ABSTRACT

Fenimore Cooper's outspoken individualism was a constant irritant to a sensitive majority, and his aloofness from the common enthusiasms was reckoned no better than treason to his native land. Fenimore Cooper was the barometer of a gusty generation, sensitive to every storm on the far horizon. His instinctive romanticisms were always being buffeted by fact, and his troubled mind in consequence was forever constructing laborious defense-mechanisms. The perplexities and dogmatisms that clutter so many of his later pages, playing havoc with his romantic art, are a testimony to the confusions of a generation in the midst of epic changes. Cooper had drifted with his age far from such old-fashioned methods of class domination. With the disintegration of Federalism, the young man went with the country in its turning towards French romanticism. Democrat though he professed to be, Cooper shrank from the logical application of the democratic principle.