Like Sir Walter,
Cooper seems to have taken but little pains in the deliberate
planning of his plots. Frequently he accepts a ready-made formula
of villain and hero, predicament and escape, renewed crisis and
rescue, mystification and explanation, worthy of a third-rate
novelist. His salvation lies in his genius for action, the beauty
and grandeur of his landscapes, the primitive veracity of his
children of nature. Cooper was an elemental man, and he
comprehended, by means of something deeper than mere artistic
instinct, the feelings of elemental humanity in the presence of
the wide ocean or of the deep woods. He is as healthy and sane as
Fielding, and he possesses an additional quality which all of the
purely English novelists lack. It was the result of his youthful
sojourn in the wilderness. Let us call it the survival in him of
an aboriginal imagination. Cooper reminds one somehow of a
moose--an ungraceful creature perhaps, but indubitably big, as
many a hunter has suddenly realized when he has come unexpectedly
upon a moose that whirled to face him in the twilight silence of
a northern wood.
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