For it was Scott who had created the immense nineteenth century
audience for prose fiction, and who had evolved a kind of formula
for the novel, ready for Cooper's use. Both men were natural
story-tellers. Scott had the richer mind and the more fully
developed historical imagination. Both were out-of-doors men,
lovers of manly adventure and of natural beauty. But the American
had the good fortune to be able to utilize in his books his
personal experiences of forest and sea and to reveal to Europe
the real romance of the American wilderness.
That Cooper was the first to perceive the artistic possibilities
of this romance, no one would claim. Brockden Brown, a Quaker
youth of Philadelphia, a disciple of the English Godwin, had
tried his hand at the very end of the eighteenth century upon
American variations of the Gothic romance then popular in
England. Brown had a keen eye for the values of the American
landscape and even of the American Indian. He had a knack for
passages of ghastly power, as his descriptions of maniacs,
murderers, sleep-walkers, and solitaries abundantly prove.
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