Precaution - James Fenimore Cooper
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PRECAUTION.
A Novel.
By J. Fenimore Cooper.
"Be wise to-day. It is madness to defer;
To-morrow's caution may arrive too late."
W. C. Bryant's Discourse on the Life, Genius, and Writings of James
Fenimore Cooper,
Delivered at Metropolitan Hall, N.Y., February 25, 1852.
It is now somewhat more than a year, since the friends of JAMES FENIMORE
COOPER, in this city; were planning to give a public dinner to his honor.
It was intended as an expression both of the regard they bore him
personally, and of the pride they took in the glory his writings had
reflected on the American name. We thought of what we should say in his
hearing; in what terms, worthy of him and of us, we should speak of the
esteem in which we held him, and of the interest we felt in a fame which
had already penetrated to the remotest nook of the earth inhabited by
civilized man.
To-day we assemble for a sadder purpose: to pay to the dead some part of
the honors then intended for the living. We bring our offering, but he is
not here who should receive it; in his stead are vacancy and silence;
there is no eye to brighten at our words, and no voice to answer. "It is
an empty office that we perform," said Virgil, in his melodious verses,
when commemorating the virtues of the young Marcellus, and bidding flowers
be strewn, with full hands, over his early grave. We might apply the
expression to the present occasion, but it would be true in part only. We
can no longer do anything for him who is departed, but we may do what will
not be without fruit to those who remain. It is good to occupy our
thoughts with the example of great talents in conjunction with great
virtues. His genius has passed away with him; but we may learn, from the
history of his life, to employ the faculties we possess with useful
activity and noble aims; we may copy his magnanimous frankness, his
disdain of everything that wears the faintest semblance of deceit, his
refusal to comply with current abuses, and the courage with which, on all
occasions, he asserted what he deemed truth, and combated what he thought
error.
The circumstances of Cooper's early life were remarkably suited to confirm
the natural hardihood and manliness of his character, and to call forth
and exercise that extraordinary power of observation, which accumulated
the materials afterwards wielded and shaped by his genius. His father,
while an inhabitant of Burlington, in New Jersey, on the pleasant banks of
the Delaware, was the owner of large possessions on the borders of the
Otsego Lake in our own state, and here, in the newly-cleared fields, he
built, in 1786, the first house in Cooperstown. To this home, Cooper, who
was born in Burlington, in the year 1789, was conveyed in his infancy, and
here, as he informs us in his preface to the _Pioneers_, his first
impressions of the external world were obtained. Here he passed his
childhood, with the vast forest around him, stretching up the mountains
that overlook the lake, and far beyond, in a region where the Indian yet
roamed, and the white hunter, half Indian in his dress and mode of life,
sought his game,--a region in which the bear and the wolf were yet hunted,
and the panther, more formidable than either, lurked in the thickets, and
tales of wanderings in the wilderness, and encounters with these fierce
animals, beguiled the length of the winter nights. Of this place, Cooper,
although early removed from it to pursue his studies, was an occasional
resident throughout his life, and here his last years were wholly passed.
At the age of thirteen he was sent to Yale College, where, notwithstanding
his extreme youth,--for, with the exception of the poet Hillhouse, he was
the youngest of his class, and Hillhouse was afterwards withdrawn,--his
progress in his studies is said to have been honorable to his talents. He
left the college, after a residence of three years, and became a
midshipman in the United States navy. Six years he followed the sea, and
there yet wanders, among those who are fond of literary anecdote, a story
of the young sailor who, in the streets of one of the English ports,
attracted the curiosity of the crowd by explaining to his companions a
Latin motto in some public place. That during this period he made himself
master of the knowledge and the imagery which he afterwards employed to so
much advantage in his romances of the sea, the finest ever written, is a
common and obvious remark; but it has not been so far as I know, observed
that from the discipline of a seaman's life he may have derived much of
his readiness and fertility of invention, much of his skill in surrounding
the personages of his novels with imaginary perils, and rescuing them by
probable expedients. Of all pursuits, the life of a sailor is that which
familiarizes men to danger in its most fearful shapes, most cultivates
presence of mind, and most effectually calls forth the resources of a
prompt and fearless dexterity by which imminent evil is avoided.
In 1811, Cooper, having resigned his post as midshipman, began the year by
marrying Miss Delaney, sister of the present bishop; of the diocese of
Western New York, and entered upon a domestic life happily passed to its
close. He went to live at Mamaroneck, in the county of Westchester, and
while here he wrote and published the first of his novels, entitled
_Precaution_. Concerning the occasion of writing this work, it is related,
that once, as he was reading an English novel to Mrs. Cooper, who has,
within a short time past, been laid in the grave beside her illustrious
husband, and of whom we may now say, that her goodness was no less eminent
than his genius, he suddenly laid down the book, and said, "I believe I
could write a better myself." Almost immediately he composed a chapter of
a projected work of fiction, and read it to the same friendly judge, who
encouraged him to finish it, and when it was completed, suggested its
publication. Of this he had at the time no intention, but he was at length
induced to submit the manuscript to the examination of the late Charles
Wilkes, of this city, in whose literary opinions he had great confidence.
Mr. Wilkes advised that it should be published, and to these circumstances
we owe it that Cooper became an author.
I confess I have merely dipped into this work. The experiment was made
with the first edition, deformed by a strange punctuation--a profusion of
commas, and other pauses, which puzzled and repelled me. Its author, many
years afterwards, revised and republished it, correcting this fault, and
some faults of style also, so that to a casual inspection it appeared
almost another work. It was a professed delineation of English manners,
though the author had then seen nothing of English society. It had,
however, the honor of being adopted by the country whose manners it
described, and, being early republished in Great Britain, passed from the
first for an English novel. I am not unwilling to believe what is said of
it, that it contained a promise of the powers which its author afterwards
put forth.
Thirty years ago, in the year 1821, and in the thirty-second of his life,
Cooper published the first of the works by which he will be known to
posterity, the _Spy_. It took the reading world by a kind of surprise; its
merit was acknowledged by a rapid sale; the public read with eagerness and
the critics wondered. Many withheld their commendations on account of
defects in the plot or blemishes in the composition, arising from want of
practice, and some waited till they could hear the judgment of European
readers. Yet there were not wanting critics in this country, of whose
good opinion any author in any part of the world might be proud, who spoke
of it in terms it deserved. "Are you not delighted," wrote a literary
friend to me, who has since risen to high distinction as a writer, both in
verse and in prose, "are you not delighted with the _Spy_, as a work of
infinite spirit and genius?" In that word genius lay the explanation of
the hold which the work had taken on the minds of men. What it had of
excellence was peculiar and unborrowed; its pictures of life, whether in
repose or activity, were drawn, with broad lights and shadows, immediately
from living originals in nature or in his own imagination. To him,
whatever he described was true; it was made a reality to him by the
strength with which he conceived it. His power in the delineation of
character was shown in the principal personage of his story, Harvey Birch,
on whom, though he has chosen to employ him in the ignoble office of a
spy, and endowed him with the qualities necessary to his
profession,--extreme circumspection, fertility in stratagem, and the art
of concealing his real character--qualities which, in conjunction with
selfishness and greediness, make the scoundrel, he has bestowed the
virtues of generosity, magnanimity, an intense love of country, a fidelity
not to be corrupted, and a disinterestedness beyond temptation. Out of
this combination of qualities he has wrought a character which is a
favorite in all nations, and with all classes of mankind.
It is said that if you cast a pebble into the ocean, at the mouth of our
harbor, the vibration made in the water passes gradually on till it
strikes the icy barriers of the deep at the south pole. The spread of
Cooper's reputation is not confined within narrower limits. The _Spy_ is
read in all the written dialects of Europe, and in some of those of Asia.
The French, immediately after its first appearance, gave it to the
multitudes who read their far-diffused language, and placed it among the
first works of its class. It was rendered into Castilian, and passed into
the hands of those who dwell under the beams of the Southern Cross. At
length it passed the eastern frontier of Europe, and the latest record I
have seen of its progress towards absolute universality, is contained in a
statement of the _International Magazine_, derived, I presume, from its
author, that in 1847 it was published in a Persian translation at Ispahan.
Before this time, I doubt not, they are reading it in some of the
languages of Hindostan, and, if the Chinese ever translated anything, it
would be in the hands of the many millions who inhabit the far Cathay.
I have spoken of the hesitation which American critics felt in admitting
the merits of the _Spy_, on account of crudities in the plot or the
composition, some of which, no doubt, really existed. An exception must be
made in favor of the _Port Folio_, which, in a notice written by Mrs.
Sarah Hall, mother of the editor of that periodical, and author of
_Conversations on the Bible_, gave the work a cordial welcome; and Cooper,
as I am informed, never forgot this act of timely and ready kindness.
It was perhaps favorable to the immediate success of the _Spy_, that
Cooper had few American authors to divide with him the public attention.
That crowd of clever men and women who now write for the magazines, who
send out volumes of essays, sketches, and poems, and who supply the press
with novels, biographies, and historical works, were then, for the most
part, either stammering their lessons in the schools, or yet unborn. Yet
it is worthy of note, that just about the time that the _Spy_ made its
appearance, the dawn of what we now call our literature was just breaking.
The concluding number of Dana's _Idle Man_, a work neglected at first, but
now numbered among the best things of the kind in our language, was issued
in the same month. The _Sketch Book_ was then just completed; the world
was admiring it, and its author was meditating _Bracebridge Hall_. Miss
Sedgwick, about the same time, made her first essay in that charming
series of novels of domestic life in New England, which have gained her so
high a reputation. Percival, now unhappily silent, had just put to press a
volume of poems. I have a copy of an edition of Hallock's _Fanny_,
published in the same year; the poem of _Yamoyden,_ by Eastburn and Sands,
appeared almost simultaneously with it. Livingston was putting the
finishing hand to his _Report on the Penal Code of Louisiana,_ a work
written with such grave, persuasive eloquence, that it belongs as much to
our literature as to our jurisprudence. Other contemporaneous American
works there were, now less read. Paul Allen's poem of _Noah_ was just laid
on the counters of the booksellers. Arden published, at the same time, in
this city, a translation of Ovid's _Tristia_, in heroic verse, in which
the complaints of the effeminate Roman poet were rendered with great
fidelity to the original, and sometimes not without beauty. If I may speak
of myself, it was in that year that I timidly intrusted to the winds and
waves of public opinion a small cargo of my own--a poem entitled _The
Ages,_ and half a dozen shorter ones, in a thin duodecimo volume, printed
at Cambridge.
We had, at the same time, works of elegant literature, fresh from the
press of Great Britain, which are still read and admired. Barry Cornwall,
then a young suitor for fame, published in the same year his _Marcia
Colonna_; Byron, in the full strength and fertility of his genius, gave
the readers of English his tragedy of _Marino Faliero_, and was in the
midst of his spirited controversy with Bowles concerning the poetry of
Pope. The _Spy_ had to sustain a comparison with Scott's _Antiquary_,
published simultaneously with it, and with Lockhart's _Valerius_, which
seems to me one of the most remarkable works of fiction ever composed.
In 1823, and in his thirty-fourth year, Cooper brought out his novel of
the _Pioneers_, the scene of which was laid on the borders of his: own
beautiful lake. In a recent survey of Mr; Cooper's works, by one of his
admirers, it is intimated that the reputation of this work may have been,
in some degree factitious. I cannot think so; I cannot see how such a work
could fail of becoming, sooner or later, a favorite. It was several years
after its first appearance that I read the _Pioneers_, and I read it with
a delighted astonishment. Here, said I to myself, is the poet of rural
life in this country--our Hesiod, our Theocritus, except that he writes
without the restraint of numbers, and is a greater poet than they. In the
_Pioneers_, as in a moving picture, are made to pass before us the hardy
occupations and spirited, amusements of a prosperous settlement, in, a
fertile region, encompassed for leagues around with the primeval
wilderness of woods. The seasons in their different aspects, bringing with
them, their different employments; forests falling before the axe; the
cheerful population, with the first mild; day of spring, engaged in the
sugar orchards; the chase of the deer through the deep woods, and into the
lake; turkey-shooting, during the Christmas holidays, in which the Indian
marksman vied for the prize of skill with the white man; swift sleigh
rides under the bright winter sun, and, perilous encounters with wild
animals in the forests; these, and other scenes of rural life, drawn, as
Cooper knew how to draw them, in the bright and healthful coloring of
which he was master are interwoven with a regular narrative of human
fortunes, not unskilfully constructed; and how could such a work be
otherwise than popular?
In the _Pioneers_, Leatherstocking; is first introduced--a philosopher of
the woods, ignorant of books, but instructed in all that nature, without
the aid of, science, could reveal to the man of quick senses and inquiring
intellect, whose life has been passed under the open sky, and in
companionship with a race whose animal perceptions are the acutest and
most cultivated of which there is any example. But Leatherstocking has
higher qualities; in him there is a genial blending of the gentlest
virtues of the civilized man with the better nature of the aboriginal
tribes; all that in them is noble, generous, and ideal, is adopted into
his own kindly character, and all that is evil is rejected. But why should
I attempt to analyse a character so familiar? Leatherstocking is
acknowledged, on all hands, to be one of the noblest, as well as most
striking and original creations of fiction. In some of his subsequent
novels, Cooper--for he had not yet Attained to the full maturity of his
powers--heightened and ennobled his first conception of the character,
but in the _Pioneers_ it dazzled the world with the splendor of novelty;
His next work was the _Pilot_, in which he showed how, from the
vicissitudes of a life at sea, its perils and escapes, from the beauty and
terrors of the great deep, from the working of a vessel on a long voyage,
and from the frank, brave, and generous but peculiar character of the
seaman, may be drawn materials of romance by which the minds of men may be
as deeply moved as by anything in the power of romance to present. In this
walk, Cooper has had many disciples but no rival. All who have since
written romances of the sea have been but travellers in a country of which
he was the great discoverer; and none of them all seemed to have loved a
ship as Cooper loved it, or have been able so strongly to interest all
classes of readers in its fortunes. Among other personages drawn with
great strength in the _Pilot_, is the general favorite, Tom Coffin, the
thorough seaman with all the virtues and one or two of the infirmities of
his profession, superstitious, as seamen are apt to be, yet whose
superstitions strike us as but an irregular growth of his devout
recognition of the Power who holds the ocean in the hollow of his hand;
true-hearted, gentle, full of resources, collected in danger, and at last
calmly perishing at the post of duty, with the vessel he has long guided,
by what I may call a great and magnanimous death. His rougher and coarser
companion, Boltrope, is drawn with scarcely less skill, and with a no less
vigorous hand.
The _Pioneers_ is not Cooper's best tale of the American forest, nor, the
_Pilot_, perhaps, in all respects, his best tale of the sea; yet, if he
had ceased to write here, the measure of his fame would possibly have been
scarcely less ample than it now is. Neither of them is far below the best
of his productions, and in them appear the two most remarkable creations
of his imagination--two of the most remarkable characters in all fiction.
It was about this time that my acquaintance with Cooper began, an
acquaintance of more than a quarter of a century, in which his deportment
towards me was that of unvaried kindness. He then resided a considerable
part of the year in this city, and here he had founded a weekly club, to
which many of the most distinguished men of the place belonged. Of the
members who have since passed away, were Chancellor Kent, the jurist;
Wiley the intelligent and liberal bookseller; Henry D. Sedgwick, always
active in schemes of benevolence; Jarvis, the painter, a man of infinite
humor, whose jests awoke inextinguishable laughter; De Kay, the
naturalist; Sands, the poet; Jacob Harvey whose genial memory is cherished
by many friends. Of those who are yet living was Morse, the inventor of
the electric telegraph; Durand, then, one of the first of engravers, and
now no less illustrious as a painter; Henry James Anderson, whose
acquirements might awaken the envy of the ripest scholars of the old
world; Halleck, the poet and wit; Verplanck, who has given the world the
best edition of Shakspeare for general readers; Dr. King, now at the head
of Columbia College, and his two immediate predecessors in that office. I
might enlarge the list with many other names of no less distinction. The
army and navy contributed their proportion of members, whose names are on
record in our national history. Cooper when in town was always present,
and I remember being struck with the inexhaustible vivacity of his
conversation and the minuteness of his knowledge, in everything which
depended upon acuteness of observation and exactness of recollection. I
remember, too, being somewhat startled, coming as I did from the seclusion
of a country life, with a certain emphatic frankness in his manner, which,
however, I came at last to like and to admire. The club met in the hotel
called Washington Hall, the site of which, is now occupied by part of the
circuit of Stewart's marble building.
_Lionel Lincoln_, which cannot be ranked among the successful productions
of Cooper, was published in 1825; and in the year following appeared the
_Last of the Mohicans_ which more than recovered the ground lost by its
predecessor. In this work, the construction of the narrative has signal
defects, but it is one of the triumphs of the author's genius that he
makes us unconscious of them while we read. It is only when we have had
time to awake from the intense interest in which he has held us by the
vivid reality of his narrative, and have begun to search for faults in
cold blood, that we are able to find them, In the _Last of the Mohicans,_
we have a bolder portraiture of. Leatherstocking than in the _Pioneers_.
This work was published in 1826, and in the same year Cooper sailed with
his family for Europe. He left New York as one of the vessels of war,
described in his romances of the sea, goes out of port, amidst the thunder
of a parting salute from the big guns on the batteries. A dinner was given
him just before his departure, attended by most of the distinguished men
of the city, at which Peter A. Jay presided, and Dr. King addressed him in
terms which some then thought too glowing, but which would now seem
sufficiently temperate, expressing the good wishes of his friends, and
dwelling on the satisfaction they promised themselves in possessing so
illustrious a representative of American literature in the old world.
Cooper was scarcely in France when he remembered his friends of the weekly
club, and sent frequent missives to be read at its meetings; but the club
missed its founder went into a decline, and not long afterwards quietly
expired.
The first of Cooper's novels published after leaving America: was the
_Prairie_, which appeared early in 1827, a work with the admirers of which
I wholly agree. I read it with a certain awe, an undefined sense of
sublimity, such as one experiences on entering, for the first time, upon
those immense grassy deserts from which the work takes its name. The
squatter and his family--that brawny old man and his large-limbed sons,
living in a sort of primitive and patriarchal barbarism, sluggish on
ordinary occasions, but terrible when roused, like the hurricane that
sweeps the grand but monotonous wilderness in which they dwell--seem a
natural growth of ancient fields of the West. Leatherstocking, a hunter in
the _Pioneers_, a warrior in the _Last of the Mohicans_, and now, in his
extreme old age, a trapper on the prairie, declined in strength, but
undecayed in intellect, and looking to the near close of his life, and a
grave under the long grass, as calmly as the laborer at sunset looks to
his evening slumber, is no less in harmony with the silent desert in which
he wanders. Equally so are the Indians, still his companions, copies of
the American savage somewhat idealized, but not the less a part of the
wild nature in which they have their haunts.
Before the year closed, Cooper had given the world another nautical tale,
the _Red Rover_, which, with many, is a greater favorite than the _Pilot_,
and with reason, perhaps, if we consider principally the incidents, which
are conducted and described with a greater mastery over the springs of
pity and terror.
It happened to Cooper while he was abroad, as it not unfrequently happens
to our countrymen, to hear the United States disadvantageously compared
with Europe. He had himself been a close observer of things both here and
in the old world, and was conscious of being able to refute the detractors
of his country in regard to many points. He published in 1828, after he
had been two years in Europe, a series of letters, entitled _Notions of
the Americans, by a Travelling Bachelor_, in which he gave a favorable
account of the working of our institutions, and vindicated his country
from various flippant and ill-natured misrepresentations of foreigners. It
is rather too measured in style, but is written from a mind full of the
subject, and from a memory wonderfully stored with particulars. Although
twenty-four years have elapsed since its publication, but little of the
vindication has become obsolete.
Cooper loved his country and was proud of her history and her
institutions, but it puzzles many that he should have appeared, at
different times, as her eulogist, and her censor. My friends, she is
worthy both of praise and of blame, and Cooper was not the man to shrink
from bestowing either, at what seemed to him the proper time. He defended
her from detractors abroad; he sought to save her from flatterers at home.
I will not say that he was in as good humor with his country when he
wrote _Home at Found_, as when he wrote his _Notions of the Americans_,
but this I will say that whether he commended or censured, he did it in
the sincerity of his heart, as a true American, and in the belief that it
would do good. His _Notions of the Americans_ were more likely to lessen
than to increase his popularity in Europe, inasmuch as they were put forth
without the slightest regard to European prejudices.