INFLUENCE OF NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE 485 



admiration, and praised them publicly; Grillparzer, visiting him, 

 found him just reading the Sources of the Susquehanna. Morike 

 read with his family in 1848 Cooper's sea-tales and was much pleased 

 with them. In a somewhat regretful note in his Outlines the statis- 

 tician of our literature, Karl Goedeke, attests the enormous popu- 

 larity of the Cooper novels from recollections of his ow r n youth. The 

 innumerable imitations of Cooper in the German language have 

 never yet been catalogued. 



Literary history cannot assign to Cooper's novels an extremely 

 high rank. He is a gifted but weak imitator of Walter Scott, who 

 simply had the good fortune to discover, in the romance of the sea and 

 of the Indians, a fresh, unhackneyed store of material. Borne con- 

 trasted the active life and mighty events and deeds of his novels with 

 the inaction of the heroes of German fiction. Sealsfield's criticisms 

 still hold good: Cooper exaggerates and idealizes beyond measure. 

 In his portrayal of the Indians he is far surpassed in truth by Seals- 

 field; so also in the ardor and magnificence of his descriptions of 

 scenery. With all his enthusiasm and high-flown passages, he still 

 remains in reality sober. His novels fairly drip with moralizing. But 

 he knows well how to group strong, rough, glaring effects, how to 

 tell a story in an absorbing and even exciting way. The strong 

 charm of the matter of his novels brings it about that selections 

 from his works have a greater effect on youth even to the present 

 day than the originals themselves. Cooper injured himself chiefly 

 by the great bulk of his writings. Impelled by success he let himself 

 be carried down a declivitous path, took up one period after another 

 in the life of his Leather Stocking, and had to admit himself, in the 

 prefaces to his later books, how hard it was to make the same charac- 

 ters appear in four or even five works without repeating or contra- 

 dicting himself too much. This precipice Cooper by no means escaped. 

 His imitations of himself became weaker and weaker. As an artist 

 he stands far below Stifter, though he exerted a powerful stimulating 

 influence on the younger man. 



As far as 1 can see, Stifter never mentioned Cooper's name in his 

 works or letters, just as he never speaks of the other mental pabulum 

 which he may have taken in, in the way of entertainment, during 

 his early years. But it is a safe assumption that he knew all five 

 of the Leather Stocking novels, and that their hero had long been 

 a cherished and familiar character in his mind from the three older 

 novels (The Pioneers, 1823; The Last of the Mohican*. 1820; The 

 Prairie, 1827), when the appearance of the two final novels (The 

 Pathfinder, 1840; and The Dcerslaycr, 1841), the German translations 

 of which followed immediately, perhaps even in 1840, kindled the 

 fire anew within him, nourished his just-awakened desire for literary 

 production, and caused the imagination of the young poet to boar 



