• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

which mark his riper years. The old buccaneer in his aquatic

habitation, and the contrasted characters of his two daughters, add a

human interest to the scene, for the want of which the highest skill in

mere landscape painting cannot compensate. The character of Judith

seems to us the best drawn, and by far the most interesting, female

portrait in any of Cooper’s novels with which we are acquainted. The

story, however, is not free from the characteristic faults of its author.

Above all, it contains, in one instance at least, a glaring exhibition of

his aptitude for describing horrors. When he compels his marvellously

graphic pen to depict scenes which would disgrace the shambles or

the dissecting table, none can wonder that ladies and young clergymen

regard his pages with abhorrence. These, however, are but casual

defects in a work which bears the unmistakable impress of his genius.

—from North American Review (January 1852)

JOSEPH CONRAD

[James Fenimore Cooper] wrote before the great American language

was born, and he wrote as well as any novelist of his time. If he pitches

upon episodes redounding to the glory of the young republic, surely

England has glory enough to forgive him, for the sake of his excellence,

the patriotic bias at her expense. The interest of his tales is convincing

and unflagging; and there runs through his work a steady vein

of friendliness for the old country which the succeeding generations

of his compatriots have replaced by a less definite sentiment.

-from Outlook (June 4, 1898)

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Cooper is in our epoch the only author worthy of being put aside

Walter Scott: he does not equal him, but he has his genius. He owes

the high place he holds in modern literature to two faculties: that of

painting the sea and seamen; that of idealizing the magnificent landscapes

of America.... I feel for his two faculties the admiration Walter

Scott felt for them, which is still further deserved by the grandeur,

the originality of Leather-Stocking, that fine personality which binds

into one The Pioneers, The Mohicans, The Pathfinder and The Prairie. LeatherStocking

is a statue, a magnificent moral hermaphrodite, born of the

savage state and of civilization, who will live as long as literatures last.

I do not know that the extraordinary work of Walter Scott furnishes

a creation as grandiose as that of this hero of the savannas and the

forests. Gurth in Ivanhoe approaches Leather-Stocking. We feel that if

the great Scotchman had seen America he might have created LeatherStocking

. It is, especially, by that man, half Indian, half civilized, that

Cooper has risen to the level of Walter Scott.

—translated by K. P Wormeley,

from The Personal Opinions of Honore de Balzac ( 1899)

D. H. LAWRENCE

Natty was Fenimore’s great Wish: his wish-fulfilment.... Because it

seems to me that the things in Cooper that make one so savage, when

one compares them with actuality, are perhaps, when one considers

them as presentations of a deep subjective desire, real in their way,

and almost prophetic.

-from Studies in Classic American Literature ( 19 2 3 )

CARL VAN DOREN

[The Deerslayer] is the tale of Natty’s coming of age. Already a hunter,

he here kills his first man and thus enters the long career which lies

before him. That career, however, had already been traced by Cooper,

and the distress with which Deerslayer realizes that he has human

blood on his hands, becomes, in the light of his future, immensely

eloquent. It gives the figure of the man almost a new dimension; one

remembers the deaths Natty has yet to deal. In other matters he is

nearer his later self, for he starts life with a steady if simple philosophy

which, through all his many adventures, keeps him to the end

the son of nature he was at the beginning.

-from The American Novel, 1789-1939 ( 1940)

Questions

1. Who is right about “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Mark Twain or Bruce L. R. Smith, the author of this edition’s introduction?

2. Consider Deerslayer’s