troop of mounted pioneers, he penetrated into the territories of the warlike Pawnees, explored the prairies and forests, chased the wild horse and the buffalo, slept in the open air by the camp-fire or in the Indian wigwam. This expedition inspired a charming book. The recent Life of Mahomet and his Successors is not a very clever production for so loveable and gracious a talent.

SECTION VIII.

THE NOVELIST, FENNIMORE COOPER.

With Washington Irving appears the first light of vivid originality, which lends a halo to American literature.

This dawn will grow with Fennimore Cooper.

the

In his first romances, which awakened the attention of Europe, all is American, descriptions, inspirations, ideas, personages; he copies only translantic nature; certainly, he reproduces it minutely, long, without pause, without perspective, but he is always American. You find his pictures rather dry, fatiguing, by the fidelity of their details; coldness of his coloring displeases; you accuse him of prolixity; the intrigue seems to be woven with a sufficient clumsiness; and the play of the passions reveals itself with a mechanical punctuality, and a scrupulous stiffness. Now, these Calvinistic and American defects are not without interest; the most rigid Quakerism seems to preside over Cooper's narration; his style is the style of an indictment. Others are prodigal of rich coloring, and shade with boldness, valueless stories and things; Cooper acts like the most con

scientious of notaries; he gives an inventory and a description of the scene-a sheriff's officer levying, is less exact.

He describes with talent, and often in his detailed pictures, only one thing is wanting-life. While he rehearses the least circumstances attending an action, the action rests unaccomplished. This accumulation of small, particular facts, far from aiding the general effect of the picture, far from augmenting its interest, only seems to destroy it; the distracted and embarassed attention loses itself in this confused mass of minute particulars. Instead of disposing of his materials, arranging, commanding them as a master, he sometimes lets them get the better of him; he is their slave.

The author is as if in a jury-box, he tells the truth, and nothing but the truth. If two foemen fight with fierce rage upon the edge of a precipice, if there be between them issues of life and death, Cooper tells you the color of the rock; how many feet it rises above the level of the sea; whether it be of silex or granite; what plants grow there; what birds build there, its latitude. Another would be content to set forth the vicissitudes of the combat, the convulsions But this is not enough.

of suffering, the triumph, the agony. for Cooper. Every muscle of the combatants must be visible; he shows his subject not merely naked, but skinned.

If such a system were to prevail, a grain of sand or a butterfly's wing would serve as a text for volumes; there is no reason why authors should ever stop in their descriptions.

A savage comes upon the scene; you must describe his bow, his arrows, his tomahawk, his tobacco-pouch, and his pipe; the coarse sculpture with which these objects are adorned would fill more than one page; if, after that, you give to your reader, a biography of the child of the wilderness

and of his forefathers, look where you will get to. Let a painter of style, Holbein or Mieris, be faithful in minutia, scrupulously exact, and I understand him; his art can seize but a moment, and he must compensate for this by not neglecting a single particular. The business of poetry, on the contrary, is motion; it takes an action, describes its course, reproduces its mobility, follows its rapid progress, developes its causes and results. It has its grand masses and its valueless circumstances; a lively impulse draws it along. If it were to strive to reproduce everything, after the manner of still-life painters, it would deprive itself of its most precious

resources.

This is what happens to Cooper. There is a certain dryness in his finest pictures; half of what the romancer tells us, we are perfectly indifferent to the outlines are stiff and full of mannerism. The author seems to trouble himself much less about his characters, and the incidents which occupy them, than about the circumstances which surround them and the little particulars which accompany them. So that characters well drawn and true, are often in want of grace and freshness. Compared with the characters whom we meet in the world, they are like what flowers preserved in an herbal are to the flowers of the meadow. There are the petals, the stamens, the corolla, the leaves, but where is the dew of heaven, the breath of morning and of night, which embalms the flower in its perfumes, the sap that circulates through the minutest pistil and the frail column which supports it. All this I look for in vain; Nature, so vivid, gay, animated; in which respires a soul so ardent, in whose silence there is so much eloquence; Nature with its eternal, inexhaustible power of life appears sterile and dead in the pictures drawn by Cooper. The more they ought to have savage

grandeur and energy, the more is one astonished at the contrast between his manner and the objects which he describes.

These are the defects which the mighty talent of Cooper owes to the doctrinal severity and Calvinist rigidity inherent in the Anglo-American colonies. Yet, nevertheless, if Cooper be the slave of physical objects, that slavery has its power, he re-paints those objects with a dry sincerity. If he babble sometimes, he never lies. If he be prosaic, he is true. Read his chef-d'œuvre, the Pilot, a romance little understood, whose heroes are the ship and the sea. This work, admirable for its unity and its vigor, perfumed with odors of the deep, impregnated with foam and salt water, apotheosis of Man governing the Ocean as a cavalier his rebellious steed, could only have been written by an Anglo-American, passionate lover of the deep, fanatic for human industry, and its rudest triumphs.

No American writer before Cooper, had carried reproduction embellished by American thought and life so far. Irving himself, in rejuvenating the style and manner of Addison, had drawn too much from the antique and forgotten sources of English literature. Cooper's touch is more vigorous; there is a translantic freshness in his works.

This is an honor, a glory, a happiness, which few authors can enjoy. Rarely does one associate oneself so intimately with the civilization of his native land. And what a civilization! What a land! So vast and wild an .aspect! So gigantic a nature! There is something strange in this strife of our industries, of our arts, of our ideas, transplanted to a new soil, forced to grapple with savage life, and to conquer it.

The genius of the artist has not yet penetrated into the solitudes of America; you look for him vainly in the cities. It is the genius of the artisan which founded this civilization

and which sustains this Republic. You will find it in his romances; it is imprinted on his physiognomy.

An

Examine with attention this fine portrait which Madame de Mirbel has painted after nature. You perceive that this man, with his severe, vigilant eye, must observe physical objects with redoubtable attention and perseverance. austere simplicity reigns in those features, drawn with hardness, animated by powerful genius, and without mobility. If there be any curved lines, they are separated from one another by hollows, by profound furrows or wrinkles; energy, promptitude, decision, firmness immovable, power of attention, perseverance, these are the characteristics of that essentially American face. Apply to this exterior and physiognomical examination the rules of Doctor Gall, and you find a high, singularly cut forehead, a positive phrenologic curiosity. On one hand, the organs of eventuality, locality, and individuality (most employed by the romance writer) start out, as it were, and detach themselves in bumps; on the other hand, the organs of causality, comparison of objects and gaiety, separated from the former by an austere line, form a projection no less prominent. The restless, piercing eye seems to be always in search of some new observation; the strange smile, sardonic and severe, announces a faculty of irony governed by an inflexible reason. The compression of the lips indicates a silent concentration of thought, without which there is no real talent. Cooper's stature is tall; his manners are frank and simple. The vigor of his mind, and the strength of his republican conviction, give to his whole face and outward man a strong, manly expression, which does not accord with the ideas of refinement and recherché grace which civilization usually attaches to the literary profession.

When Robinson Crusoe perceived the trace of Friday's steps upon the beach, he was not more astounded than the