But he
had read too much and lived too little to rival the masters of
the art of fiction. And there was a traveled Frenchman,
Chateaubriand, surely an expert in the art of eloquent prose, who
had transferred to the pages of his American Indian stories,
"Atala" and "Rene," the mystery and enchantment of our dark
forests
and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand, like Brockden Brown, is
feverish. A taint of old-world eroticism and despair hovers like
a miasma over his magnificent panorama of the wilderness. Cooper,
like Scott, is masculine.
He was a Knickerbocker only by adoption. Born in New Jersey, his
childhood was spent in the then remote settlement of Cooperstown
in Central New York. He had a little schooling at Albany, and a
brief and inglorious career at Yale with the class of 1806. He
went to sea for two years, and then served for three years in the
United States Navy upon Lakes Ontario and Champlain, the very
scene of some of his best stories. In 1811 he married, resigned
from the Navy, and settled upon a little estate in Westchester
County, near New York.
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