and with the able seaman Bob Betts set himself to solve the problem of existence. What with gardening, poultry-raising, boat-building, tempests, earthquakes, exploration of neighboring islands, colonization, savages, and pirates, the book resolves itself into one of the infinite variations of _Robinson Crusoe_. After twenty-nine chapters of this sort of thing comes an absurd and irrelevant conclusion.

All the later novels, _Jack Tier_, _The Sea Lions_, _Oak Openings_, and _The Ways of the Hour_, are hard reading, yet the least happy of them has passages betraying the master’s hand. _The Sea Lions_ stands out by virtue of the powerful descriptions of an Antarctic winter; but neither Captain Spike’s mission to the gulf, nor the revelation of fat, profane Jack’s true station and sex, nor yet the malapropisms of Mrs. Budd (she would say ‘It blew what they call a Hyson in the Chinese seas’), can make _Jack Tier_ more than tolerable.

* * * * *

Cooper’s greatest achievements were his stories of the sea and the forest. His real creations are sailors, backwoodsmen, old soldiers, and Indians. Whether his red men are conceived in the spirit of modern ethnological science can matter but little now. They are neither so close to Chateaubriand’s idealized savage, nor so far from the real Indian as is generally believed. That Cooper had no skill in representing contemporary society is plain enough; but the failure of _Home as Found_ need not have been as complete as it was. Haste and anger must bear the blame of that literary disaster. Where he deals with manners of the past, as in _Satanstoe_, he is often most felicitous. With his novel of _The Bravo_ he was in line with the Romantic movement. How far he comprehended that movement, or was influenced by it, is a more intricate problem.

Modern literature can show but few authors more popular than Cooper. He has been praised extravagantly; but the fact that Miss Mitford thought him as good as Scott ought not to prejudice us against him. And he has been damned without measure; but over against Mark Twain’s unchivalrous attack on his great fellow countryman may be set the royally generous tributes of Balzac and of Dumas.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Judge Cooper’s _A Guide in the Wilderness_, Dublin, 1810, was
reprinted in 1897 with an introduction by J. F. Cooper [the
Younger], throwing much light on the manners of the times and
the character of his ancestor.

[8] One of the most extraordinary of the suits arose from
criticism of the _Naval History_. Cooper had refused to take
the popular side of a heated controversy and to join in
assailing Elliott, Perry’s second in command at the Battle
of Lake Erie. The suit, against Stone of the ‘Commercial
Advertiser,’ was settled by arbitration, and in Cooper’s
favor. Lounsbury’s _Cooper_, pp. 200–230.

[9] Park Theatre, New York, March, 1822.

[10] Burton’s Theatre, New York, June, 1850.

IV

_George Bancroft_

REFERENCES:

=W. M. Sloane=: ‘George Bancroft in Society, in Politics, in
Letters,’ ‘The Century Magazine,’ January, 1887.

=S. S. Green=: ‘George Bancroft,’ _Proceedings of the American
Antiquarian Society_, April 29, 1891.

=A. McF. Davis=: ‘George Bancroft,’ _Proceedings of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences_, vol. xxvi, 1891.