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Ossian, Scott and Cooper's Indians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Barrie Hayne
Barrie Hayne
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Though Mark Twain's phrase ‘the showiest kind of book-talk’ undoubtedly represents the apogee of the attacks on Cooper's diction in general, the grandiloquent speeches of Cooper's Indians had drawn the fire of the proponents of verisimilitude from the earliest. The North American Review, with The Last of the Mohicans before it, criticized the author's idealization of Indian speech and character (‘We should be glad to know, for example, in what tribe, or in what age of Indian history, such a civilized warrior as Uncas ever flourished?’). Nor, two years later, did the reviewing of one of Cooper's sea novels seem an inappropriate occasion for a fresh onslaught upon his Indians: ‘This bronze noble of nature, is then made to talk like Ossian for whole pages, and measure out hexameters, as though he had been practising for a poetic prize’. Adding weightily to the chorus, as the years succeeded, would be the Indian fighter Cass, who expressed ‘regret that [Cooper] did not cross the Allegany, instead of the Atlantic, and survey the red man in the forests and prairies’, as well as the author of The Oregon Trail and historian of the eighteenth century's struggle against the Five Nations: ‘We do not allude to his Indian characters, which it must be granted, are for the most part either superficially or falsely drawn; while the long conversations which he puts into their mouths, are as truthless as they are tiresome’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , July 1969 , pp. 73 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1969

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References

page 73 note 1 ‘Fenimore Cooper's literary offences’, The Portable Mark Twain, ed. de Voto, B. (New York, 1946), p. 553Google Scholar.

page 73 note 2 The citations from the North American Review are as follows: 23, no. 52 (07 1826), 167 [W. H. Gardiner]Google Scholar; 27, no. 60 (July 1828), 140 [G. Mellen]; 26, no. 59 (April 1828), 373 [Lewis Cass]; 74, no. 154 (January 1852), 150 [Francis Parkman]. See as well the review of Gleanings in Europe, 46, no. 98 (01 1838), 1–19Google Scholar.

page 73 note 3 Fridén, Georg, ‘James Fenimore Cooper and Ossian’, Essays and Studies on American Language and Literature, vol. viii, ed. Liljegren, S. B. (Upsala, 1949), p. 55Google Scholar.

page 74 note 1 See, especially, Frederick, John T., ‘Cooper's eloquent Indians’, PMLA, 71, no. 5 (12 1956), 1004–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 74 note 2 ‘Charles Brockden Brown’, Biographical and Critical Miscellanies, Complete Works of William H. Prescott (New York: Kelmscott Press, undated), p. 28Google Scholar: ‘Cooper is indeed a poet. His descriptions of inanimate nature, no less than of savage man, are instinct with the breath of poetry’.

page 74 note 3 The Crater, The Works of J. Fenimore Cooper, Ideal Edition, 32 volumes (New York, 1901)Google Scholar [All subsequent references to Cooper's works will be to this edition, which is printed from the same plates as the Mohawk edition], p. 379. ‘It might be said to resemble, in this respect, that sublime rock, which is recognized as a part of the “everlasting hills” in Coles’ [sic] series of noble landscapes that is called “The March [sic] of Empire”, ever the same amid the changes of time, and civilization, and decay, there was the apex of the Peak….' See also Jones, H. M., ‘Prose and pictures: James Fenimore Cooper’, Tulane Studies in English, 3 (1952), pp. 133–54Google Scholar; Ringe, Donald A., ‘James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Cole: an analogous technique’, American Literature, 30, no. 1 (03 1958), 26–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 75 note 1 Oeuvres Complètes de Honoré de Balzac (Oeuvres Diverses, Tome III, Paris, 1940, p. 282)Google Scholar: ‘Bas-de-cuir est une statue, un magnifique hermaphrodite moral, né de l'état sauvage et de la civilisation…. C'est surtout par cet homme demi-indien, demi-civilisé que Cooper s'est élevé jusqu'à Walter Scott’; Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1852). p. 48 (‘W. C. Bryant's Discourse’)Google Scholar.

page 75 note 2 See The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. Beard, J. F. (Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. ii, p. 310Google Scholar: ‘The “Heidenmauer” is not equal to the “Bravo”, but it is a good book and better than two thirds of Scott's. They may say it is like his if they please; they have said so of every book I have written, even the “Pilot”!’ The best discussions of the literary relationship between Scott and Cooper are Davie, Donald, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London, 1961), pp. 101–65Google Scholar, and Dekker, George, James Fenimore Cooper the Novelist (London, 1967), pp. 20–42 and passimGoogle Scholar.

page 75 note 3 See Georg Fridén, ‘James Fenimore Cooper and Ossian’; also Liljegren, S. B., ‘The Revolt against Romanticism in American Literature as Evidenced in the Works of S. L. Clemens’, Essays and Studies on Amer. Lang, and Lit., I (Upsala, 1945), 45 ffGoogle Scholar.

page 76 note 1 The quotations are from The Poems of Ossian, translated by Macpherson, James, Esq.; 2 vols., new edition (London, 1773), i, p. 3Google Scholar; ii, p. 129; i, p. 271; i, p. 295; i, p. 202. This edition is hereafter cited as Ossian.

page 77 note 1 6, no. 12 (July 1805), p. 462.

page 77 note 2 See Carpenter, Frederic I., ‘The Vogue of Ossian in America: A Study in Taste’, American Literature, 2, no. 4 (01 1931), 405–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 77 note 3 On my own count of thirty novels (Precaution and The Monikins do not have epigraphs), out of 936 chapter epigraphs, Shakespeare has 400, followed by Byron (56) and Scott (25). Other Romantics substantially represented—by more than twelve epigraphs—are Samuel Rogers, Mrs Hemans, Bryant and Halleck.

page 77 note 4 The Columbiad: A Poem (London 1809), Book ix, 11. 699–704Google Scholar; Book ii, 11. 37–8; Book x, 11. 546, 549–51.

page 78 note 1 Critique of Judgement, tr. Bernard, J. H. (London, 1931), p. 125Google Scholar. Cooper himself follows the romantic definition of sublimity to the letter in the opening sentences of The Pathfinder (p. 1): ‘The sublimity connected with vastness is familiar to every eye. The most abstruse, the most far-reaching, perhaps the most chastened of the poet's thoughts, crowd on the imagination as he gazes into the depths of the illimitable void. The expanse of the ocean is seldom seen by the novice with indifference; and the mind, even in the obscurity of night, finds a parallel to that grandeur which seems inseparable from images that the senses cannot compass’.

page 78 note 2 ‘A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian’, Ossian, vol. ii, p. 425Google Scholar; see also Blair's discussion of sublimity beginning on p. 422: ‘But amidst the rude scenes of nature, amidst rocks and torrents and whirlwinds and battles, dwells the sublime’ (p. 423).

page 79 note 1 Essays on Chivalry and Romance [Scott's articles for the supplement to the 5th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica] (London, 1892), p. 134Google Scholar.

page 79 note 2 See Manzoni, , ‘Sul Romanticismo’, Opere (Milano, 1953), pp. 187–209Google Scholar; also Colquhoun, Archibald, Manzoni and His Times (New York, 1954), p. 164 ffGoogle Scholar.; see Hawthorne, preface to The House of the Seven Gables; for Ainsworth's view of the relation between documentary and romance, see especially the prefaces to Boscobel and Rookwood: ‘The chief object…was to see how far the infusion of a warmer and more genial current into the veins of old Romance would succeed in reviving her fluttering and feeble pulses’ (Rookwood).

page 79 note 3 Hazlitt, , Complete Works, ed. Howe, P. P., 21 volumes (London, 1932), vol. xi, p. 240Google Scholar.

page 79 note 4 61, no. 123 (April 1835), p. 26.

page 79 note 5 The Monthly Magazine and American Review, 2, no. 4 (04 1800), 251Google Scholar. The essay is unsigned, but Brown's interests and his editorship of the magazine point to his being the author.

page 79 note 6 The Yemassee, ed. Cowie, Alexander (American Book Company, 1937), prefatory letter ‘To Professor Samuel Henry Dickson, M.D., of South Carolina’, pp. 3–7Google Scholar.

page 80 note 1 ‘Preface to the Leather-Stocking Tales’, The Deerslayer, p. viiGoogle Scholar.

page 80 note 2 Ibid. p. vi.

page 80 note 3 ‘A Dissertation Concerning the Aera of Ossian’, Ossian, vol. ii, pp. 227–30Google Scholar.

page 80 note 4 Complete Works, vol. xi, p. 240; vol. xvi, p. 321.

page 81 note 1 The Deerslayer, p. 3.

page 81 note 2 ‘A Dissertation Concerning the Aera of Ossian’, Ossian, vol. ii, pp. 213–31Google Scholar.

page 81 note 3 The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1955), p. 102Google Scholar.

page 81 note 4 ‘Fenimore Cooper's Leathstocking Novels’, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Beal, Anthony (London, 1955), p. 317Google Scholar.

page 82 note 1 Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, tr. Hannah, and Mitchell, Stanley (London, 1962), p. 65Google Scholar. This whole discussion is valuable in seeing the historical background to Cooper's epic.

page 82 note 2 Ossian, vol. ii, pp. 213–4.

page 82 note 3 North American Review, 15, no. 36 (07 1822) [W. H. Gardiner] [Review of The Spy], 255Google Scholar.

page 82 note 4 The Deerslayer, pp. 1–2.

page 82 note 5 Ibid. p. 572.

page 83 note 1 See Miller, Perry, ‘The Romance and the novel’, Nature's Nation (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 241–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Miller cites this quotation from E. T. Channing in the North American Review (247).

page 83 note 2 The Deerslayer, p. vi.

page 83 note 3 ‘A Critical dissertation’, Ossian, vol. ii, p. 345Google Scholar.

page 83 note 4 Cf. Lowell, James Russell, A Fable for Critics (The Shock of Recognition, ed. Wilson, Edmund, New York, 1943), p. 57Google Scholar: ‘His Indians, with proper respect be it said,/Are just Natty Bumppo, daubed over with red….’

page 83 note 5 See ‘Fenimore Cooper's literary offences’, pp. 543–53.

page 84 note 1 See, for a discussion of Cooper's use of Heckewelder and others, John T. Frederick, ‘Cooper's eloquent Indians’, 1006–8.

page 84 note 2 Colden, Cadwallader, The History of the Five Indian Nations, 2nd edition (London, 1750), p. xiiiGoogle Scholar; Schoolcraft, Henry R., Narrative Journal of Travels (Albany, 1821), p. 235Google Scholar; Rev. Heckewelder, John, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations, new and revised edition, ed. Reichel, William C., Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. xii (Philadelphia, 1881), pp. 137–40Google Scholar.

page 84 note 3 Colden, p. xiii; Schoolcraft, p. 234.

page 84 note 4 Heckewelder, p. 132.

page 84 note 5 pp. iii–iv.

page 84 note 6 ‘A synopsis of the Indian tribes of North America’, Archaeoligia Americana (Cambridge, 1836), pp. 164–5Google Scholar.

page 84 note 7 Colden, p. xiii.

page 85 note 1 Wyandotté, p. 382. Fridén (pp. 23–4) draws a distinction between Indians of inferior rank and those corrupted by the whites, and the romantic Indian heroes. The one, like Nick in Wyandotté, uses a pidgin-English, the other the Ossianic mode. Yet the hero-villains, like Magua, also speak like Ossianic chieftains. The distinction seems to be primarily one of romanticism and realism, for the chief, whether he be hero or villain, if romantically conceived, uses high mimetic, whereas realistically viewed, like Chingachgook himself in The Pioneers, or Wyandotté, he will speak in broken English. (This point is effectively dramatized in the figure of Wyandotté, the heroic chief, who is the residual fantasy-self of Nick, who is now enslaved by the white man. Realism demands that in both personalities Nick-Wyandotté use the same dialect.) The distinction is not simply that Cooper intends the high mimetic to be a simultaneous English translation of the Indian utterance, and the broken English to be more what the Indian, using English himself, would actually say, since the English which Magua addresses to the captured party when he makes his proposal to Cora (The Last of the Mohicans, pp. 123–6) is also in the high-flown, rhetorical style. Cooper's imitators discriminate less; their main interest lies in the romantic hero-villains, like the Brant of Charles Fenno Hoffman's Greyslaer (1840) or the Pontiac of John Richardson's—‘The Canadian Cooper's’—Wacousta (1832). Robert Montgomery Bird, whose purpose in Nick of the Woods (1837) was explicitly to present the Indian anti-romantically as a savage, brutal being (see the preface to the first edition, and also to the edition of 1853), nevertheless puts the Ossianic mode into the mouth of his villain Wenonga. William Gilmore Simms, on the other hand, whose attitude to the Indians is in the vein of an ante-bellum Southerner to a race one notch above the Negro, uses the pidgin-English for even the most heroic of his Indians—Sanutee and Occonestoga of The Yemassee (1835), and Oakatibbé (1845).

page 85 note 2 See Preface to The Last of the Mohicans (p. iv): ‘His language has the richness of and sententious fulness of the Chinese. He will express a phrase in a word, and he will qualify the meaning of an entire sentence by a syllable….’

page 85 note 3 The Last of the Mohicans, pp. 422–3.

page 86 note 1 Ossian, vol. i, pp. 311–2.

page 86 note 2 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Boston, 1867), p. 365Google Scholar.

page 86 note 3 Ossian, vol. ii, p. 286.

page 86 note 4 33, 7. The same passage is quoted in another review of Blair's dissertation, Monthly Review, 28 (02 1763), 147Google Scholar.

page 86 note 5 See, for instance, 25 (June 1755), 252: ‘The following Speeches are faithful Translations of those that were made by the Indian Chiefs to the Representatives of our American Colonies … and cannot fail to be agreeable to our Readers, as they contain not only the Sense of the Indians on our State of Affairs there, but some Strains of native Eloquence; which might have done Honour to Tully or Demosthenes’.