For one thing, Cooper never meant to be writing realism. In the 1850 preface to the collected Leather-Stocking novels, he quite sensibly answered his critics thus:
It is the privilege of all writers of fiction, more particularly when their works aspire to the elevation of romances, to present the beau-ideal of their characters to the reader. This it is which constitutes poetry, and to suppose that the red-man is to be represented only in the squalid misery or in the degraded moral state that certainly more or less belongs to his condition, is, we apprehend, taking a very narrow view of an author's privileges. Such criticism would have deprived the world of even Homer.
The term beau-ideal is a key one. Cooper is true to the spirit of the American frontier, but he is writing romance as distinguished from realism and naturalism. For his characters, even those rounded and relatively three-dimensional ones like Hawkeye and Magua, he abstracts in order to make them recognizable and representative. When we note that a Cooper Indian, for instance, is usually all good or all bad, it may be well to remember that Milton's Satan, though at times admirable, is all evil, his Christ all good. Both writers abstracted certain qualities in order to present a worldview that was also a belief strongly tinted with tragic sadness. Cooper, who seldom did any rewriting, was far from the careful craftsman that Milton was; nonetheless, Cooper too, though working on a national rather than a cosmic scale, wrote of the sin of Man and a consequent vanishing way of life and of an ideal human messiah image that could point the way to rectifying a bad situation. Cooper's was a lesser achievement than Milton's, but both men worked with what, from any broad consideration, must be called romance.
Cooper, then, should be appreciated as a writer blazing new ground, an entertainer unable to divest himself of certain stock traditions like sentimentalism which had proved its ability to hold a reader, an artist slowly and with reasonable success experimenting his way into a new, native, and to-be-established tradition. He did this by abstracting from frontier rifle lore, from the Indian lore personally seen or found in the factual writings of the Reverend John Heckewelder and others, and, along with his own observations, from the history and the oral or written folklore about frontiersmen like Daniel Boone. What he did achieve is worthy of understanding and appreciation. Only that way can a reader realize how quickly Sydney Smith was proved wrong. Only that way can one properly withhold or offer applause.
