tinguished from the superficial circumstances of human experience, ever much engaged his thought. Delicate, refined, romantic sentiment he set forth in delicate, refined classic style. One may often wonder whether he had much to say; one can never question that he wrote beautifully.

This was the first recognised literary revelation of the New World to the Old. In a previous generation, Edwards had made American theology a fact for all Calvinists to reckon with. The political philosophers of the Revolution had made our political and legal thought matters which even the Old World could hardly neglect. When we come to pure literature, however, in which America should at last express to Europe what life meant to men of artistic sensitiveness living under the conditions of our new and emancipated society, what we find is little more than greater delicacy of form than existed in contemporary England. Irving is certainly a permanent literary figure. What makes him so is not novelty or power, but charming refinement.

III

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

IN 1820, American literature, at least so far as it has survived even in tradition, consisted of the work of Brockden Brown, then ten years dead, and of Irving's "Sketch Book," the first edition of which had appeared the year before. Apart from these works, what had been produced in this country was so obviously imitative as to express only a sense on the part of our numerous writers that they ought to copy the eminent authors of England. In 1820 appeared the first work of a new novelist, soon to attain not only permanent reputation in America, but also a European recognition more general than Irving's, if not so critically admiring. This was James Fenimore Cooper.

He was born in New Jersey in 1789. When he was about a year old his father, a gentleman of means, migrated to that region in the wilderness of Central New York where Cooperstown now preserves his name. Here the father founded and christened the settlement where for the rest of his life he maintained a position of almost feudal superiority. Here, in a country so wild as to be almost primeval, Cooper was brought up. Before he was fourteen years old he went to Yale College, then in charge of its great President, Timothy Dwight; but some academic trouble brought his college career to a premature end. The years between 1806 and 1810 he spent at sea, first as a kind of apprentice on a merchant vessel, afterward as an officer in the navy. In 1811, having married a lady of the Tory family of De Lancey, he resigned his commission.

After several years of inconspicuous life he was living at the time in the country near New York City - he read some now forgotten but temporarily fashionable English novel; and stirred by the notion that he could write a better, he rapidly produced a story, now almost as forgotten as its model, entitled "Precaution." This, published in 1820, was a tale of fashionable life in England, of which at the time Cooper knew very little. It had a measure of success, being mistaken for the anonymous work of some English woman of fashion. In the following year Cooper produced "The Spy," an historical novel of the American Revolution, then less than fifty years past. In 1823 came "The Pioneers," the first in publication of his Leather-Stocking tales; and just at the beginning of 1824 appeared "The Pilot," the first of his stories of the sea. "The Last of the Mohicans," perhaps his masterpiece, was published in 1826. In that year he went abroad, where he remained for seven years. He then came home,

and resided for most of the rest of his life on the ancestral estate at Cooperstown, where he died in 1851. Peculiarities of temper kept him throughout his later years in chronic quarrels with the public, with his neighbours, and with almost everybody but some of his personal friends, who remained strongly attached to him.

At the age of thirty, as we have seen, Cooper had never published anything; he died at the age of sixty-two; and in the incomplete list of his writings appended to Professor Lounsbury's biography of him there are some seventy entries. Of these hastily written works a number dealt with matters of fact; for one thing, with characteristic asperity and lack of tact, he wrote books about both America and England, in which, when discussing either country, he seemed chiefly animated by a desire to emphasise those truths which would be least welcome to the people concerned. He wrote, too, a considerable history of the American Navy which generously contributed to his personal difficulties. For years there had

been a dispute among naval people as to the comparative merit in the battle of Lake Erie of Perry, whose name is permanently associated with that victory, and his second in command, a subsequently distinguished officer named Elliott. In his account of this battle, Cooper reserved his opinion, simply stating facts; he was consequently held by the partisans both of Elliott and of Perry to have been what they certainly became, — venomously libellous. And long before the naval history appeared, he was already prosecuting newspaper after newspaper for personal criticisms, which but for these prosecutions - technically successful, by the way,would long ago have been forgotten.

A glance at Professor Lounsbury's bibliography, however, will show that with one exception all of Cooper's works which fall into this invidious class were written after the year in which Sir Walter Scott died, 1832; and that meantime, between 1820 and that date, he had produced at least ten novels which have maintained their position in literature. What is more, these novels almost immediately attained worldwide reputation; they were translated not only into French, but also into many other languages of continental Europe, in which they preserve popularity. Great as was his success at home and in England, indeed, it is sometimes said to have been exceeded by that which he has enjoyed throughout continental Europe. For this there is a reason which has been little remarked. The mere number and bulk of Cooper's works bear evidence to the fact that he must have written with careless haste. He had small literary training and little more tact in the matter of style than he displayed in his personal relations with people who did not enjoy his respect. Cooper's English, then, is often ponderous and generally clumsy. An odd result follows. His style is frequently such as could hardly be altered except for the better. A translator into whatever language can often say what Cooper said in a form more readable and agreeable than Cooper's own. Many of

the minor passages in his writings seem more felicitous in French translation than in his own words.

Yet his own words, though even in his best work impaired by clumsiness and prolixity, are well worth reading. He has been called the American Scott, and indeed was so called in his own time, for his reputation was literally contemporary with Sir Walter's. "The Spy" appeared in the same year with "Kenilworth" and "The Pirate; ""The Pilot" in the year of "Quentin Durward." Now, Scott and Cooper really belong to different categories of merit. Scott, saturated with the traditions of a brave old human world, was gifted with an imagination so robust as to have invented in the historical novel a virtually new form of literature, and to have enlivened it with a host of characters so vital that among the creatures of English imagination his personages rank almost next to Shakspere's. When Cooper began to write, "Waverley was already about six years old. In a certain sense, then, he may be said to have imitated Scott; it is doubtful, however, whether he was by any means so conscious of his model as Brockden Brown was of Godwin, or Irving of Goldsmith. The resemblance between Cooper and Scott lies chiefly in the fact that each did his best work in fiction dealing with the romantic past of his own country. By just so much, then, as the past of Cooper's America was a slighter, less varied, less human past than that of Scott's England or Scotland, Cooper's work must remain inferior to Scott's in human interest. Partly for the same reason, the range of character created by Cooper is at once less wide and far less highly developed than that brought into being by Sir Walter. Cooper, indeed, as the very difficulties of his later life would show, was temperamentally narrow in sympathy. It happened, for example, that he was an Episcopalian; consequently, if for no other reason, he detested the New England Puritans. Now and again he introduced them into his novels; and although he was too honest intentionally to misrepresent them, malig