ant in detail or tragic in trend
he seems less characteristic--so definitely was he a
romanticist, seeking beauty and wishing to throw over life the
kindly glamour of imaginative art. It is worth noting, however,
that he looked forward rather than back, towards the coming
realism, not to the incurable pseudo-romanticism of the late
eighteenth century, in his instinct to base his happenings upon
the bedrock of truth--the external truth of scene and character
and the inner truth of human psychology.

Admirably a modern artist in this respect, his
old-fashionedness, so often dilated upon, can easily be overstated.
He not only left charming work in the tale, but helped others
who came after to use their tools, furthering their art by the
study of a good model.

Nothing was more inevitable then that Cooper when he began
fiction in mid-manhood should have written the romance: it was
the dominant form in England because of Scott. But that he
should have realized the unused resources of America and
produced a long series of adventure stories, taking a pioneer as
his hero and illustrating the western life of settlement in his
career, the settlement that was to reclaim a wilderness for a
mighty civilization--that was a thing less to be expected, a
truly epic achievement. The Leather Stocking Series was in the
strictest sense an original performance--the significance of
Fenimore Cooper is not likely to be exaggerated; it is quite
independent of the question of his present hold upon mature
readers, his faults of technique and the truth of his pictures.
To have grasped such an opportunity and so to have used it as to
become a great man-of-letters at a time when literature was more
a private employ than the interest of the general--surely it
indicates genuine personality, and has the mark of creative
power. To which we may add, that Cooper is still vital in his
appeal, as the statistics of our public libraries show.

Moreover, incorrigible romancer that he was, he is a man of the
nineteenth century, as was Irving, in the way he instinctively
chose near-at-hand native material: he knew the Mohawk Valley by
long residence; he knew the Indian and the trapper there; and he
depicted these types in a setting that was to him the most
familiar thing in the world. In fact, we have in him an
illustration of the modern writer who knows he must found his
message firmly upon reality. For both Leather-stocking and
Chingachgook are true in t