test anticipation of the effect
that it was going to have upon his future. In writing it he was
carrying out the wishes of his friends full as much as his own. Nor,
apparently, did they urge the course upon him because they conceived
him capable of accomplishing anything very great or even very good.
They felt that he could produce something that was not discreditable,
and that was all that could reasonably be expected of an American.
There was no other novelist in the field. Charles Brockden Brown had
been dead several years. Irving and Paulding were writing only short
sketches. John Neal, indeed, in addition to the poems, tragedies,
reviews, newspaper articles, indexes, and histories he was turning out
by wholesale, had likewise perpetrated a novel; but it was never known
enough to justify the mention of it as having been forgotten. (p. 031)
Here, consequently, was a vacant place that ought to be filled. Cooper
was never the man who would be eager to take a place because there was
no one else to occupy it; and the way he went at the task he had
undertaken gives indirectly a clear insight into an American author's
feelings sixty years ago. He entered upon the work not merely without
the expectation of success, but almost without the hope of it. The
novel was written very hastily; the sheets passed into the hands of
the type-setter with scarcely a correction; and so little heart had he
in the task that the first volume was printed several months before he
felt any inducement to write a line of the second. The propriety of
abandoning it entirely, under the apprehension of its proving a serious
loss, was debated. "Should chance," he said, in a later introduction
to the book, "throw a copy of this prefatory notice into the hands of
an American twenty years hence, he will smile to think that a
countryman hesitated to complete a work so far advanced, merely
because the disposition of the country to read a book that treated of
its own familiar interests was distrusted." In this respect the
difficulty of his position was made more prominent by its contrast
with that of the great novelist who was then occupying the attention
of the English-speaking world. Scott, in writing "Waverley," could
take for granted that there lay behind him an intense feeling of
nationality, which would show itself not in noisy boastfulness, but in
genuine appreciation; that with the matter of his work his countrymen
would sympathize, whatever migh