, bleached-out
personifications of the proprieties. Women like them may be far more
useful members of society than the stormier characters of fiction that
are dear to the carnal-minded. They may very possibly be far more
agreeable to live with; but they are not usually the women for whom men
are willing or anxious to die.

These are imperfections that have led to the undue depreciation of
Cooper among many highly cultivated men. Taken by themselves they might
seem enough to ruin his reputation beyond redemption. It is a proof of
his real greatness that he triumphs over defects which would utterly
destroy the fame of a writer of inferior power. It is with novels as
with men. There are those with great faults which please us and impress
us far more than those in which the component parts are better balanced.
Whatever its other demerits, Cooper's best work never sins against the
first law of fictitious composition, that the story shall be full of
sustained interest. It has power, and power always fascinates, even
though accompanied with much that would naturally excite repulsion or
dislike. Moreover, poorly as he sometimes told his story, he had a story
to tell. The permanence and universality of his reputation are largely
due to this fact. In many modern creations full of subtle charm and
beauty, the narrative, the material framework of the fiction, has been
made so subordinate to the delineation of character and motive, that the
reader ceases to feel much interest in what men do in the study which is
furnished him of why they do it. In this highly-rarefied air of
philosophic analysis, incident and event wither and die. Work of this
kind is apt to have within its sphere an unbounded popularity; but its
sphere is limited, and can never include a tithe of that vast (p. 282)
public for which Cooper wrote and which has always cherished and kept
alive his memory, while that of men of perhaps far finer mould has quite
faded away.

It is only fair, also, to judge him by his successes and not by his
failures; by the work he did best, and not by what he did moderately
well. His strength lies in the description of scenes, in the narration
of events. In the best of these he has had no superior, and very few
equals. The reader will look in vain for the revelation of sentiment, or
for the exhibition of passion. The love-story is rarely well done; but
the love-story plays a subordinate part in the composition. The moment
his ima