ally cares; and men and women are the accessories,
inconvenient and often uncomfortable, that must be endured. Of the
former he speaks with a loving particularity that lets nothing escape
the attention. Yet minute as are often his descriptions, he did not fall
into that too easily besetting sin of the novelist, of overloading his
picture with details. To advance the greater he sacrificed the less.
Cooper looked at nature with the eye of a painter and not of a (p. 284)
photographer. He fills the imagination even more than he does the sight.
Hence the permanence of the impression which he leaves upon the mind.
His descriptions, too, produce a greater effect at the time and cling
longer to the memory because they fall naturally into the narrative, and
form a real part in the development of the story; they are not merely
dragged in to let the reader know what the writer can do. "If Cooper,"
said Balzac, "had succeeded in the painting of character to the same
extent that he did in the painting of the phenomena of nature, he would
have uttered the last word of our art." This author I have quoted
several times, because far better even than George Sand, or indeed any
who have criticised the American novelist, he seems to me to have seen
clearly wherein the latter succeeded and wherein he failed.

To this it is just to add one word which Cooper himself would have
regarded as the highest tribute that could be paid to what he did.
Whatever else we may say of his writings, their influence is always a
healthy influence. Narrow and prejudiced he sometimes was in his
opinions; but he hated whatever was mean and low in character. It is
with beautiful things and with noble things that he teaches us to
sympathize. Here are no incitements to passion, no prurient suggestions
of sensual delights. The air which breathes through all his fictions is
as pure as that which sweeps the streets of his mountain home. It is as
healthy as nature itself. To read one of his best works after many of
the novels of the day, is like passing from the heated and stifling
atmosphere of crowded rooms to the purity, the freedom, and the
boundlessness of the forest.

In these foregoing pages I have attempted to portray an author (p. 285)
who was something more than an author, who in any community would have
been a marked man had he never written a word. I have not sought to hide
his foibles and his faults, his intolerance and his dogmatism, the
irascibil