64 



INDIANA UNIVERSITY STUDIES 



The Cooi)ei'ian influence upon the authors mentioned above 

 is after all only sporadic. Not one of these authors was a dis- 

 cipl*^ of Cooper in the sense that Hauff and Alexis were of Scott. 

 For such followers we must turn to the exotic school of novel 

 ists, many of whom identified themselves exclusively with the 

 tT'ansatlantic novel. These writers were nearly all men whon) 

 conditions at home or pure " Auswanderungslust " had brought to 

 the shores of America. Some had lived as squatters or planters 

 in the far West; others had even dwelt among the Indians. All 

 were in a sens:^ adventurers, and with few exceptions only latei' 

 turned to novel- writing. In some instances they diverge far from 

 the path of Cooper. Since Cooper's early novels the Far West 

 had been opened, and different conditions, both among the In- 

 dians and the frontiersmen, presented themselves to the novel- 

 ist. The novel itself had evolved decidedly toward realism. 

 In spite of all this. Cooper's novels nevertheless remained a fac- 

 tor and their traces cannot be ignored in the younger writers. 

 The most prominent of these writers were Sealsfield, Strubberg. 

 and Mollhausen. 



Sealsfield. — Charles Sealsfield (1793-1864), commonly known 

 as the father of the exotic novel, was the first to write an 

 Indian novel in German after the manner of Cooper. Monastic 

 life in Prague was too restraining for the impetuous young Aus- 

 trian monk Carl Postl. He fled to America and was henceforth 

 known to the world as Charles Sealsfield. In America he lived a 

 varied life as traveller, correspondent, and editor. In 1828 Seals- 

 field's first novel, 'Tokeah or the White Rose, an Indian Tale,' ap- 

 peared in English. It was published by Carey and Lea of Phila- 

 delphia, who two years before had published Cooper's 'Last of the 

 Mohicans.' This novel was later rewritten and appeared in Ger- 

 man in 1833, as 'Der Legitime und die Republikaner. ' The great 

 French Romanticist Chateaubriand had conceived beautiful poetic 

 Indians in his ' Atala.' The white man, M^hen compared with thes'^ 

 exalted beings living in a lovely primitive world suffers by such 

 comparison and rather deserves our pity. However, in Cooper's 

 works we are made to pity the Indian and feel that his fate has 

 been unjustly sealed by the Whites. The elegiac note of the 'Last 

 of the Mohicans' is plainly re-echoed in Sealsfield 's 'Legitime und 

 die Republikaner.' The novel is introduced with the memorable 

 words of Jefferson : ' ' Ich zittere f iir mein Volk, wenn ich der Un- 

 gerechtigkeiten gedenke, deren es sich gegen die Ureinwohner 

 schuldig gemacht hat." The author evidently desired to depict 



