James Fenimore Cooper | Page 8

in which it originated. There was slight encouragement for
the author to write; there was still less for the publisher to print. It was
indeed a positive injury ordinarily to the commercial credit of a
bookseller to bring out a volume of poetry or of prose fiction which had
been written by an American; for it was almost certain to fail to pay
expenses. A sort of critical literature was struggling, or rather (p. 019)
gasping, for a life that was hardly worth living; for its most marked
characteristic was its servile deference to English judgment and dread
of English censure. It requires a painful and penitential examination of
the reviews of the period to comprehend the utter abasement of mind
with which the men of that day accepted the foreign estimate upon
works written here, which had been read by themselves, but which it
was clear had not been read by the critics whose opinions they echoed.
Even the meekness with which they submitted to the most depreciatory
estimate of themselves was outdone by the anxiety with which they
hurried to assure the world that they, the most cultivated of the
American race, did not presume to have so high an opinion of the
writings of some one of their countrymen as had been expressed by
enthusiasts, whose patriotism had proved too much for their
discernment. Never was any class so eager to free itself from charges
that imputed to it the presumption of holding independent views of its
own. Out of the intellectual character of many of those who at that day
pretended to be the representatives of the highest education in this
country, it almost seemed that the element of manliness had been
wholly eliminated; and that along with its sturdy democracy, whom no
obstacles thwarted and no dangers daunted, the New World was also to
give birth to a race of literary cowards and parasites. With such a state
of feeling prevalent, a work of fiction that concerned America might
seem to have small chance of success with Americans themselves. It
would not, therefore, have been strange, under any circumstances, that

in beginning his career as an author Cooper should have chosen to
write a tale of English social life. The fact that he knew (p. 020)
personally nothing about what he was describing was in itself no
insuperable objection. That ignorance was then and has since been
shared by many novelists on both sides of the water, who have treated
of the same subject. Relying upon English precedent, he might in fact
feel that he was peculiarly fitted for the task. He had cruised a few
times up and down the British channel, he had caught limited views of
British manners and customs by walking on several occasions the
length of Fleet Street and the Strand. Knowledge of America equivalent
to this would then have been regarded in England as an ample
equipment for an accurate treatise upon the social life of this country,
and even upon its existing political condition and probable future.
But much more than the choice of a foreign subject did the pretense of
foreign authorship prove the servility of feeling prevailing at that time
among the educated classes. This was in the first place, to be sure, the
result of the freak that led Cooper originally to begin writing a novel;
but it was a freak that would never have been carried out, after
publication had been decided upon, had he not been fully aware of the
fact that the least recommendation of a book to his countrymen would
be the knowledge that it was composed by one of themselves.
"Precaution" was not merely a tale of English social life, it purported to
be written by an Englishman; and it was so thoroughly conformed to its
imaginary model that it not only reëchoed the cant of English
expression, but likewise the expression of English cant. To talk about
dissenters and the establishment was natural and proper enough in a
work written ostensibly by the citizen of a country in which there was a
state church. But Cooper went much farther than (p. 021) this in the
reflections and moral observations which are scattered up and down the
pages of this novel. These represent fairly views widely held at the time
in America, and may not impossibly express the personal opinions he
himself then entertained. He speaks in one place, in his assumed
character of an Englishman, of the solidity and purity of our ethics as
giving a superior tone to our moral feelings as contrasted with the
French. He goes out of his way to compliment George III. One of the
personages in the novel was tempted to admit something to his credit

that he did not deserve. The love of truth,