Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/90

 if the place were suddenly flooded with light. The shadowy shapes regain their sharpness of contour and recover their jutting boldness of feature and their animated expression. They seem once more to have something to say to us; and we gather responsively around, rejoicing to feel the power of great writers, and rejoicing, too, perhaps, in an illusory sense of our own perceptiveness.

"Oh, yes," we exclaim, "Cooper is clearly one of our distinguished assets—we mustn't forget Cooper. Prolix, to be sure; but then diffuseness is an element in his illusion. He hadn't Scott's rich background, but the alliance of romance with reality in his tales, his general and personal interest in the life he depicted, make his account of it solider art, give his romance even more substance and meaning than Scott's historiography. And then consider his actual 'contributions.' His Indians were unprecedented, and they remain unsurpassed for vigor and fidelity. Balzac praised his painting of woods and sea to the skies. Thackeray picked half a dozen of his characters as the equals of Scott's men, and he called La Longue Carabine 'one of the great prize men of fiction.' Add to all this his solid merits as publicist and patriotic critic. Between 1825 and 1850, you remember, New England, always the apex, had become also the incubus of our civilization, and called loudly for the note-taking of a chiel from beyond its borders. Cooper performed that service. To him we owe it that not only American authorship but American literature