he broad sense, albeit the white
trapper's dialect may be uncertain and the red man exhibit a
dignity that seems Roman rather than aboriginal. The Daniel
Boone of history must have had, we feel, the nobler qualities of
Bumpo; how otherwise did he do what it was his destiny to do? In
the same way, the Indian of Cooper is the red man in his
pristine home before the day of fire-water and Agency methods.
It may be that what to us to-day seems a too glorified picture
is nearer the fact than we are in a position easily to realize.
Cooper worked in the older method of primary colors, of vivid,
even violent contrasts: his was not the school of subtleties.
His women, for example, strike us as somewhat mechanical; there
is a sameness about them that means the failure to
differentiate: the Ibsenian psychology of the sex was still to
come. But this does not alter the obvious excellencies of the
work. Cooper carried his romanticism in presenting the heroic
aspects of the life he knew best into other fields where he
walked with hardly less success: the revolutionary story
illustrated by "The Spy," and the sea-tale of which a fine
example is "The Pilot." He had a sure instinct for those
elements of fiction which make for romance, and the change of
time and place affects him only in so far as it affects his
familiarity with his materials. His experience in the United
States Navy gave him a sure hand in the sea novels: and in a
book like "The Spy" he was near enough to the scenes and
characters to be studies practically contemporary. He had the
born romanticist's natural affection for the appeal of the past
and the stock elements can be counted upon in all his best
fiction: salient personalities, the march of events, exciting
situations, and ever that arch-romantic lure, the one trick up
the sleeve to pique anticipation. Hence, in spite of
descriptions that seem over-long, a heavy-footed manner that
lacks suppleness and variety, and undeniable carelessness of
construction, he is still loved of the young and seen to be a
natural raconteur, an improviser of the Dumas-Scott lineage and,
even tested by the later tests, a noble writer of romance, a man
whom Balzac and Goethe read with admiration: unquestionably
influential outside his own land in that romantic mood of
expression which, during the first half of the nineteenth
century, was so widespread and fruitful.

III

It is the plainer with every year that Poe's contribution to
A