r could neither
enter himself nor lay bare to others. Remorse that gnaws incessantly at
every activity of the spirit, the consciousness of sin that haunts the
heart and hangs like a burden upon the life, can never well be depicted
save by him whose words suggest more than they reveal. Cooper was not
a writer of this kind. He belonged to that class of literary artists
who convey their precise meaning by exactness and fullness of (p. 051)
detail. The vagueness and indefiniteness with which this story abounds
is not, therefore, that impressive obscurity which springs from the
mysterious; it is, on the contrary, the obscurity of the unintelligible
and absurd. In all of Cooper's novels, it is a fault that the
characters are often represented as acting without sufficient motive.
In the story of adventure this can be pardoned, or at least overlooked;
for freak plays an important part in determining the movements of many
of us. It is not so, however, in tales containing a plot similar to
that of "Lionel Lincoln." The mind revolts at finding the actors in
the drama represented as having committed monstrous crimes, without
any reason that is worth mentioning. This radical defect in the plan
is not counterbalanced by any felicity in the execution. Many of the
incidents are more than improbable, they are impossible. The style,
likewise, is labored, and the conversations combine the two undesirable
peculiarities of being both stilted and dull. The characters, female
or male, are in no case successfully drawn. The inferior ones, introduced
to amuse, serve only to depress the reader. The hero in the course of
the tale does several absurd things; but he finally surpasses himself
by hurrying away from the woman he loves, without her knowledge,
immediately after he has been joined to her in marriage. The
representation of the half-witted Job--a character upon which the
author clearly labored hard--neither arouses interest nor touches the
heart. It is, indeed, impossible to feel much sympathy with one
particular imbecile, no matter how patriotic, in a story where most of
the actors are represented as acting like idiots.

Nevertheless, his reputation and the real excellence of the battle (p. 052)
battle scenes, saved this work from seeming at the time so much of a
failure as it actually was. Certainly whatever loss of credit he may
have sustained as the result of writing "Lionel Lincoln," was much
more than made up by the success of t