It is not as though Cooper were a teller of naïve, unvarnished tales; such tales please the most fastidious mind. His fault is that he has coated his stories with a sticky, tacky varnish of ugly hue. To deny this is not only to misunderstand his merit, the great power that overcomes his own dead weight of words, but to misconceive the pleasure that millions of readers find in him. It is unjust to ascribe to a classic virtues to which it has no claim. Cooper is an outdoor man. Critics have shut him up in their studies with books about rhetoric and style and other things of limited interest. Mark Twain opened the study windows and let in some fresh air. But he did not stop with this revivifying service; he jumped in through the window and stamped on the critics. all the while Cooper was out in the woods.

And

Cooper gave to fiction some wholly new material, primeval as the forest, native and sincere. He knew the woods and he knew the sea. He knew Indians objectively, their appearance and habits of action. Their habits of mind, about which we know nothing, he probably did not understand, because he did not understand the characters of white men and women. The ladies in "The Pilot" are intolerable, much worse than Dickens's Dora and Agnes. But when the mysterious stranger begins to handle the ship, how she sails!

Cooper did not like people any too heartily. Perhaps it is not unduly fanciful to see a connection between his failure to understand his characters and the stupidity that allowed him, a prosperous and honoured man, to make himself and his neighbours miserable through years of quarrel.

Human nature was not his province; when he tried to sail

in it he was as a landlubber; when he tried to strike through it on foot, he was as a greenhorn in the woods to whom Natty Bumppo might deliver patronizing lectures. Cooper loves open air nature heartily, honestly, and he manages to impart his enthusiasm through his heavy ineptitudes of expression. His Indians are part of nature, like the wild animals; we accept them, we do not know enough about them to question their "psychology."

It is a tribute to Cooper that no American since his time, for all our real or pretended gains in ethnological knowledge, has made any better Indians. Of late years western stories have recorded the contact of our civilization with the rem$ nants of the better tribes of red men whom we have debauched and cheated, and with the dirty, unheroic savages of the plains. But few of the later writers seem to have been really fond of the Indians, to have drawn them as convincing heroes or interesting villains.

Men who go north and meet the woods Indian still unspoiled (I am thinking especially of one sympathetic and shrewd explorer) tell us that they find the living brother of Cooper's bronze hero, dignified, of high honour, stoical and eloquent. Cooper's red heroes are at least as convincing as many of the paleface heroes of romance whom we accept. Uncas and Chingachgook will bear scrutiny as well as Rob Roy and Robin Hood. It is with them, the figures of myth, that Natty Bumppo belongs; he is not an American character but a fabulous personage, like Ulysses, Achilles, King Arthur, and the adorable pirates of Howard Pyle and Stevenson. He has taken his place in this gallery of demigods and held it

for a century. There he seems likely to remain until we close the institution forever and the innocent credulity which is the postulate of romance shall become an atrophied function in man.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

James Fenimore Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, September 15, 1789; he died at Cooperstown, New York, September 14, 1851. Cooperstown was settled by his father, who owned a large tract of land there. In Cooper's boyhood it was wilderness, and "The Pioneers" is a picture of the country. He went to Yale College, but was dismissed for a misdemeanour in his third year. Then he entered the merchant service for a year, after which he enlisted in the navy and served as midshipman four years. He married, resigned from the navy, and became a gentleman farmer, first on Long Island, then at Cooperstown. He went to England in 1826, returned to America in 1833. He wrote three books to attack monarchy and uphold republicanism, two books to attack the vices of his countrymen, and three books to uphold the landlords in their fight with settlers; he was one of the landlords. His controversies made the most widely read author the most unpopular man in America. He was

an honest fighter and showed in his life some of the qualities and defects of his books.

3

His works are: Precaution, 1820; The Spy, 1821; The Pioneers, 1823; The Pilot, 1823; Lionel Lincoln, 1823-1824; The Last of the Mohicans, 1826; the Prairie, 1827; The Red Rover, 1828; Notions of the Americans, 1828; The Wept of

the Wish-ton-wish, 1829; The Water Witch, 1830; The Bravo, 1831; The Heidenmauer, 1832; The Headsman, 1833; The Monikins, 1835; Sketches of Switzerland, 1835; Gleanings in Europe (France, 1837; England, 1837; Italy, 1838); The American Democrat, 1838; The Chronicles of Cooperstown, 1838; Homeward Bound, 1838; Home as Found, 1838; History of the Navy of the United States, 1839; The Pathfinder, 1840; Mercedes of Castile, 1840; The Deerslayer, 1841; The Two Admirals, 1842; Wing-and-Wing, 1842; Wyandotte, 1843; Ned Myers, 1843; Afloat and Ashore, 1844; Satanstoe, 1845; The Chainbearer, 1845; Lives of Distinguished Naval Officers, 1846; The Redskins, 1846; The Crater, 1847; Jack Tier, 1848; The Oak Openings, 1848; The Sea Lions, 1849; The Ways of the Hour, 1850.

I know of no good essay on Cooper, except that on his "Literary Offenses" by Mark Twain, which is amusing and is a suggestive discourse on the art of fiction; but it should be taken with a grain of sugar. Professor Lounsbury's “Life” in American Men of Letters is conscientious.

CHAPTER IV

EMERSON

SOME thinkers are so candid and so wise in formulating their relations in life, that they become the best critics of themselves and their generation. What a man a hundred years later may say of them is truest when it is but a slight revision of their own account of their personal destinies and surroundings. Emerson is one of these completely self-expressed recorders of life. Did any one else ever more thoroughly obey the Socratic injunction? Emerson epitomizes his era and his neighbourhood. His mind is open to the prevailing winds of thought from all quarters. As he says of Swedenborg, he lies abroad upon his times; his significance absorbs a multitude of lesser men; his eminence grows more imposing as the ephemeral which was his daily partner sinks out of sight. In his later years he made some "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," to which one has but to add for him "quorum pars maxima fuit," in order to make it the best possible introduction to his life and writings.

"The key to the period" the period of his young manhood-"appeared to be," he says, "that the mind had become aware of itself." After Kant those who pursued philosophy analyzed their instrument of thought, scrutinized with a mixture of credulous wonder and scepticism the mental