James Fenlmore Cooper

was one of its active foreign supporters. He served on a com-
mittee in Paris to raise funds, presided at dinners, drafted
appeals to the American people for aid, first for the support
of the war and ultimately for the relief of the refugees. The
French revolution was on the other hand not a call for action
but a call for thought. Nominally successful, it had failed in
actuality, as Cooper early saw, not because the throne had
been preserved, but because the republican institutions that
the throne was to support had not been immediately estab-
lished. Such a step would have been opposed by the bankers,
manufacturers, and great landed proprietors, and might have
caused foreign intervention; but the strength of the opposi-
tion was the very reason why the new institutions had to be
set up during the period of revolutionary ardor, or not at all.

The monarchical principle, Cooper was convinced, was
virtually extinct. Monarchy versus republic, which popular
opinion took to be the great question of the day, was
purely a matter of form obscuring the true conflict, that be-
tween the interests of the few and the many. A monarchy,
the Russian as well as the English, was now actually an aris-
tocracy in disguise, but it could be made the basis of respon-
sible popular government. A republic—and this was the point
of The Bravo—might conceal even more effectually than a
throne the rule of an irresponsible and ruthless minority.

Cooper furnished The Bravo with the conventional char-
acters of historical romance: an heiress destined for a love-
less marriage, a gay young nobleman who succeeds in
eloping with her, a jailer's tender-hearted daughter, and an
assassin—all using unfortunately an even more stilted lan-
guage than the author normally employs. But in the course
of developing his subject, as Cooper said, ". . . thegovern-

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