James Fenimore Cooper

every man a stake in society: "A man may be a voluntary
associate in a joint-stock company, and justly have a right
to a participation in its management, in proportion to his
pecuniary interest; but life is not a chartered institution.
Men are born with all their wants and passions, their means of
enjoyment, and their sources of misery, without any agency
of their own, and frequently to their great discomfort."

To the modern reader Cooper's analysis of the present and
future of American literature is perhaps too modest. He is
so good on the reasons why it is not better that one wonders
how it existed at all. In the peculiar circumstances of Ameri-
can settlement, a brand-new world that had immediately at
hand all of the intellectual resources of the old, the printer
preceded the author. English literature was part of the com-
mon heritage and first supplied American needs, and still
continues (at the time of the Notions) to be preferred by
publishers and readers. An American publisher not only
avoids payment of royalties on an English book but can cut
down all risks by waiting to see how a book sells abroad and
how well it is reviewed, or, if he will not wait, by dealing in
the great popular names that are sure to sell. Under these
circumstances there are not a dozen American writers whose
books can pay their way with an American publisher.

Unlike Tocqueville, Cooper is not afraid of the trading
spirit that democracy introduces into literature; "a good,
wholesome, profitable and continued pecuniary support, is
the applause that talent most craves." He fears democrats
not as readers but as subjects for the writer. In a passage
similar to Henry James's famous enumeration in his Haw-
thorne of "the negative side of the American social situa-

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