COOPEK IN GKRAfANY 



53 



him belongs the credit of having given American literature; a 

 respectable place beside the literatures of Europe. From his works 

 the European first received a comprehensive idea of American 

 life, and of the social and political aspirations of the new r(^])iil)lic. 



Cooper's popularity spread to nearly all of the civilized coun- 

 tries of the world, and rose to a height perhaps unparalleled in the 

 history of fiction. Lounsbury, in his excellent biography of Cooper, 

 quotes the following passage from a letter written by the inventor 

 Morse in defense of Cooper: "I have visited, in Europe, many 

 countries, and what I have asserted of the fame of Mr. Cooper I 

 assert from personal knowledge. In every city of Europe that I 

 visited the works of Cooper were conspicuously placed in the win- 

 dows of every bookshop. They are published as soon as he pro- 

 duces them in thirty-four different places in Europe. They have 

 been seen by American travelers in the languages of Turkey and 

 Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan." 

 William Cullen Bryant, in his 'Commemorative Discourses,' gives 

 further testimony to Cooper's popularity in Europe. He writes: 

 ''A gentleman who had returned from Europe just before the 

 death of Cooper was asked what he found the people of the Conti- 

 nent doing. 'They all are reading Cooper,' he answered; 'in 

 the little Kingdom of Holland, with its three millions of inhabitants, 

 I looked into four different translations of Cooper in the language 

 of the country.' A traveler, who has seen much of the middle 

 classes of Italy, lately said to me : ' I found that all they knew 

 of America, and that was not little, they had learned from Cooper's 

 novels.' " 



The works of an author so intensely American by temperament 

 could not have been so widely read by the peoples of Europe with- 

 out also affecting their subsequent literature. In no country was 

 Cooper's influence more vital than in Germany. 



When the German translation of 'The Spy' made its appearance 

 in Germany in 1824 there was no German novelist, who pre-emi- 

 nently commanded the attention of the reading public. The only 

 notable contributions to German novelistic literature in the imme- 

 diately preceding years were the fragmentary 'Kronenwachter' 

 (1817) of L. A. von Arnim, 'Wilhelm Meisters Wander jahre' 

 (1821) of Goethe, and several of the phantastic novels of E. T. A. 

 Hoffmann. The one dominating influence in German fiction at 

 this time was a foreign one, namely that of Walter Scott, whose 

 works had been appearing in German since 1815. Cooper's usur- 

 pation of Scott's place in the hearts of the Gernum reading public 



2—870 



