[In the following essay, Grossman discusses Cooper's political views and the influence of European values on his writings.]

Cooper's literary career, beginning haphazardly without conscious preparation or plan and advancing rapidly to world fame, in its apparently eccentric course from the time of the European experience onward touches on almost every situation that can confront the American writer or that criticism insists on confronting him with. The questions so often argued since are thoroughly argued in Cooper's work and in contemporary criticism of it: whether an American writer expatriates himself and loses touch with his own country by living abroad; whether it is dangerous for his development to write on "foreign" subjects; the extent to which he should be influenced by popular opinion and, conversely, should try to influence it; his role in American civilization, and his duty both to represent and to create it.

Stated bluntly the questions seem unprofitable and unreal, but they have a historical reality. They are as old as American literature, and in fact largely preceded it. Before there was a national literature a critical attitude toward it, an anxious parental expectation of what it was to achieve, had been developed. The questions are significant not for the answers that we may give them now but for what they reveal about the demands that the nation was making of the American writer, and the strained relation that in consequence of these demands was to exist between him and his country.

In Cooper's day and for long afterward every question about American culture involved Europe, and it was the European trip that made Cooper self-consciously aware of the great American questions. The length of the trip itself presented a problem. Jefferson had said that an American could safely live abroad only five years. Cooper meant to stay away for no more than the allotted period but overstayed his leave. He returned out of step with his country; he doubted, however, that he had fallen behind, as Jefferson said an American would, and suggested brashly that he had gone too far ahead alone. This may be a way of admitting that Europe had unfitted him for life in America, but he never regretted his European adventure. To the end of his life he defended the American artist's right of access to Europe as part of his heritage. It was a "provincial absurdity" for Americans to say that Thomas Cole's painting or even Washington Irving's writing had lost in originality after their European years. He insisted always that his own Bravo, which had analyzed European aristocracy, was in spirit the most American book he ever wrote.

Europe had made Cooper feel the need to write about the American democratic ideal and to adopt new forms for this purpose—the treatise, the pamphlet, the propaganda novel with the direct and often intrusive exposition of ideas. Cooper's theme in Europe, the superiority of American principles, became, after his return, the inferiority of American life. His countrymen failed to live up to the high standards which he had proclaimed were theirs. In defense of the ideal he denounced the actual as a fraud. The newspapers, largely under the control of the Bank of the United States, the self-appointed leaders of small-town life calling and manipulating "public" meetings, the provincial rich in the cities, were not the real America. He attacked them as usurpers who spoke in the country's name; but the usurpation was so broad that he frequently sounded as if he were attacking all American opinion and ultimately came close to doing so. The manufacture of public opinion by the few was no less undemocratic merely because it succeeded and brought the many around to their views; success only made the tyranny of opinion more complete. The liberalism of the 1830's during which he asserted the soundness of the great mass of the people gave way in his conservative last years to a struggle for democracy carried on against the people. According to Cooper, it was the masses and not he who had abandoned the democratic faith.

Cooper saw as a fundamental problem of democracy his own right to be different and on his own terms. It is hard to describe his position with any exactness, for in its defeat the very word that would most accurately define the difference that he asserted, "gentleman," has been erased from the language as a meaningful term. American democracy has at times gone about solving the problems of the various kinds of difference by glossing over them. In Cooper's own day, as he gleefully noted, such frank terms as "master" and "servant" were disappearing and their place was being taken by "boss" (the Dutch word for master) and "help" (surely a euphemistic understatement of the amount of work expected from the worker). The right of a gentleman to be different has been denied by denying the existence of gentlemen as a special class, just as, by much the same device, the rights of racial and religious minorities have been defended chiefly by denying that they are really different from the rest of the community.

Cooper was writing about American class manners and attitudes in the very period in which they were undergoing a profound change. The traditional rights of social position were being reduced to mere perquisites that might be gracefully offered to a man but which it was unbecoming for him to demand. The political revolution of Jacksonian democracy had brought about a revolution in social tone, more thoroughgoing in politics than elsewhere. The discovery was made—but not by the Jacksonians—that in the era of the common man it was politically astute for his leaders to appear to be common men. At almost the same time that Whig editors were attacking Cooper as an aristocrat who aped the style of an English lord and looked down on his fellow townsmen as peasants, the Whig party was inveighing against Martin Van Buren as the little aristocrat who drank champagne and used finger cups amid the royal splendor of the President's palace; its own candidate, William Henry Harrison, who it was hoped would restore the Bank of the United States, was presented successfully in 1840 as a simple man, happy in a log cabin with a barrel of hard cider. This triumph of "democratic" manners was for Cooper the triumph of the worst elements of the commercial classes. The honest observance of class distinctions and the honest description of social classes might help preserve political sanity and the distinction between true democracy and the bastard democracy of the demagogue. In the Anti-Rent novels Cooper seems nearly as indignant at the inaccurate description of the landlords as feudal aristocrats as he does at the attempt to take away their property. He was not a large landholder himself, but both he and they were victims of the same loose rhetoric. In his hatred, if not in his love, he was still guided by what he had always thought the standards of the true democrat.

The Whig myth of Fenimore Cooper—Dorothy Waples' happy phrase for the editors' composite picture of their adversary as a morbidly sensitive, embittered failure—is, as Miss Waples insisted, a gross distortion. Yet, normal though it was for Cooper to resent the attacks on him, there is something disconcerting in the elaborate publicness of his resentment, in his going so thoroughly into the minutiae of his quarrels, as if bent on immortalizing each moment of his anger. The genteel and the democratic tradition both agree—the one in the name of dignity, the other in that of good fellowship—that a man attacked, stoutly though he may defend himself, must pretend not to mind too much or too long.

Cooper was too obviously really hurt. He was a literal patriot, and beneath the excellent formal logic of the political philosopher and novelist of ideas there is always the illogic of love. Half a dozen Whig editors were not the country—this is his political point—but his personal one is that his country, speaking through them, has rejected him. While he is discoursing on his country's faults and on the distance to be kept between himself and his countrymen, his aggrieved tone reveals his need for their affection.

There is nothing remarkable in the fact that the writer who denounces demands admiration. It was bound, however, to be denied Cooper for reasons which he himself had indicated: Americans of his day were accustomed to flattery from their fellow-Americans; and in a society that strove so hard to seem homogeneous, there was no place for an opposition from within—it was not the recognized function of a democrat to harry democracy.

Because his right to speak out was questioned, he insisted not only on the substance but on the appearance of opposition. He became as absorbed in the denunciatory role as in denunciation, but too frequently is not frank enough about it; only as Miles Wallingford does he generously give himself away and admit his honest pleasure as a self-appointed censor. The role which he typically assumed, often to the disadvantage of his modulated thought, may be described as that of the plain dealer, that blunt foe of hypocritical cant and friend of disagreeable truths. It is not too far from the editors' myth by which the warm, eager, social, hopelessly domestic Fenimore Cooper of private life, fond of his friends and good talk, had been transformed, for his contemporaries, into the legendary isolated misanthrope. Misanthropy and plain dealing are close to each other and can be taken as rough equivalents (as we can see by the fact that Molière's Misanthrope became The Plain Dealer on its adaptation into English by Wycherley). And at times Cooper seems to be almost cooperating with the editors in myth-making, to show that their version of his role is accurate. In refusing to join the Copyright Club, although believing in its objective, international copyright, he wrote to the club's secretary that he desired to do nothing for his country beyond his inescapable duty, paying his taxes.

Cooper was not withdrawing from American life in actuality; the letter to the Copyright Club may represent a moment of churlishness, and his true adherence is demonstrated by his continuing to write. But the subject of his writing was more and more his withdrawal in his imagination, his estrangement from the world he knows and in which he feels increasingly insecure. When, in his last wholly successful novel, Satanstoe, he imagines a hero secure in all of his relations to the world and certain of its affection, he has made him not an American like himself struggling between two worlds but a dependent colonial for whom there is but one. Cooper has not in his old age become the conventional conservative loving the past for its own sake as inevitably superior to the present. He has moved Corny back in time to escape not only the American present but America itself. In terms of national existence, past and present are remarkably alike. A grey disenchantment hangs over the beginnings of the nation in Wyandotté and The Chainbearer; if Cooper has become too disillusioned to see Utopia in the American future, he refuses with equal steadfastness to see it in the purely American past.

The instability and impermanence of American life, which Cooper in the last half of his career sees as endangering the gentleman's right to his rational enjoyments, the landowner's right to his property, and finally, in his last novel, the literal right to life itself, had been one of his themes in the years of his untroubled beginnings. His first worth-while novel, The Spy, is about a revolution, and his next, The Pioneers, is about the destruction of an older way of life by the coming of civilization. Even in his early works Cooper's finest awareness is of the victims of change and of the cruelty of the process. But he is not yet committed to seeing as evil the irresistible forces that make for change, and it is this uncommitted insight, which sees no more than the mere inevitability of life, that makes the persecuted and exiled Natty so great. With his most famous class of the dispossessed, his good Indians, Cooper succeeds not by sympathetic identification but by a pathetic fallacy which endows them with his own ability to accept their dispossession philosophically; and it is this capacity for acceptance that gives them their haunting improbable charm.

Cooper's untroubled detachment—so remarkable because he was himself one of the victims of American instability and his writing career was begun just after, perhaps because of, the loss of the family fortune which left him burdened with family debts—gives way to personal involvement only when he feels himself unjustly victimized. He may have been wrong in his feeling, may in fact have created the conspiracy against himself which he discovered and which soon by his efforts took on an objective reality. He was not, however, turning aside from his work. His creative energy burst forth amid his fiercest quarrels with the press. For all of its nagging byways, small folly is his own road, at once difficult and self-indulgent, to inaccessible truths. The sense of betrayal, so unbecoming in him personally, enriches the meaning of his work. It gives him, while he seems perversely bent on taking his stand against time itself, his sudden tragic glimpses that every present moment of living is in some form a treachery to the past.

He never found a wholly adequate symbol in which to concentrate his tragic vision, perhaps because in the depths of his nature his heart was cheerful, and the bitterness was on the surface, for all the world to see, in his mind. The vision remains scattered and fragmentary, distributed not quite impartially, among his best and his poorest works, for his best, the Leather-Stocking Tales by which he was content to be remembered, do not have their full share. But to know his best well and to enjoy it fully, his other work, his very failures, must also be taken into the reckoning; for the gusto and enjoyment of life of which the best are so full are all the finer for a knowledge of their bitter price.