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 the 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