It was obvious that they had no real reason
for dismissing him but his ghastly honesty, and that hardly offers
a decent excuse to depose a minister of the gospel.
for dismissing him but his ghastly honesty, and that hardly offers
a decent excuse to depose a minister of the gospel.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v06 to v10 - Cal to Fro
Two francs from people who are starving!
Who could
describe the tortures and sorrows of this family? The letter
contains perhaps what may put an end to their distress; perhaps
it would dry up their tears, satisfy their hunger, and protect
them from ejectment. And alas! whilst they are staring with
beating heart at the letter, and long so ardently to open it, the
postman is turning to go off with it and to rob them of all their
hopes. It is as if the ground was burning beneath their feet;
they stamp the floor from impatience and tear their hair.
Now the mother kneels down before the postman; she raises
her hands imploringly! Ha! he weeps - his heart is not of stone.
"Here" - he hands the letter to Frank-"take it; I am a poor
man too, but I can't stand this any longer. " Frank opens the
letter slowly with a trembling hand, cautiously undoing each and
every fold: but scarcely had he cast his eyes upon the contents,
## p. 3972 (#338) ###########################################
3972
HENRI CONSCIENCE
when the muscles of his face began to tremble convulsively; he
grows deadly pale, and a strange scream escapes his breast. He
supports himself upon the table, and the letter drops from his
hands on the floor. The room rings with lamentations, the
grandmother raises her hands to heaven, the mother sinks back-
ward from her chair as if paralyzed. Frank was struggling to
speak. It was evident he wanted to say something, but he could
not make it pass his trembling lips. At last his speech burst
forth" Grandmother, mother, father, I am a painter! Five
hundred francs for my picture! »
## p. 3973 (#339) ###########################################
3973
ROSE TERRY COOKE
(1827-1892)
OSE TERRY was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1827, of an
old and well-known family, and there nearly all the first
half of her life was passed. After that she was little there,
spending a number of years with her married sister in Collinsville,
and, for fifteen years following her own marriage, in Winsted, Con-
necticut. The last five years of her life were passed in Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, where she died in 1892.
An uneventful life, it might be said; but she had the tempera-
ment that makes events. Intensity was the keynote of her nature,
the source of her gifts and of her defects. In appearance she was
tall and slight, with dark hair, and large dark eyes that dominated
her slender oval face, and melted or sparkled with the mood or the
occasion. This versatility of temper was deeply founded in her, and
is manifest in her work, as in the deep overflowing sentiment of her
poems and the almost rollicking humor of her stories, or the tender-
ness suddenly giving way to bitterness.
Her first literary work was in verse; her earliest venture, before
she was twelve years old, being some verses sent privately to the Hart-
ford Courant, and appearing there to the great awe and delight of the
little author. As time went on, the creative impulse strengthened and
took shape, and she became known as a writer of true poetic feeling
and fine rhythmical instinct. In 1860 she gathered her poems into a
little volume, which won for her a wider recognition. Quite late in
life, in 1888, a complete collection of her poems was made; but she
had hardly surpassed that earlier work, which included such gems as
'Then,' Trailing Arbutus,' The Fishing Song. Besides these,
'The Two Villages' and 'Nounettes' should be named, as having
found their way into many hearts, and as being very perfect speci-
mens of her poetic gift. But it was in her stories that all her rich
powers were enlisted. She was one of the first to open by the story-
teller's art New England life to the reading public. This field has
since been worked to a finer culture, but she brought to the opening
of the ground a racy vigor and freshness, a spontaneity, a sparkle,
that we could ill spare for the sake of a more delicate finish, and
that make her characters stand out with an almost internal force.
Among the best of her stories are 'Freedom Wheeler's Controversy
## p. 3974 (#340) ###########################################
ROSE TERRY COOKE
3974
with Providence,' 'The Deacon's Week,' 'Polly Mariner,' 'A Town
Mouse and a Country Mouse,' and 'Odd Miss Todd. ' But it is hard
to make an exclusive choice among them. The Deacon's Week,'
which she esteemed the best thing she ever did, has had a world-
wide fame and usefulness, having been translated into as many as
four languages, and widely distributed as a tract. Between the years
1881 and 1891 she gathered her stories into book form, under these
titles: Somebody's Neighbors,' 'Root-Bound,' The Sphinx's Child-
ren,' 'Happy Dodd,' 'Huckleberries. ' In 1889 appeared her one
novel, 'Steadfast,' an interesting story with much fine character-
drawing. But it is as a writer of short stories of New England life
and of some lovely poems that Rose Terry Cooke will live.
THE REVEREND THOMAS TUCKER AS A PARSON
From Some Account of Thomas Tucker'
THE
HE Social duties of a settled clergyman might have pressed on
him onerously; but as if Providence saw that he was best
fitted for a life of solitude, just as the Green Street Church
had listened to their learned and pious pastor for the first time
after his installation in their pulpit, Keziah, his sister, was seized
with a sudden and dangerous illness. The kind women of the
church rallied around Thomas Tucker in this hour of his need,
and nursed Keziah with unremitting kindness; but all in vain.
She dropped out of life as silently and patiently as she had
endured living, and it remained only to say that the place which
knew her should now know her no more; for she left behind
her no dear friend but her brother, and not an enemy. Even
Thomas missed her rather as a convenience than a companion;
profiting in a certain sense by her death, as it aroused keenly
the sympathy of the church for his loss and loneliness, and
attached them to him by those links of pity that are proverbi-
ally almost as strong as love. In any other circumstances the
Green Street Church would no doubt have discovered, early in
their relation, that Mr. Tucker was as unfit for any pastoral
position as he had been for that post in the college chapel; but
much was forgiven him out of his people's abundant kindness,
and their respect for his learning, his simplicity, and his sincere
piety, forbade their objecting at first to his great deficiencies in
those things considered quite as needful to pulpit success as the
## p. 3975 (#341) ###########################################
ROSE TERRY COOKE
3975
It hap-
power of preaching and the abundance of knowledge.
pened, soon after Keziah's death, that Mr. Tucker was called
to officiate at the funeral of one of his wealthiest parishioners,
a man who had just come back from Europe, and been killed
in a railroad accident on the way to his home in Deerford. He
was personally unknown to Thomas Tucker, but his character
was notorious. He went to church, and bought an expensive
pew there, merely as a business speculation, it gave him weight
in the eyes of his fellows to be outwardly respectable as well
as rich; but he was niggardly to his family, ostentatious, over-
reaching, and cruel as death to the poor and struggling who
crossed his path or came into his employ.
The Reverend Mr. Tucker improved the occasion. He took
for the text of that funeral address, "What shall it profit a man
if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? " and after a
pungent comparison between the goods of this world and the
tortures of a future state, he laid down his spectacles and wound
up with, "And now, beloved, I have laid before you the two
conditions. Think ye that to-day he whose mortal part lieth
before you would not utter a loud Amen to my statement? Yea,
if there be truth in the Word of God, he who hath left behind
him the gain of life and greed is now crying aloud for a drop of
water to cool his parched tongue, and longing for an hour of
probation wherein to cast off the fetters of ill-gotten gold and
sit with Lazarus gathering crumbs in the company of dogs.
Wherefore, seeing that God hath spoken sharply to you all in
the sudden requirement of this rich man's soul, let his admoni-
tion sink into your souls; seek ye first the kingdom of God, and
cast in your lot with the poor of this world, rich in faith, and
be ready to answer joyfully when the Master calls. "
Of course the community was outraged; but for a few kindly
souls who stood by the poor parson, and insisted that Keziah's
death had unsettled his mind, and not a few who felt that he
had manfully told the truth without fear or favor, and could
not help feeling a certain respect for him, he would have been
asked, forcibly, to resign that very week. As it was, the indig-
nant widow went over to another denomination without delay.
"I will never set foot in that church again! " she said.
can one be safe, where a man is allowed to say whatever he
chooses in the pulpit? A ritual never can be personal or
insulting. I shall abide by the Prayer-Book hereafter. "
« How
## p. 3976 (#342) ###########################################
3976
ROSE TERRY COOKE
In due time this matter faded out of the popular mind, as all
things do in course of time, and nothing came between pastor
and people except a gradual sense on their part that Solomon
was right when he said, "Much study is a weariness to the flesh;"
not only the student's flesh, but also theirs who have to hear
reiterated all the dry outcome of such study.
But Parson Tucker's career was not to be monotonous. His
next astonishing performance was at a wedding. A very pretty
young girl, an orphan, living in the house of a relative, equally
poor but grasping and ambitious, was about to marry a young
man of great wealth and thoroughly bad character; a man whom
all men knew to be a drunkard, a gambler, and a dissolute fel-
low, though the only son of a cultivated and very aristocratic
family. Poor Emily Manning had suffered all those deprivations
and mortifications which result from living in a dependent con-
dition, aware that her presence was irksome and unwelcome,
while her delicate organization was overtaxed with work whose
limits were as indefinite as the food and clothing which were its
only reward. She had entered into this engagement in a sort of
desperation, goaded on by the widowed sister-in-law with whom
she lived, and feeling that nothing could be much worse than
her present position. Parson Tucker knew nothing of this, but
he did know the character of Royal Van Wyck; and when he
saw the pallid, delicate, shrinking girl beside this already worn-
out, debased, bestial creature, ready to put herself into his
hands for life, the "daimon" laid hold upon him and spake
again. He opened the service, as was customary in Hartland,
with a short address; but surely never did such a bridal exhort-
ation enter the ears of man and woman before.
"My friends," he began, "matrimony is not to be lightly un-
dertaken, as the matter of a day; it is an awful compact for life
and death that ye enter into here. Young man, if thou hast
not within thyself the full purpose to treat this woman with
pure respect, loyal service, and tender care; to guard her soul's
innocence as well as her bodily welfare; to cleave to her only,
and keep thyself from evil thoughts and base indulgences for
her sake, if thou art not fit, as well as willing, to be priest
and king of a clean household, standing unto her in character
and act in God's stead so far as man may, draw back even now
from thine intent; for a lesser purpose is sacrilege here, and
will be damnable infamy hereafter. "
## p. 3977 (#343) ###########################################
ROSE TERRY COOKE
3977
Royal Van Wyck opened his sallow green eyes with an inso-
lent stare. He would have sworn roundly had not some poor
instinct of propriety restrained him; as it was, he did not speak
but looked away. He could not bear the keen deep-set eyes
fixed upon him, and a certain gaunt majesty in the parson's
outstretched arm and severe countenance daunted him for the
moment. But Thomas Tucker saw that he had no intention of
accepting this good advice, so he turned to Emily.
"Daughter," he said, "if thou art about to enter into this
solemn relation, pause and consider. If thou hast not such con-
fidence in this man that thy heart faileth not an iota at the
prospect of a lifelong companionship with him; if thou canst not.
trust him utterly, respect him as thy lord and head, yield him
an obedience joyful and secure next to that thou givest to God;
if he is not to thee the one desirable friend and lover; if thou
hast a thought so free of him that it is possible for thee to
imagine another man in his place without a shudder; if thou art
not willing to give thyself to him in the bonds of a lifelong,
inevitable covenant of love and service; if it is not the best and
sweetest thing earth can offer thee to be his wife and the mother
of his children,-stop now; stop at the very horns of the altar,
lest thou commit the worst sin of woman, sell thy birthright for
a mess of pottage, and find no place for repentance, though thou
seek it carefully and with tears. "
Carried away with his zeal for truth and righteousness, speak-
ing as with the sudden inspiration of a prophet, Parson Tucker
did not see the terror and the paleness deepening, as he spoke,
on the bride's fair countenance. As he extended his hand toward
her she fell in a dead faint at his feet. All was confusion in an
instant. The bridegroom swore and Mrs. Manning screamed,
while the relations crowded about the insensible girl and tried to
revive her. She was taken at once up-stairs to her room, and the
wedding put off till the next day, as Mrs. Manning announced.
"And you won't officiate at it, old fellow! I'll swear to that! "
roared the baffled bridgroom with a volley of profane epithets,
shaking his fist in the parson's calm face.
"Having taken the sword, I am content to perish thereby,
even as Scripture saith," answered Thomas Tucker, stalking out
of the door.
That night as he sat in his study, the door opened softly, and
Emily Manning came in and knelt at the side of the parson's
## p. 3978 (#344) ###########################################
3978
ROSE TERRY COOKE
chair. "I have no place to go to, sir," she whispered, with
trembling lips. "You saved me to-day; will you help me now?
I was going to sin, but I didn't know it till you told me. ”
"Then it was not sin, my child," said Parson Tucker gently.
"Sin is conscious transgression, and from that thou hast instantly
departed. "
"But what could I do? " she asked, her eyes full of tears.
"I have no home. Marcia is tired of me, and I have no other
friends. I wanted a home so much. Oh, I was wrong, for I did
not love him. And now I have run away from Marcia, — she
was so dreadful,- and what shall I do? »
"Poor child! " he said tenderly. "Sit here. I will help.
My old woman, in the kitchen below, shall fetch thee to a
chamber. Keziah brought her with us; she is kind, and will
care for thee, while I go to bring a friend. " So saying, the
parson rung his bell for old Jane, gave the girl over to her
care, and set out himself for President Winthrop's house.
"I have brought you a good work," he said abruptly to Mrs.
Winthrop. "Come with me; there is a soul in need at my
house. "
Mrs. Winthrop was used to this sort of summons from the
parson. They had been good friends ever since the eccentric
interview brought about by Jack Mason's valentine, and when
charity was needed Eleanor Winthrop's heart and hand were
always ready for service. She put on hat and shawl, and went
with the parson to his house, hearing on the way all the story.
"Mr. Tucker," she said, as he finished the recital, "aren't
you going to make much trouble for yourself by your aggressive
honesty? "
Thomas looked at her, bewildered.
"But the truth is to be spoken! " he replied, as if that were
the end of the controversy.
And she was silent, recognizing the
fact that here conventions were useless, and self-preservation
not the first law of grace, if it is of nature.
All Mrs. Winthrop's kindliness was aroused by the pitiful
condition of Emily Manning. She consoled and counseled her
like a mother, and soon after took her into her household as
governess to the little girls whom Mr. Winthrop's first wife had
left him; making for the grateful girl a happy home, which in
after years she left to become the wife of a good man, toward
whom she felt all that Parson Tucker had required of her on
## p. 3979 (#345) ###########################################
ROSE TERRY COOKE
3979
that painful day which she hated now to remember. And as the
parson performed this ceremony he turned after the benediction
to Eleanor Winthrop, and said with a beam of noble triumph
on his hollow visage, "Blessed be the Lord! I have saved a soul
alive! »
But long before this happy sequel came about, he had other
opportunities to distinguish himself. There came a Sunday when
the service of infant baptism was to be performed; and when
the fair sweet babes, who had behaved with unusual decorum,
were returned to their mothers' arms, and the parson according
to order said, "Let us pray," he certainly offered the most
peculiar petition ever heard in the Green Street Church. After
expressing the usual desire that the baptized children might
up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, he went
grow
on:
Yea!
«But if it please thee, O Father, to recall these little ones
to thyself in the innocence of their infancy, we will rejoice and
give thanks, and sound thy praises upon the harp and timbrel.
with the whole heart we will praise thee; for we know the
tribulations and snares, the evil and folly and anguish, of this
life below; and we know that not one child of Adam, coming
to man's estate, is spared that bitter and woful cup that is
pressed out from the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil,
which
our progenitors ate of in thy garden of Paradise, and
thereby sinned and fell, and bequeathed to us their evil long-
ings
and habitual transgression. They are the blessed who are
taken
away in their infancy, and lie forever by green pastures
and still waters in the fields of heaven. We ask of thee no
greater or better gift for these lambs than early to be folded
where
none shall hurt or destroy in all thy holy mountain, and
love that is above all mother's love shall cradle them
the
throughout eternity. Amen! "
ble at
who
Not a mother in that congregation failed to shiver and trem-
this prayer, and tears fell fast and thick on the babes
slumbered softly in the tender arms that had gathered them.
home, after consecrating them to that God who yet they were
so unwilling should literally accept their offering. Fifty pairs
of eyes were turned on Parson Tucker with the look of a bear
robbed of its cubs; but far more were drowned in tears of mem-
ory and, regret, poignant still, but strangely soothed by this vivid
presentation of the blessedness wherein their loved and lost were
safely abiding.
## p. 3980 (#346) ###########################################
3980
ROSE TERRY COOKE
Much comment was exchanged in the church porch, after
service, on the parson's prayer.
"We ought to hold a special meeting to pray that the Lord
will not answer such a petition! " cried one indignant mother,
whose little flock were clinging about her skirts, and who had
left twin babies, yet unbaptized, at home.
"It is rather hard on you, aunty! " said the graceless Jack
Mason, the speaker's nephew, now transformed into an unprom-
ising young lawyer in Hartland. "You'd rather have your babies
sin and suffer with you than have 'em safe in their little graves,
hadn't you? I don't go with the parson myself. I didn't so
much mind his funeral gymnastic over old Baker, and his dispo-
sition of that party's soul in Hades, because I never before sup-
posed Roosevelt Baker had a soul, and it was quite reassuring to
be certain he met with his dues somewhere; but he's worse than
Herod about the babies! "
However, the parson did not hear or know what was said of
hi and in an ignorance that was indeed bliss continued to
preach and minister to his people in strict accordance with his
own views of duty. His next essay was a pastoral visit to one
of his flock, recently a widow, a woman weak in body and mind
both; desirous above all things to be proper and like other
people, to weep where she must, smile when she ought, wear
clothes like the advance-guard of fashion, and do "the thing"
to be done always, whether it was the right and true thing
or not.
Her husband had spent all her fortune in speculation, taken
to drink as a refuge from folly and reproach at home, and
under the influence of the consoling fluid had turned his wife
out-of-doors whenever he felt in the mood; kicked her, beaten
her, and forced her, in fear of her life, over and over to steal
from her own house and take refuge with the neighbors, and
ask from them the food she was not allowed at home. At last
the end came. Parson Tucker was sent for to see the widow
and arrange for funeral services. She had not been present at
the Baker funeral, or indeed been in Deerford for some years
after that occasion, so she adhered to the conventions; and when
Parson Tucker reached the house he was shown into a dark-
ened room, where the disconsolate woman sat posed already in
deep mourning, a widow's cap perched upon her small head.
A woman would have inferred at once that Mrs. Spring had
## p. 3981 (#347) ###########################################
ROSE TERRY COOKE
3981
anticipated the end of Joe's last attack of mania à potu, and pre-
pared these funeral garments beforehand; but Thomas Tucker
drew no such conclusions. He sat down silently and grimly, after
shaking hands with Mrs. Spring, and said nothing. She began
the conversation: —
"This is a dreadful affliction, Mr. Tucker. I don't know how
I shall live through it. "
"It is terrible, indeed," said the parson.
"I do not wonder,
madam, that you mourn to see your partner cut off in his sins,
without time for repentance; but no doubt you feel with grati-
tude the goodness which hath delivered you from so sore a
burden. "
"What? " screamed the widow.
"I speak of God's mercy in removing from your house one
who made your life a terror, and your days full of fear and suf-
fering; you might have been as others, bereaved and desolate,
and mourning to your life's end. "
"I don't know what you mean, Parson Tucker," said Mrs.
Spring sharply, removing a dry handkerchief from unwet eyes.
"Poor dear Joseph is taken away from me, and I'm left a
desolate widow, and you talk in this way! I'm sure he had the
best of hearts that ever was; it was only, as you may say, acci-
dental to him to be a little overcome at times, and I'm—I'm –
o-h! "
some well-
He rose up
Here she gave a little hysterical scream, and did
executed sobbing; but the parson did not mind it.
before her, gaunt and gray.
"Madam, did not this man beat,
and abuse, and insult, and starve you, when he was living? Or
have I been misinformed ? »
"Well-oh dear, what dreadful questions! "
"Did he? " thundered the parson.
"He didn't mean to; he was excited, Mr. Tucker.
He- »
"He was drunk. And is that excuse? Not so, madam. You
know, and I know, that his death is a relief and a release to
you. I cannot condole with you on that which is not a sorrow; "
and he walked rigidly out of the door.
Is it necessary to say that Mr. Spring's funeral did not take
place in Deerford ? His widow suddenly remembered that he had
been born in a small town among the hills of West Massachu-
setts, and she took his body thither, to be "laid beside his dear
payrents," as she expressed it.
## p. 3982 (#348) ###########################################
3982
ROSE TERRY COOKE
Things had now come to a bad pass for Parson Tucker. The
church committee had held more than one conference over their
duty toward him.
It was obvious that they had no real reason
for dismissing him but his ghastly honesty, and that hardly offers
a decent excuse to depose a minister of the gospel. They hardly
knew how to face the matter, and were in this state of perplexity
when Mr. Tucker announced, one Sunday, after the sermon, that
he would like to see the church committee at his study on Tues-
day night; and accordingly they assembled there and found
President Winthrop with the parson.
"Brethren," said Thomas Tucker, after the preliminary wel-
come had passed, "I have sent for you to-night to say, that
having now been settled over your church eight years, I have
found the salary you paid me so much more than was needed
for my bodily support that I have laid by each year as the sur-
plus came to hand, that I might restore to you your goods.
The sum is now something over eight thousand dollars, and is
placed to the credit of your chairman, in the First Deerford
Bank. " The committee stared at each other as if each one
were trying to arouse himself from sleep. The chairman at last
spoke :-
"But Mr. Tucker, this is unheard-of!
-
The salary is yours;
we do not desire to take it back; we can't do it. "
"That which I have not earned, Brother Street, is not mine.
I am a solitary man; my expenses are light. It must be as I
said. Moreover, I have to say that I hereby withdraw from
your pulpit, of necessity. I have dealt with our best physicians
concerning a certain anguish of the breast which seizes me at
times unawares, and they all concur that an evil disease lieth
upon me.
I have not much time to live, and I would fain with-
draw from activities and duties that are external, and prepare for
the day that is at hand. "
The committee were pained as well as shocked. They felt
guilty to think how they had plotted this very thing among
themselves; and they felt too a certain awe and deep respect for
this simple unworldly nature, this supernatural integrity. Mr.
Street spoke again; his voice was husky:-
"If this is so, Mr. Tucker, we must of course accept your
resignation; but my dear pastor, keep the money! You will
need care and comforts, now this trouble has come on you. We
can't take it back. "
## p. 3983 (#349) ###########################################
ROSE TERRY COOKE
3983
Parson Tucker looked at him with a grave sweet smile.
« I
thank you, brother, but I have a private store. My sister left
her worldly goods to me, and there is enough and to spare for
my short sojourn," he answered.
"But it isn't according to the fitness of things that we should
take your salary back, Parson Tucker," put in bustling Mr.
Taylor. "What upon earth should we do with it? "
"Friend," said the parson, "the eternal fitness of things is
but the outcome of their eternal verity. I have not, as I said,
earned that wage, and I must restore it: it is for you to decide
what end it shall serve in the church. ”
A few more words passed between them, and then each
wrung the parson's hand and left him, not all with unmoved
hearts or dry eyes.
"I don't wonder he's going to die! " exclaimed Mr. Street, as
the committee separated at a street corner. "He's altogether
too honest to live! "
From that day Thomas Tucker sank quietly toward his grave.
Friends swarmed about him, and if delicacies of food could have
saved him, the dainty stores poured in upon him would have
renewed his youth; but all was in vain.
President Winthrop sat by him one summer day, and seeing
a sad gleam in his sunken eye, asked gently, "You are ready
and willing to go, Brother Tucker? " nothing doubting a glad
assent.
But the parson was honest to the last. "No," he said, "I do
not want to die; I am afraid. I do not like strange and new
things. I do not want to leave my books and my study. "
"But, dear brother,” broke in the astonished president, "it is
a going home to your Father's house! "
"I know not what a home is, friend, in the sense of regret or
longing for one. My early home was but as the egg to the
bird, a prison wherein I was born, from which I fled; nor was
my knowledge of a father one that commends itself as a type
of good. I trust, indeed, that the Master will take me by the
hand, even as he did Peter upon the water; but the utterance
of my secret soul is even that of the apostle with the keys:
'Lord, save, or I perish! >»
"But you have been a power for good, and a close follower
of Peter's Lord," said Mr. Winthrop, altogether at a loss for the
proper thing to say to this peculiar man.
## p. 3984 (#350) ###########################################
3984
ROSE TERRY COOKE
"One thing alone have I been enabled to do, Brother Win-
throp, for which I can with heart and soul thank God, even at
this hour. Yea, I thank him that I have been enabled to speak
the truth even in the face of lies and deceptions, through his
upholding. " A smile of unearthly triumph filled every line of
the wasted face, and lit his eyes with a flash of divine light as
he said this. He grasped close the friendly hand he was hold-
ing, turned his cheek to the pillow, and closed his eyes, passing
into that life of truth and love that awaited him, even as a
child that lies down in the darkness, trembling, fearful, and
weary, but awakes, in the dawn of a new day, in the heart of
home.
"Still," said President Winthrop to his wife, as they walked
home after the funeral, "I believe in the good old proverb,
Eleanor, that the truth is not to be spoken at all times. '»
"And I never believed in it so little! " she cried, indig-
nantly. "Think what a record he has left; what respect hangs
about his memory! Do we know how many weak souls have
relied on his example, and held to the truth when it was hard,
because he did and could? It is something to be heroic in these
days, even if it is unpopular! "
The president shrugged his shoulders.
From The Sphinx's Children and Other People's': copyrighted 1886, by
Ticknor and Company
## p. 3984 (#351) ###########################################
## p. 3984 (#352) ###########################################
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## p. 3984 (#354) ###########################################
JAMES FEN MORE COOPER
## p. 3985 (#355) ###########################################
3985
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
(1789-1851)
BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE
M
men
ORE than a century ago, in the town of Burlington, New Jer-
sey, was born a man destined to become one of the best
known figures of his time. He was as devout an American
as ever lived, for he could arraign the shortcomings of his country-
as stanchly as he could defend and glorify their ideals. He
entered fearlessly and passionately into the life around him, seeing
intensely, yet sometimes blind; feeling ardently, yet not always
aright; acting with might and conviction, yet not seldom amiss. He
loved and revered good, scorned and hated evil, and with the
strength and straightforwardness of a bull championed the one and
gored the other. He worshiped justice, but lacked judgment; his
brain, stubborn and logical, was incongruously mated with a deep
and tender heart. A brave and burly backwoods gentleman was he,
with a smattering of the humanities from Yale, and a dogged pre-
cision of principle and conduct from six years in the navy. He had
the iron memory proper to a vigorous organization and a serious,
observant mind; he was tirelessly industrious-in nine-and-twenty
years he published thirty-two novels, many of them of prodigious
length, besides producing much matter never brought to light. His
birth fell at a noble period of our history, and his surroundings fos-
tered true and generous manhood. Doubtless many of his contem-
poraries were as true men as he: but to Cooper in addition was
vouchsafed the gift of genius; and that magic quality dominated
and transfigured his else rugged and intractable nature, and made
his name known and loved over all the earth. No author has been
more widely read than he; no American author has won even a tithe
of his honorable popularity.
Though Jersey may claim his birthplace, Cooper's childhood from
his second to his fourteenth year was passed on the then frontiers of
civilization, at Cooperstown on the Susquehanna. There in the pri-
meval forest, hard by the broad Lake Otsego and the wide-flowing
river, the old Judge built his house and laid out his town. Trees,
mountains, wild animals, and wild men nursed the child, and im-
planted in him seeds of poetry and wrought into the sturdy fibres of
his mind golden threads of creative imagination. Then round about
VII-250
## p. 3986 (#356) ###########################################
3986
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
the hearth at night, men of pith and character told tales of the
Revolution, of battle, adventure, and endurance, which the child,
hearing, fed upon with his soul, and grew strong in patriotism and
independence. Nobility was innate in him; he conceived lofty and
sweet ideals of human nature and conduct, and was never false to
them thereafter. The ideal Man—the ideal Woman - he believed in
them to the end. And more than twice or thrice in his fictions we
find personages like Harvey Birch, Leatherstocking, Long Tom Cof-
fin, the jailer's daughter in The Bravo,' and Mabel Dunham and
Dew-of-June in The Pathfinder,' which give adequate embodiment
to his exalted conception of the possibilities of his fellow creatures.
For though portrayal of character in the ultra-refined modern sense
of the term was impossible to Cooper, yet he perceived and could
impressively present certain broad qualities of human nature, and
combine them in consistent and memorable figures. Criticism may
smile now and then, and psychology arch her eyebrows, but the fig-
ures live, and bid fair to be lusty long after present fashions have
been forgotten.
But of the making of books, Cooper, during the first three decades
of his life, had no thought at all. He looked forward to a career of
action; and after Yale College had given him a glimpse of the range
of knowledge, he joined a vessel as midshipman, with the prospect
of an admiral's cocked hat and glory in the distance. The glory,
however, with which the ocean was to crown him, was destined to be
gained through the pen and not the sword, when at the age of five-
and-thirty he should have published The Pilot. ' As a naval officer,
he might have helped to whip the English in the War of 1812; but
as author of the best sea story in the language he conquered all the
world of readers unaided. Meanwhile, when he was twenty-one years
old he married a Miss Delancey, whose goodness (according to one of
his biographers) was no less eminent than his genius, and who died
but a short time before him. The joys of wedded life in a home of
his own outweighed with him the chances of warlike distinction, and
he resigned his commission and took command of a farm in West-
chester County; and a gentleman farmer, either there or at his boy-
hood's home in Cooperstown, he remained till the end, with the
exception of his seven-years' sojourn in Europe.
His was a bodily frame built to endure a hundred years, and the
robustness of his intelligence and the vivacity of his feelings would
have kept him young throughout; yet he died of a dropsy, at the
prime of his powers, in 1851, heartily mourned by innumerable
friends, and having already outlived all his enmities. He died, too,
the unquestioned chief of American novelists; and however superior
to his may have been the genius of his contemporary Walter Scott,
b
## p. 3987 (#357) ###########################################
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
3987
the latter can hardly be said to have rivaled him in breadth of
dominion over readers of all nationalities. Cooper was a household
name from New York to Ispahan, from St. Petersburg to Rio Janeiro;
and the copyright on his works in various languages would to-day
amount to a large fortune every year. Three generations have passed
since with The Spy' he won the sympathies of mankind; and he
holds them still. It is an enviable record. And although in respect
of actual quality of work produced there have been many geniuses
greater than he, yet it is fair to remember that Cooper's genius had
a great deal of stubborn raw material to subdue before it could pro-
ceed to produce anything. It started handicapped. As it was, the
man wasted years of time and an immensity of effort in doing, or
trying to do, things he had no business with. He would be a politi-
cal reformer, a critic of society, an interpreter of law, even a master
grammarian. He would fight to the finish all who differed from him
in opinion; he fought and-incredible as it may seem- he actually
conquered the American press. He published reams of stuff which
no one now reads and which was never worth reading, to enforce his
views and prove that he was right and others wrong.
All this power
was misdirected; it might have been applied to producing more and
better Leatherstockings and Pilots. Perhaps he hardly appreciated
at its value that one immortal thing about him,- his genius,—and
was too much concerned about his dogmatic and bull-headed Self.
Unless the world confessed his infallibility, he could not be quite at
peace with it.
Such an attitude arouses one's sense of humor; it
would never have existed had Cooper possessed a spark of humor
himself. But he was uncompromisingly serious on all subjects, or if
at times he tried to be playful, we shudder and avert our faces. It
is too like Juggernaut dancing a jig. And he gave too much weight
to the verdict of the moment, and not enough to that judgment of
posterity to which the great Verulam was content to submit his
fame. Who cares to-day, or how are we the better or the worse, if
Cooper were right or wrong in his various convictions? What con-
cerns us is that he wrote delightful stories of the forest and the sea;
it is in those stories, and not in his controversial or didactic homilies,
that we choose to discover his faith in good and ire against evil.
Cooper, in short, had his limitations; but with all his errors, we may
take him and be thankful.
Moreover, his essential largeness appears in the fact that in the
midst of his bitterest conflicts, at the very moment when his pam-
phlets and "satires" were heating the printing-presses and people's
tempers, a novel of his would be issued, redolent with pure and
serene imagination, telling of the prairies and the woods, of deer and
panther, of noble redskins and heroic trappers. It is another world,
## p. 3988 (#358) ###########################################
3988
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
harmonious and calm; no echo of the petty tumults in which its
author seemed to live is audible therein. But it is a world of that
author's imagination, and its existence proves that he was greater
and wiser than the man of troubles and grievances who so noisily
solicits our attention. The surface truculence which fought and
wrangled was distinct from the interior energy which created and
harmonized, and acted perhaps as the safety-valve to relieve the
inward region from disturbance.
The anecdote of how Cooper happened to adopt literature as a
calling is somewhat musty, and its only significant feature is the
characteristic self-confidence of his exclamation, on laying down a
stupid English novel which he had been reading to his wife, "I
could write as well as that myself! " Also in point is the fact that
the thing he wrote, 'Precaution,' is a story of English life, whereof
at that time he had had no personal experience. One would like to
know the name of the novel which touched him off; if it was stu-
pider and more turgid than 'Precaution' it must have been a curi-
osity. Cooper may have thought otherwise, or he may have been
stimulated by recognition of his failure, as a good warrior by the
discovery that his adversary is a more redoubtable fighter than he
had gauged him to be. At all events, he lost no time in engaging
once more, and this time he routed his foe, horse and foot. One is
reminded of the exclamation of his own Paul Jones, when requested
to surrender-"I haven't begun to fight! " (The Spy' is not a per-
fect work of art, but it is a story of adventure and character such as
the world loves and will never tire of. Precaution' had showed
not even talent; 'The Spy' revealed unquestionable genius. This is
not to say that its merit was actually unquestioned at the time it
came out; our native critics hesitated to commit themselves, and
awaited English verdicts. But the nation's criticism was to buy the
book and read it, and they and other nations have been so doing
ever since. Nothing in literature lasts longer, or may be oftener
re-read with pleasure, than a good tale of adventure. The incidents
are so many and the complications so ingenious that one forgets the
detail after a few years, and comes to the perusal with fresh appe-
tite. Cooper's best books are epics, possessing an almost Homeric
vitality. The hero is what the reader would like to be, and the lat-
ter thrills with his perils and triumphs in his success. Ulysses is
Mankind, making sweet uses of adversity, and regenerate at last;
and Harvey Birch, Leatherstocking, and the rest are congenial types
of Man, acting up to high standards in given circumstances.
But oh! the remorseless tracts of verbiage in these books, the
long toiling through endless preliminaries, as of a too unwieldy army
marching and marshaling for battle! It is Cooper's way; he must
K_KAMAR
## p. 3989 (#359) ###########################################
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
3989
warm to his work gradually, or his strength cannot declare itself.
His beginnings abound in seemingly profitless detail, as if he must
needs plot his every footstep on the map ere trusting himself to take
the next. Balzac's method is similar, but possesses a spiritual charm
lacking in the American's. The modern ability of Stevenson and
Kipling to plunge into the thick of it in the first paragraph was
impossible to this ponderous pioneer. Yet when at length he does
begin to move, the impetus and majesty of his advance are tremen-
dous; as in the avalanche, every added particular of passive prepara-
tion adds weight and power to the final action. Cooper teaches
us, Wellington-like, "what long-enduring hearts can do! " Doubtless,
therefore, any attempt to improve him by blue-penciling his tedious-
ness would result in spoiling him altogether. We must accept him
as he is. Dullness past furnishes fire to present excitement. It is a
mistake to "skip" in reading Cooper; if we have not leisure to read
him as he stands, let us wait until we have.
'Precaution' and 'The Spy' both appeared in 1821, when the
author was about thirty-two years old. Two years passed before the
production of 'The Pioneers,' wherein Cooper draws upon memory
no less than upon imagination, and in which Leatherstocking first
makes our acquaintance. As a rule (proved by exceptions), the best
novels of great novelists have their scene in surroundings with which
the writer's boyhood was familiar. The Pioneers' and the ensuing
series of Leatherstocking tales are placed in the neighborhood of the
lake and river which Cooper, as a child, had so lovingly learned by
heart. Time had supplied the requisite atmosphere for the pictures
that he drew, while the accuracy of his memory and the minuteness
of his observation assured ample realism. In the course of the nar-
rative the whole mode of life of a frontier settlement from season to
season appears before us, and the typical figures which constitute it.
It is history, illuminated by romance and uplifted by poetic imagina-
tion. One of our greatest poets, speaking after the second-thought
of thirty years, declared Cooper to be a greater poet than Hesiod or
Theocritus. But between a poet and a prose-writer capable of poetic
feeling there is perhaps both a distinction and a difference.
The birth-year of the Pioneers' and of the 'Pilot' are again the
same. Now Cooper leaves, for the time, the backwoods, and em-
barks upon the sea. He is as great upon one element as upon the
other of whom else can that be affirmed? We might adapt the
apophthegm on Washington to him: he was "first on land, first
on sea, and first in the hearts of his readers. " In The Pilot' the
resources of the writer's invention first appear in full development.
His personal experience of the vicissitudes and perils of a seaman's
life stood him in good stead here, and may indeed have served him
## p. 3990 (#360) ###########################################
3990
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
well in the construction of all his fictions. Fertility in incident and
the element of suspense are valuable parts of a story-teller's outfit,
and Cooper excelled in both; he might have been less adequately
furnished in these respects had he never served on a man-of-war.
Be that as it may, The Pilot' is generally accepted as the best sea
story ever written. Herman Melville and his disciple Clark Russell
have both written lovingly and thrillingly of the sea and seamen,
but neither of them has rivaled their common original. Long Tom
Coffin is the peer of Leatherstocking himself, and might have been
made the central figure of as many and as excellent tales. The
three books-'The Spy,' 'The Pioneers,' and 'The Pilot'-form a
trilogy of itself more than sufficient to support a mighty reputation;
and they were all written before Cooper was thirty-five years old.
Indeed, his subsequent works did not importantly add to his fame;
and many of them of course might better never have been written.
'Lionel Lincoln,' in 1825, fell far short of the level of the previous
romances; but The Last of the Mohicans,' in the year following, is
again as good as the best, and the great figure of Leatherstocking
even gains in solidity and charm. As a structure, the story is easily
criticized, but the texture is so sound and the spirit so stirring that
only the cooler after-thought finds fault. Faults which would ship-
wreck a lesser man leave this leviathan almost unscathed.
At this juncture occurred the unfortunate episode in Cooper's
career. His fame having spread over two continents, he felt a
natural desire to visit the scene of his foreign empire and make
acquaintance with his subjects there; it seemed an act of expedi-
ency too to get local color for romances which should appeal more
directly to these friends across the sea. Upon these pretexts he set
forth, and in due season arrived in Paris. Here however he chanced
to read a newspaper criticism of the United States government;
and true to his conviction that he was the heaven-appointed agent
to correct and castigate the world, he sat down and wrote a sharp
rejoinder. He was well furnished with facts, and he exhibited
plenty of acumen in his statement of them; though his cumbrous and
pompous style, as of a schoolmaster laying down the law, was not
calculated to fascinate the lectured ones. In the controversy which
ensued he found himself arrayed against the aristocratic party,
with only the aged Lafayette to afford him moral support; his argu-
ments were not refuted, but this rendered him only the more
obnoxious to his hosts, who finally informed him that his room was
more desirable than his company. As a Parthian shaft, our redoubt-
able champion launched a missile in the shape of a romance of
ancient Venice (The Bravo'), in which he showed how the perver-
sion of institutions devised to insure freedom, inevitably brings to
## p. 3991 (#361) ###########################################
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
3991
pass freedom's opposite. It is a capital novel, worthy of Cooper's
fame; but it neither convinced nor pleased the effete monarchists
whom it arraigned. In the end accordingly he returned home, with
the consciousness of having vindicated his countrymen, but of having
antagonized all Europe in the process. It may be possible to win
the affection of a people while proving to them that they are fools
and worse; but if so, Cooper was not the man to accomplish the
feat. It should be premised here that during his residence abroad
he had written, in addition to The Bravo,' three novels which may
be placed among his better works; and one, The Wept of Wish-ton-
Wish,' whose lovely title is its only recommendation. The Red
Rover' was by some held to be superior even to The Pilot'; and
'Heidenhauer' and 'The Headsman of Berne' attempt, not with
entire success, to repeat the excellence of The Bravo. ' He had
also published a volume of letters critical of national features,
entitled 'Notions of the Americans,' which may have flattered his
countrymen's susceptibilities, but did nothing to assuage the wounded
feelings of those with whom he contrasted them.
describe the tortures and sorrows of this family? The letter
contains perhaps what may put an end to their distress; perhaps
it would dry up their tears, satisfy their hunger, and protect
them from ejectment. And alas! whilst they are staring with
beating heart at the letter, and long so ardently to open it, the
postman is turning to go off with it and to rob them of all their
hopes. It is as if the ground was burning beneath their feet;
they stamp the floor from impatience and tear their hair.
Now the mother kneels down before the postman; she raises
her hands imploringly! Ha! he weeps - his heart is not of stone.
"Here" - he hands the letter to Frank-"take it; I am a poor
man too, but I can't stand this any longer. " Frank opens the
letter slowly with a trembling hand, cautiously undoing each and
every fold: but scarcely had he cast his eyes upon the contents,
## p. 3972 (#338) ###########################################
3972
HENRI CONSCIENCE
when the muscles of his face began to tremble convulsively; he
grows deadly pale, and a strange scream escapes his breast. He
supports himself upon the table, and the letter drops from his
hands on the floor. The room rings with lamentations, the
grandmother raises her hands to heaven, the mother sinks back-
ward from her chair as if paralyzed. Frank was struggling to
speak. It was evident he wanted to say something, but he could
not make it pass his trembling lips. At last his speech burst
forth" Grandmother, mother, father, I am a painter! Five
hundred francs for my picture! »
## p. 3973 (#339) ###########################################
3973
ROSE TERRY COOKE
(1827-1892)
OSE TERRY was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1827, of an
old and well-known family, and there nearly all the first
half of her life was passed. After that she was little there,
spending a number of years with her married sister in Collinsville,
and, for fifteen years following her own marriage, in Winsted, Con-
necticut. The last five years of her life were passed in Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, where she died in 1892.
An uneventful life, it might be said; but she had the tempera-
ment that makes events. Intensity was the keynote of her nature,
the source of her gifts and of her defects. In appearance she was
tall and slight, with dark hair, and large dark eyes that dominated
her slender oval face, and melted or sparkled with the mood or the
occasion. This versatility of temper was deeply founded in her, and
is manifest in her work, as in the deep overflowing sentiment of her
poems and the almost rollicking humor of her stories, or the tender-
ness suddenly giving way to bitterness.
Her first literary work was in verse; her earliest venture, before
she was twelve years old, being some verses sent privately to the Hart-
ford Courant, and appearing there to the great awe and delight of the
little author. As time went on, the creative impulse strengthened and
took shape, and she became known as a writer of true poetic feeling
and fine rhythmical instinct. In 1860 she gathered her poems into a
little volume, which won for her a wider recognition. Quite late in
life, in 1888, a complete collection of her poems was made; but she
had hardly surpassed that earlier work, which included such gems as
'Then,' Trailing Arbutus,' The Fishing Song. Besides these,
'The Two Villages' and 'Nounettes' should be named, as having
found their way into many hearts, and as being very perfect speci-
mens of her poetic gift. But it was in her stories that all her rich
powers were enlisted. She was one of the first to open by the story-
teller's art New England life to the reading public. This field has
since been worked to a finer culture, but she brought to the opening
of the ground a racy vigor and freshness, a spontaneity, a sparkle,
that we could ill spare for the sake of a more delicate finish, and
that make her characters stand out with an almost internal force.
Among the best of her stories are 'Freedom Wheeler's Controversy
## p. 3974 (#340) ###########################################
ROSE TERRY COOKE
3974
with Providence,' 'The Deacon's Week,' 'Polly Mariner,' 'A Town
Mouse and a Country Mouse,' and 'Odd Miss Todd. ' But it is hard
to make an exclusive choice among them. The Deacon's Week,'
which she esteemed the best thing she ever did, has had a world-
wide fame and usefulness, having been translated into as many as
four languages, and widely distributed as a tract. Between the years
1881 and 1891 she gathered her stories into book form, under these
titles: Somebody's Neighbors,' 'Root-Bound,' The Sphinx's Child-
ren,' 'Happy Dodd,' 'Huckleberries. ' In 1889 appeared her one
novel, 'Steadfast,' an interesting story with much fine character-
drawing. But it is as a writer of short stories of New England life
and of some lovely poems that Rose Terry Cooke will live.
THE REVEREND THOMAS TUCKER AS A PARSON
From Some Account of Thomas Tucker'
THE
HE Social duties of a settled clergyman might have pressed on
him onerously; but as if Providence saw that he was best
fitted for a life of solitude, just as the Green Street Church
had listened to their learned and pious pastor for the first time
after his installation in their pulpit, Keziah, his sister, was seized
with a sudden and dangerous illness. The kind women of the
church rallied around Thomas Tucker in this hour of his need,
and nursed Keziah with unremitting kindness; but all in vain.
She dropped out of life as silently and patiently as she had
endured living, and it remained only to say that the place which
knew her should now know her no more; for she left behind
her no dear friend but her brother, and not an enemy. Even
Thomas missed her rather as a convenience than a companion;
profiting in a certain sense by her death, as it aroused keenly
the sympathy of the church for his loss and loneliness, and
attached them to him by those links of pity that are proverbi-
ally almost as strong as love. In any other circumstances the
Green Street Church would no doubt have discovered, early in
their relation, that Mr. Tucker was as unfit for any pastoral
position as he had been for that post in the college chapel; but
much was forgiven him out of his people's abundant kindness,
and their respect for his learning, his simplicity, and his sincere
piety, forbade their objecting at first to his great deficiencies in
those things considered quite as needful to pulpit success as the
## p. 3975 (#341) ###########################################
ROSE TERRY COOKE
3975
It hap-
power of preaching and the abundance of knowledge.
pened, soon after Keziah's death, that Mr. Tucker was called
to officiate at the funeral of one of his wealthiest parishioners,
a man who had just come back from Europe, and been killed
in a railroad accident on the way to his home in Deerford. He
was personally unknown to Thomas Tucker, but his character
was notorious. He went to church, and bought an expensive
pew there, merely as a business speculation, it gave him weight
in the eyes of his fellows to be outwardly respectable as well
as rich; but he was niggardly to his family, ostentatious, over-
reaching, and cruel as death to the poor and struggling who
crossed his path or came into his employ.
The Reverend Mr. Tucker improved the occasion. He took
for the text of that funeral address, "What shall it profit a man
if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? " and after a
pungent comparison between the goods of this world and the
tortures of a future state, he laid down his spectacles and wound
up with, "And now, beloved, I have laid before you the two
conditions. Think ye that to-day he whose mortal part lieth
before you would not utter a loud Amen to my statement? Yea,
if there be truth in the Word of God, he who hath left behind
him the gain of life and greed is now crying aloud for a drop of
water to cool his parched tongue, and longing for an hour of
probation wherein to cast off the fetters of ill-gotten gold and
sit with Lazarus gathering crumbs in the company of dogs.
Wherefore, seeing that God hath spoken sharply to you all in
the sudden requirement of this rich man's soul, let his admoni-
tion sink into your souls; seek ye first the kingdom of God, and
cast in your lot with the poor of this world, rich in faith, and
be ready to answer joyfully when the Master calls. "
Of course the community was outraged; but for a few kindly
souls who stood by the poor parson, and insisted that Keziah's
death had unsettled his mind, and not a few who felt that he
had manfully told the truth without fear or favor, and could
not help feeling a certain respect for him, he would have been
asked, forcibly, to resign that very week. As it was, the indig-
nant widow went over to another denomination without delay.
"I will never set foot in that church again! " she said.
can one be safe, where a man is allowed to say whatever he
chooses in the pulpit? A ritual never can be personal or
insulting. I shall abide by the Prayer-Book hereafter. "
« How
## p. 3976 (#342) ###########################################
3976
ROSE TERRY COOKE
In due time this matter faded out of the popular mind, as all
things do in course of time, and nothing came between pastor
and people except a gradual sense on their part that Solomon
was right when he said, "Much study is a weariness to the flesh;"
not only the student's flesh, but also theirs who have to hear
reiterated all the dry outcome of such study.
But Parson Tucker's career was not to be monotonous. His
next astonishing performance was at a wedding. A very pretty
young girl, an orphan, living in the house of a relative, equally
poor but grasping and ambitious, was about to marry a young
man of great wealth and thoroughly bad character; a man whom
all men knew to be a drunkard, a gambler, and a dissolute fel-
low, though the only son of a cultivated and very aristocratic
family. Poor Emily Manning had suffered all those deprivations
and mortifications which result from living in a dependent con-
dition, aware that her presence was irksome and unwelcome,
while her delicate organization was overtaxed with work whose
limits were as indefinite as the food and clothing which were its
only reward. She had entered into this engagement in a sort of
desperation, goaded on by the widowed sister-in-law with whom
she lived, and feeling that nothing could be much worse than
her present position. Parson Tucker knew nothing of this, but
he did know the character of Royal Van Wyck; and when he
saw the pallid, delicate, shrinking girl beside this already worn-
out, debased, bestial creature, ready to put herself into his
hands for life, the "daimon" laid hold upon him and spake
again. He opened the service, as was customary in Hartland,
with a short address; but surely never did such a bridal exhort-
ation enter the ears of man and woman before.
"My friends," he began, "matrimony is not to be lightly un-
dertaken, as the matter of a day; it is an awful compact for life
and death that ye enter into here. Young man, if thou hast
not within thyself the full purpose to treat this woman with
pure respect, loyal service, and tender care; to guard her soul's
innocence as well as her bodily welfare; to cleave to her only,
and keep thyself from evil thoughts and base indulgences for
her sake, if thou art not fit, as well as willing, to be priest
and king of a clean household, standing unto her in character
and act in God's stead so far as man may, draw back even now
from thine intent; for a lesser purpose is sacrilege here, and
will be damnable infamy hereafter. "
## p. 3977 (#343) ###########################################
ROSE TERRY COOKE
3977
Royal Van Wyck opened his sallow green eyes with an inso-
lent stare. He would have sworn roundly had not some poor
instinct of propriety restrained him; as it was, he did not speak
but looked away. He could not bear the keen deep-set eyes
fixed upon him, and a certain gaunt majesty in the parson's
outstretched arm and severe countenance daunted him for the
moment. But Thomas Tucker saw that he had no intention of
accepting this good advice, so he turned to Emily.
"Daughter," he said, "if thou art about to enter into this
solemn relation, pause and consider. If thou hast not such con-
fidence in this man that thy heart faileth not an iota at the
prospect of a lifelong companionship with him; if thou canst not.
trust him utterly, respect him as thy lord and head, yield him
an obedience joyful and secure next to that thou givest to God;
if he is not to thee the one desirable friend and lover; if thou
hast a thought so free of him that it is possible for thee to
imagine another man in his place without a shudder; if thou art
not willing to give thyself to him in the bonds of a lifelong,
inevitable covenant of love and service; if it is not the best and
sweetest thing earth can offer thee to be his wife and the mother
of his children,-stop now; stop at the very horns of the altar,
lest thou commit the worst sin of woman, sell thy birthright for
a mess of pottage, and find no place for repentance, though thou
seek it carefully and with tears. "
Carried away with his zeal for truth and righteousness, speak-
ing as with the sudden inspiration of a prophet, Parson Tucker
did not see the terror and the paleness deepening, as he spoke,
on the bride's fair countenance. As he extended his hand toward
her she fell in a dead faint at his feet. All was confusion in an
instant. The bridegroom swore and Mrs. Manning screamed,
while the relations crowded about the insensible girl and tried to
revive her. She was taken at once up-stairs to her room, and the
wedding put off till the next day, as Mrs. Manning announced.
"And you won't officiate at it, old fellow! I'll swear to that! "
roared the baffled bridgroom with a volley of profane epithets,
shaking his fist in the parson's calm face.
"Having taken the sword, I am content to perish thereby,
even as Scripture saith," answered Thomas Tucker, stalking out
of the door.
That night as he sat in his study, the door opened softly, and
Emily Manning came in and knelt at the side of the parson's
## p. 3978 (#344) ###########################################
3978
ROSE TERRY COOKE
chair. "I have no place to go to, sir," she whispered, with
trembling lips. "You saved me to-day; will you help me now?
I was going to sin, but I didn't know it till you told me. ”
"Then it was not sin, my child," said Parson Tucker gently.
"Sin is conscious transgression, and from that thou hast instantly
departed. "
"But what could I do? " she asked, her eyes full of tears.
"I have no home. Marcia is tired of me, and I have no other
friends. I wanted a home so much. Oh, I was wrong, for I did
not love him. And now I have run away from Marcia, — she
was so dreadful,- and what shall I do? »
"Poor child! " he said tenderly. "Sit here. I will help.
My old woman, in the kitchen below, shall fetch thee to a
chamber. Keziah brought her with us; she is kind, and will
care for thee, while I go to bring a friend. " So saying, the
parson rung his bell for old Jane, gave the girl over to her
care, and set out himself for President Winthrop's house.
"I have brought you a good work," he said abruptly to Mrs.
Winthrop. "Come with me; there is a soul in need at my
house. "
Mrs. Winthrop was used to this sort of summons from the
parson. They had been good friends ever since the eccentric
interview brought about by Jack Mason's valentine, and when
charity was needed Eleanor Winthrop's heart and hand were
always ready for service. She put on hat and shawl, and went
with the parson to his house, hearing on the way all the story.
"Mr. Tucker," she said, as he finished the recital, "aren't
you going to make much trouble for yourself by your aggressive
honesty? "
Thomas looked at her, bewildered.
"But the truth is to be spoken! " he replied, as if that were
the end of the controversy.
And she was silent, recognizing the
fact that here conventions were useless, and self-preservation
not the first law of grace, if it is of nature.
All Mrs. Winthrop's kindliness was aroused by the pitiful
condition of Emily Manning. She consoled and counseled her
like a mother, and soon after took her into her household as
governess to the little girls whom Mr. Winthrop's first wife had
left him; making for the grateful girl a happy home, which in
after years she left to become the wife of a good man, toward
whom she felt all that Parson Tucker had required of her on
## p. 3979 (#345) ###########################################
ROSE TERRY COOKE
3979
that painful day which she hated now to remember. And as the
parson performed this ceremony he turned after the benediction
to Eleanor Winthrop, and said with a beam of noble triumph
on his hollow visage, "Blessed be the Lord! I have saved a soul
alive! »
But long before this happy sequel came about, he had other
opportunities to distinguish himself. There came a Sunday when
the service of infant baptism was to be performed; and when
the fair sweet babes, who had behaved with unusual decorum,
were returned to their mothers' arms, and the parson according
to order said, "Let us pray," he certainly offered the most
peculiar petition ever heard in the Green Street Church. After
expressing the usual desire that the baptized children might
up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, he went
grow
on:
Yea!
«But if it please thee, O Father, to recall these little ones
to thyself in the innocence of their infancy, we will rejoice and
give thanks, and sound thy praises upon the harp and timbrel.
with the whole heart we will praise thee; for we know the
tribulations and snares, the evil and folly and anguish, of this
life below; and we know that not one child of Adam, coming
to man's estate, is spared that bitter and woful cup that is
pressed out from the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil,
which
our progenitors ate of in thy garden of Paradise, and
thereby sinned and fell, and bequeathed to us their evil long-
ings
and habitual transgression. They are the blessed who are
taken
away in their infancy, and lie forever by green pastures
and still waters in the fields of heaven. We ask of thee no
greater or better gift for these lambs than early to be folded
where
none shall hurt or destroy in all thy holy mountain, and
love that is above all mother's love shall cradle them
the
throughout eternity. Amen! "
ble at
who
Not a mother in that congregation failed to shiver and trem-
this prayer, and tears fell fast and thick on the babes
slumbered softly in the tender arms that had gathered them.
home, after consecrating them to that God who yet they were
so unwilling should literally accept their offering. Fifty pairs
of eyes were turned on Parson Tucker with the look of a bear
robbed of its cubs; but far more were drowned in tears of mem-
ory and, regret, poignant still, but strangely soothed by this vivid
presentation of the blessedness wherein their loved and lost were
safely abiding.
## p. 3980 (#346) ###########################################
3980
ROSE TERRY COOKE
Much comment was exchanged in the church porch, after
service, on the parson's prayer.
"We ought to hold a special meeting to pray that the Lord
will not answer such a petition! " cried one indignant mother,
whose little flock were clinging about her skirts, and who had
left twin babies, yet unbaptized, at home.
"It is rather hard on you, aunty! " said the graceless Jack
Mason, the speaker's nephew, now transformed into an unprom-
ising young lawyer in Hartland. "You'd rather have your babies
sin and suffer with you than have 'em safe in their little graves,
hadn't you? I don't go with the parson myself. I didn't so
much mind his funeral gymnastic over old Baker, and his dispo-
sition of that party's soul in Hades, because I never before sup-
posed Roosevelt Baker had a soul, and it was quite reassuring to
be certain he met with his dues somewhere; but he's worse than
Herod about the babies! "
However, the parson did not hear or know what was said of
hi and in an ignorance that was indeed bliss continued to
preach and minister to his people in strict accordance with his
own views of duty. His next essay was a pastoral visit to one
of his flock, recently a widow, a woman weak in body and mind
both; desirous above all things to be proper and like other
people, to weep where she must, smile when she ought, wear
clothes like the advance-guard of fashion, and do "the thing"
to be done always, whether it was the right and true thing
or not.
Her husband had spent all her fortune in speculation, taken
to drink as a refuge from folly and reproach at home, and
under the influence of the consoling fluid had turned his wife
out-of-doors whenever he felt in the mood; kicked her, beaten
her, and forced her, in fear of her life, over and over to steal
from her own house and take refuge with the neighbors, and
ask from them the food she was not allowed at home. At last
the end came. Parson Tucker was sent for to see the widow
and arrange for funeral services. She had not been present at
the Baker funeral, or indeed been in Deerford for some years
after that occasion, so she adhered to the conventions; and when
Parson Tucker reached the house he was shown into a dark-
ened room, where the disconsolate woman sat posed already in
deep mourning, a widow's cap perched upon her small head.
A woman would have inferred at once that Mrs. Spring had
## p. 3981 (#347) ###########################################
ROSE TERRY COOKE
3981
anticipated the end of Joe's last attack of mania à potu, and pre-
pared these funeral garments beforehand; but Thomas Tucker
drew no such conclusions. He sat down silently and grimly, after
shaking hands with Mrs. Spring, and said nothing. She began
the conversation: —
"This is a dreadful affliction, Mr. Tucker. I don't know how
I shall live through it. "
"It is terrible, indeed," said the parson.
"I do not wonder,
madam, that you mourn to see your partner cut off in his sins,
without time for repentance; but no doubt you feel with grati-
tude the goodness which hath delivered you from so sore a
burden. "
"What? " screamed the widow.
"I speak of God's mercy in removing from your house one
who made your life a terror, and your days full of fear and suf-
fering; you might have been as others, bereaved and desolate,
and mourning to your life's end. "
"I don't know what you mean, Parson Tucker," said Mrs.
Spring sharply, removing a dry handkerchief from unwet eyes.
"Poor dear Joseph is taken away from me, and I'm left a
desolate widow, and you talk in this way! I'm sure he had the
best of hearts that ever was; it was only, as you may say, acci-
dental to him to be a little overcome at times, and I'm—I'm –
o-h! "
some well-
He rose up
Here she gave a little hysterical scream, and did
executed sobbing; but the parson did not mind it.
before her, gaunt and gray.
"Madam, did not this man beat,
and abuse, and insult, and starve you, when he was living? Or
have I been misinformed ? »
"Well-oh dear, what dreadful questions! "
"Did he? " thundered the parson.
"He didn't mean to; he was excited, Mr. Tucker.
He- »
"He was drunk. And is that excuse? Not so, madam. You
know, and I know, that his death is a relief and a release to
you. I cannot condole with you on that which is not a sorrow; "
and he walked rigidly out of the door.
Is it necessary to say that Mr. Spring's funeral did not take
place in Deerford ? His widow suddenly remembered that he had
been born in a small town among the hills of West Massachu-
setts, and she took his body thither, to be "laid beside his dear
payrents," as she expressed it.
## p. 3982 (#348) ###########################################
3982
ROSE TERRY COOKE
Things had now come to a bad pass for Parson Tucker. The
church committee had held more than one conference over their
duty toward him.
It was obvious that they had no real reason
for dismissing him but his ghastly honesty, and that hardly offers
a decent excuse to depose a minister of the gospel. They hardly
knew how to face the matter, and were in this state of perplexity
when Mr. Tucker announced, one Sunday, after the sermon, that
he would like to see the church committee at his study on Tues-
day night; and accordingly they assembled there and found
President Winthrop with the parson.
"Brethren," said Thomas Tucker, after the preliminary wel-
come had passed, "I have sent for you to-night to say, that
having now been settled over your church eight years, I have
found the salary you paid me so much more than was needed
for my bodily support that I have laid by each year as the sur-
plus came to hand, that I might restore to you your goods.
The sum is now something over eight thousand dollars, and is
placed to the credit of your chairman, in the First Deerford
Bank. " The committee stared at each other as if each one
were trying to arouse himself from sleep. The chairman at last
spoke :-
"But Mr. Tucker, this is unheard-of!
-
The salary is yours;
we do not desire to take it back; we can't do it. "
"That which I have not earned, Brother Street, is not mine.
I am a solitary man; my expenses are light. It must be as I
said. Moreover, I have to say that I hereby withdraw from
your pulpit, of necessity. I have dealt with our best physicians
concerning a certain anguish of the breast which seizes me at
times unawares, and they all concur that an evil disease lieth
upon me.
I have not much time to live, and I would fain with-
draw from activities and duties that are external, and prepare for
the day that is at hand. "
The committee were pained as well as shocked. They felt
guilty to think how they had plotted this very thing among
themselves; and they felt too a certain awe and deep respect for
this simple unworldly nature, this supernatural integrity. Mr.
Street spoke again; his voice was husky:-
"If this is so, Mr. Tucker, we must of course accept your
resignation; but my dear pastor, keep the money! You will
need care and comforts, now this trouble has come on you. We
can't take it back. "
## p. 3983 (#349) ###########################################
ROSE TERRY COOKE
3983
Parson Tucker looked at him with a grave sweet smile.
« I
thank you, brother, but I have a private store. My sister left
her worldly goods to me, and there is enough and to spare for
my short sojourn," he answered.
"But it isn't according to the fitness of things that we should
take your salary back, Parson Tucker," put in bustling Mr.
Taylor. "What upon earth should we do with it? "
"Friend," said the parson, "the eternal fitness of things is
but the outcome of their eternal verity. I have not, as I said,
earned that wage, and I must restore it: it is for you to decide
what end it shall serve in the church. ”
A few more words passed between them, and then each
wrung the parson's hand and left him, not all with unmoved
hearts or dry eyes.
"I don't wonder he's going to die! " exclaimed Mr. Street, as
the committee separated at a street corner. "He's altogether
too honest to live! "
From that day Thomas Tucker sank quietly toward his grave.
Friends swarmed about him, and if delicacies of food could have
saved him, the dainty stores poured in upon him would have
renewed his youth; but all was in vain.
President Winthrop sat by him one summer day, and seeing
a sad gleam in his sunken eye, asked gently, "You are ready
and willing to go, Brother Tucker? " nothing doubting a glad
assent.
But the parson was honest to the last. "No," he said, "I do
not want to die; I am afraid. I do not like strange and new
things. I do not want to leave my books and my study. "
"But, dear brother,” broke in the astonished president, "it is
a going home to your Father's house! "
"I know not what a home is, friend, in the sense of regret or
longing for one. My early home was but as the egg to the
bird, a prison wherein I was born, from which I fled; nor was
my knowledge of a father one that commends itself as a type
of good. I trust, indeed, that the Master will take me by the
hand, even as he did Peter upon the water; but the utterance
of my secret soul is even that of the apostle with the keys:
'Lord, save, or I perish! >»
"But you have been a power for good, and a close follower
of Peter's Lord," said Mr. Winthrop, altogether at a loss for the
proper thing to say to this peculiar man.
## p. 3984 (#350) ###########################################
3984
ROSE TERRY COOKE
"One thing alone have I been enabled to do, Brother Win-
throp, for which I can with heart and soul thank God, even at
this hour. Yea, I thank him that I have been enabled to speak
the truth even in the face of lies and deceptions, through his
upholding. " A smile of unearthly triumph filled every line of
the wasted face, and lit his eyes with a flash of divine light as
he said this. He grasped close the friendly hand he was hold-
ing, turned his cheek to the pillow, and closed his eyes, passing
into that life of truth and love that awaited him, even as a
child that lies down in the darkness, trembling, fearful, and
weary, but awakes, in the dawn of a new day, in the heart of
home.
"Still," said President Winthrop to his wife, as they walked
home after the funeral, "I believe in the good old proverb,
Eleanor, that the truth is not to be spoken at all times. '»
"And I never believed in it so little! " she cried, indig-
nantly. "Think what a record he has left; what respect hangs
about his memory! Do we know how many weak souls have
relied on his example, and held to the truth when it was hard,
because he did and could? It is something to be heroic in these
days, even if it is unpopular! "
The president shrugged his shoulders.
From The Sphinx's Children and Other People's': copyrighted 1886, by
Ticknor and Company
## p. 3984 (#351) ###########################################
## p. 3984 (#352) ###########################################
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## p. 3984 (#354) ###########################################
JAMES FEN MORE COOPER
## p. 3985 (#355) ###########################################
3985
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
(1789-1851)
BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE
M
men
ORE than a century ago, in the town of Burlington, New Jer-
sey, was born a man destined to become one of the best
known figures of his time. He was as devout an American
as ever lived, for he could arraign the shortcomings of his country-
as stanchly as he could defend and glorify their ideals. He
entered fearlessly and passionately into the life around him, seeing
intensely, yet sometimes blind; feeling ardently, yet not always
aright; acting with might and conviction, yet not seldom amiss. He
loved and revered good, scorned and hated evil, and with the
strength and straightforwardness of a bull championed the one and
gored the other. He worshiped justice, but lacked judgment; his
brain, stubborn and logical, was incongruously mated with a deep
and tender heart. A brave and burly backwoods gentleman was he,
with a smattering of the humanities from Yale, and a dogged pre-
cision of principle and conduct from six years in the navy. He had
the iron memory proper to a vigorous organization and a serious,
observant mind; he was tirelessly industrious-in nine-and-twenty
years he published thirty-two novels, many of them of prodigious
length, besides producing much matter never brought to light. His
birth fell at a noble period of our history, and his surroundings fos-
tered true and generous manhood. Doubtless many of his contem-
poraries were as true men as he: but to Cooper in addition was
vouchsafed the gift of genius; and that magic quality dominated
and transfigured his else rugged and intractable nature, and made
his name known and loved over all the earth. No author has been
more widely read than he; no American author has won even a tithe
of his honorable popularity.
Though Jersey may claim his birthplace, Cooper's childhood from
his second to his fourteenth year was passed on the then frontiers of
civilization, at Cooperstown on the Susquehanna. There in the pri-
meval forest, hard by the broad Lake Otsego and the wide-flowing
river, the old Judge built his house and laid out his town. Trees,
mountains, wild animals, and wild men nursed the child, and im-
planted in him seeds of poetry and wrought into the sturdy fibres of
his mind golden threads of creative imagination. Then round about
VII-250
## p. 3986 (#356) ###########################################
3986
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
the hearth at night, men of pith and character told tales of the
Revolution, of battle, adventure, and endurance, which the child,
hearing, fed upon with his soul, and grew strong in patriotism and
independence. Nobility was innate in him; he conceived lofty and
sweet ideals of human nature and conduct, and was never false to
them thereafter. The ideal Man—the ideal Woman - he believed in
them to the end. And more than twice or thrice in his fictions we
find personages like Harvey Birch, Leatherstocking, Long Tom Cof-
fin, the jailer's daughter in The Bravo,' and Mabel Dunham and
Dew-of-June in The Pathfinder,' which give adequate embodiment
to his exalted conception of the possibilities of his fellow creatures.
For though portrayal of character in the ultra-refined modern sense
of the term was impossible to Cooper, yet he perceived and could
impressively present certain broad qualities of human nature, and
combine them in consistent and memorable figures. Criticism may
smile now and then, and psychology arch her eyebrows, but the fig-
ures live, and bid fair to be lusty long after present fashions have
been forgotten.
But of the making of books, Cooper, during the first three decades
of his life, had no thought at all. He looked forward to a career of
action; and after Yale College had given him a glimpse of the range
of knowledge, he joined a vessel as midshipman, with the prospect
of an admiral's cocked hat and glory in the distance. The glory,
however, with which the ocean was to crown him, was destined to be
gained through the pen and not the sword, when at the age of five-
and-thirty he should have published The Pilot. ' As a naval officer,
he might have helped to whip the English in the War of 1812; but
as author of the best sea story in the language he conquered all the
world of readers unaided. Meanwhile, when he was twenty-one years
old he married a Miss Delancey, whose goodness (according to one of
his biographers) was no less eminent than his genius, and who died
but a short time before him. The joys of wedded life in a home of
his own outweighed with him the chances of warlike distinction, and
he resigned his commission and took command of a farm in West-
chester County; and a gentleman farmer, either there or at his boy-
hood's home in Cooperstown, he remained till the end, with the
exception of his seven-years' sojourn in Europe.
His was a bodily frame built to endure a hundred years, and the
robustness of his intelligence and the vivacity of his feelings would
have kept him young throughout; yet he died of a dropsy, at the
prime of his powers, in 1851, heartily mourned by innumerable
friends, and having already outlived all his enmities. He died, too,
the unquestioned chief of American novelists; and however superior
to his may have been the genius of his contemporary Walter Scott,
b
## p. 3987 (#357) ###########################################
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
3987
the latter can hardly be said to have rivaled him in breadth of
dominion over readers of all nationalities. Cooper was a household
name from New York to Ispahan, from St. Petersburg to Rio Janeiro;
and the copyright on his works in various languages would to-day
amount to a large fortune every year. Three generations have passed
since with The Spy' he won the sympathies of mankind; and he
holds them still. It is an enviable record. And although in respect
of actual quality of work produced there have been many geniuses
greater than he, yet it is fair to remember that Cooper's genius had
a great deal of stubborn raw material to subdue before it could pro-
ceed to produce anything. It started handicapped. As it was, the
man wasted years of time and an immensity of effort in doing, or
trying to do, things he had no business with. He would be a politi-
cal reformer, a critic of society, an interpreter of law, even a master
grammarian. He would fight to the finish all who differed from him
in opinion; he fought and-incredible as it may seem- he actually
conquered the American press. He published reams of stuff which
no one now reads and which was never worth reading, to enforce his
views and prove that he was right and others wrong.
All this power
was misdirected; it might have been applied to producing more and
better Leatherstockings and Pilots. Perhaps he hardly appreciated
at its value that one immortal thing about him,- his genius,—and
was too much concerned about his dogmatic and bull-headed Self.
Unless the world confessed his infallibility, he could not be quite at
peace with it.
Such an attitude arouses one's sense of humor; it
would never have existed had Cooper possessed a spark of humor
himself. But he was uncompromisingly serious on all subjects, or if
at times he tried to be playful, we shudder and avert our faces. It
is too like Juggernaut dancing a jig. And he gave too much weight
to the verdict of the moment, and not enough to that judgment of
posterity to which the great Verulam was content to submit his
fame. Who cares to-day, or how are we the better or the worse, if
Cooper were right or wrong in his various convictions? What con-
cerns us is that he wrote delightful stories of the forest and the sea;
it is in those stories, and not in his controversial or didactic homilies,
that we choose to discover his faith in good and ire against evil.
Cooper, in short, had his limitations; but with all his errors, we may
take him and be thankful.
Moreover, his essential largeness appears in the fact that in the
midst of his bitterest conflicts, at the very moment when his pam-
phlets and "satires" were heating the printing-presses and people's
tempers, a novel of his would be issued, redolent with pure and
serene imagination, telling of the prairies and the woods, of deer and
panther, of noble redskins and heroic trappers. It is another world,
## p. 3988 (#358) ###########################################
3988
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
harmonious and calm; no echo of the petty tumults in which its
author seemed to live is audible therein. But it is a world of that
author's imagination, and its existence proves that he was greater
and wiser than the man of troubles and grievances who so noisily
solicits our attention. The surface truculence which fought and
wrangled was distinct from the interior energy which created and
harmonized, and acted perhaps as the safety-valve to relieve the
inward region from disturbance.
The anecdote of how Cooper happened to adopt literature as a
calling is somewhat musty, and its only significant feature is the
characteristic self-confidence of his exclamation, on laying down a
stupid English novel which he had been reading to his wife, "I
could write as well as that myself! " Also in point is the fact that
the thing he wrote, 'Precaution,' is a story of English life, whereof
at that time he had had no personal experience. One would like to
know the name of the novel which touched him off; if it was stu-
pider and more turgid than 'Precaution' it must have been a curi-
osity. Cooper may have thought otherwise, or he may have been
stimulated by recognition of his failure, as a good warrior by the
discovery that his adversary is a more redoubtable fighter than he
had gauged him to be. At all events, he lost no time in engaging
once more, and this time he routed his foe, horse and foot. One is
reminded of the exclamation of his own Paul Jones, when requested
to surrender-"I haven't begun to fight! " (The Spy' is not a per-
fect work of art, but it is a story of adventure and character such as
the world loves and will never tire of. Precaution' had showed
not even talent; 'The Spy' revealed unquestionable genius. This is
not to say that its merit was actually unquestioned at the time it
came out; our native critics hesitated to commit themselves, and
awaited English verdicts. But the nation's criticism was to buy the
book and read it, and they and other nations have been so doing
ever since. Nothing in literature lasts longer, or may be oftener
re-read with pleasure, than a good tale of adventure. The incidents
are so many and the complications so ingenious that one forgets the
detail after a few years, and comes to the perusal with fresh appe-
tite. Cooper's best books are epics, possessing an almost Homeric
vitality. The hero is what the reader would like to be, and the lat-
ter thrills with his perils and triumphs in his success. Ulysses is
Mankind, making sweet uses of adversity, and regenerate at last;
and Harvey Birch, Leatherstocking, and the rest are congenial types
of Man, acting up to high standards in given circumstances.
But oh! the remorseless tracts of verbiage in these books, the
long toiling through endless preliminaries, as of a too unwieldy army
marching and marshaling for battle! It is Cooper's way; he must
K_KAMAR
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JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
3989
warm to his work gradually, or his strength cannot declare itself.
His beginnings abound in seemingly profitless detail, as if he must
needs plot his every footstep on the map ere trusting himself to take
the next. Balzac's method is similar, but possesses a spiritual charm
lacking in the American's. The modern ability of Stevenson and
Kipling to plunge into the thick of it in the first paragraph was
impossible to this ponderous pioneer. Yet when at length he does
begin to move, the impetus and majesty of his advance are tremen-
dous; as in the avalanche, every added particular of passive prepara-
tion adds weight and power to the final action. Cooper teaches
us, Wellington-like, "what long-enduring hearts can do! " Doubtless,
therefore, any attempt to improve him by blue-penciling his tedious-
ness would result in spoiling him altogether. We must accept him
as he is. Dullness past furnishes fire to present excitement. It is a
mistake to "skip" in reading Cooper; if we have not leisure to read
him as he stands, let us wait until we have.
'Precaution' and 'The Spy' both appeared in 1821, when the
author was about thirty-two years old. Two years passed before the
production of 'The Pioneers,' wherein Cooper draws upon memory
no less than upon imagination, and in which Leatherstocking first
makes our acquaintance. As a rule (proved by exceptions), the best
novels of great novelists have their scene in surroundings with which
the writer's boyhood was familiar. The Pioneers' and the ensuing
series of Leatherstocking tales are placed in the neighborhood of the
lake and river which Cooper, as a child, had so lovingly learned by
heart. Time had supplied the requisite atmosphere for the pictures
that he drew, while the accuracy of his memory and the minuteness
of his observation assured ample realism. In the course of the nar-
rative the whole mode of life of a frontier settlement from season to
season appears before us, and the typical figures which constitute it.
It is history, illuminated by romance and uplifted by poetic imagina-
tion. One of our greatest poets, speaking after the second-thought
of thirty years, declared Cooper to be a greater poet than Hesiod or
Theocritus. But between a poet and a prose-writer capable of poetic
feeling there is perhaps both a distinction and a difference.
The birth-year of the Pioneers' and of the 'Pilot' are again the
same. Now Cooper leaves, for the time, the backwoods, and em-
barks upon the sea. He is as great upon one element as upon the
other of whom else can that be affirmed? We might adapt the
apophthegm on Washington to him: he was "first on land, first
on sea, and first in the hearts of his readers. " In The Pilot' the
resources of the writer's invention first appear in full development.
His personal experience of the vicissitudes and perils of a seaman's
life stood him in good stead here, and may indeed have served him
## p. 3990 (#360) ###########################################
3990
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
well in the construction of all his fictions. Fertility in incident and
the element of suspense are valuable parts of a story-teller's outfit,
and Cooper excelled in both; he might have been less adequately
furnished in these respects had he never served on a man-of-war.
Be that as it may, The Pilot' is generally accepted as the best sea
story ever written. Herman Melville and his disciple Clark Russell
have both written lovingly and thrillingly of the sea and seamen,
but neither of them has rivaled their common original. Long Tom
Coffin is the peer of Leatherstocking himself, and might have been
made the central figure of as many and as excellent tales. The
three books-'The Spy,' 'The Pioneers,' and 'The Pilot'-form a
trilogy of itself more than sufficient to support a mighty reputation;
and they were all written before Cooper was thirty-five years old.
Indeed, his subsequent works did not importantly add to his fame;
and many of them of course might better never have been written.
'Lionel Lincoln,' in 1825, fell far short of the level of the previous
romances; but The Last of the Mohicans,' in the year following, is
again as good as the best, and the great figure of Leatherstocking
even gains in solidity and charm. As a structure, the story is easily
criticized, but the texture is so sound and the spirit so stirring that
only the cooler after-thought finds fault. Faults which would ship-
wreck a lesser man leave this leviathan almost unscathed.
At this juncture occurred the unfortunate episode in Cooper's
career. His fame having spread over two continents, he felt a
natural desire to visit the scene of his foreign empire and make
acquaintance with his subjects there; it seemed an act of expedi-
ency too to get local color for romances which should appeal more
directly to these friends across the sea. Upon these pretexts he set
forth, and in due season arrived in Paris. Here however he chanced
to read a newspaper criticism of the United States government;
and true to his conviction that he was the heaven-appointed agent
to correct and castigate the world, he sat down and wrote a sharp
rejoinder. He was well furnished with facts, and he exhibited
plenty of acumen in his statement of them; though his cumbrous and
pompous style, as of a schoolmaster laying down the law, was not
calculated to fascinate the lectured ones. In the controversy which
ensued he found himself arrayed against the aristocratic party,
with only the aged Lafayette to afford him moral support; his argu-
ments were not refuted, but this rendered him only the more
obnoxious to his hosts, who finally informed him that his room was
more desirable than his company. As a Parthian shaft, our redoubt-
able champion launched a missile in the shape of a romance of
ancient Venice (The Bravo'), in which he showed how the perver-
sion of institutions devised to insure freedom, inevitably brings to
## p. 3991 (#361) ###########################################
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
3991
pass freedom's opposite. It is a capital novel, worthy of Cooper's
fame; but it neither convinced nor pleased the effete monarchists
whom it arraigned. In the end accordingly he returned home, with
the consciousness of having vindicated his countrymen, but of having
antagonized all Europe in the process. It may be possible to win
the affection of a people while proving to them that they are fools
and worse; but if so, Cooper was not the man to accomplish the
feat. It should be premised here that during his residence abroad
he had written, in addition to The Bravo,' three novels which may
be placed among his better works; and one, The Wept of Wish-ton-
Wish,' whose lovely title is its only recommendation. The Red
Rover' was by some held to be superior even to The Pilot'; and
'Heidenhauer' and 'The Headsman of Berne' attempt, not with
entire success, to repeat the excellence of The Bravo. ' He had
also published a volume of letters critical of national features,
entitled 'Notions of the Americans,' which may have flattered his
countrymen's susceptibilities, but did nothing to assuage the wounded
feelings of those with whom he contrasted them.
