ABSTRACT
Co o p e r in his own day was called ‘theAmerican Scott.’ Lockhart decided he was the best of all Scott’s imitators and Balzac coupled the two names together in a momen tous appreciation of The Pathfinder. Cooper himself was proud enough of the title until he was incensed by Lockhart’s Life o f Scott. (Lockhart printed a journal-entry by Scott, dating from a period in the eighteen-twenties when the pair of them, ‘the Scottish lion and the American lion’, were being feted to gether in Paris. Scott remarked that Cooper had the typically American ‘manner or absence of manner’. In Lockhart this became ‘manners, or absence of manners’.) But times have changed; and in our own day when Marius Bewley wants to make a case for Cooper, he does so by angrily putting the blame for neglect of Cooper precisely on this label, ‘the Ameri can Scott’, and arguing, on the very slender grounds of Cooper’s bad first novel Precaution, that Cooper’s idea of plot came to him from Jane Austen, not from Scott at all.1 When Mr. Bewley reprinted his essay in The Eccentric Design, he rightly omitted this and other disparaging references to Scott, but his first version is invaluable for showing what delicate ground it is, this whole question of Cooper’s relation to the Scott tradition. On the one hand Leslie Fiedler can write:
1 Scrutiny, Vol. XIX, No. 2.
