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Updated: May 2, 2025
This book, "The Last of the Mohicans," proved, perhaps, to be the most popular of all his works up to 1826. A present-day man-of-letters writes of Cooper: "He paints Indians and Indian scenes with a glow of our sunset skies and the crimson of our autumn maples, and makes them alive with brilliant color. Rifles crack, tomahawks gleam, and arrows dart like sunbeams through the air.
And not even Walpole's show to quite the same degree, that extraordinary power of making anything interesting of entirely transcending the subject which belongs to the letter-writer in probably a greater measure than to any man-of-letters in the other sense, except the poet. The matter which these letters have to chronicle is often the very smallest of small beer.
If we do not mark passages and delectate over phrases, we receive an exquisite sense of harmony and harmony is the last word of style. It is this power which helps to make him a great man-of-letters, as well as a master of romance. One can imagine him neither making haste to furnish "copy" nor pausing by the way for ornament's sake.
He lacked power and depth of imagination, the field in which he was really at home was a narrow one, and the verdict of time will probably be that he was a pleasant versifier rather than a true poet. And this brings us to our most versatile man-of-letters James Russell Lowell.
Meanwhile, since it is the spiritual always that determines the material, this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole world will do and make. The world's manner of dealing with him is the most significant feature of the world's general position.
To have grasped such an opportunity and so to have used it as to become a great man-of-letters at a time when literature was more a private employ than the interest of the general surely it indicates genuine personality, and has the mark of creative power. To which we may add, that Cooper is still vital in his appeal, as the statistics of our public libraries show.
The makers of epigrams, of phrases, of pages of all more or less brief judgements assuredly waste their time when they sum up any one of all mankind; and how do they squander it when their matter is a poet! They may hardly describe him; nor shall any student's care, or psychologist's formula, or man-of-letters' summary, or wit's sentence define him.
In the "Hero as Man-of-Letters," Carlyle was at home. If ever pure letters produced a hero, the sage of Chelsea was one. With Johnson, with Rousseau, he is perfectly rational, and the mass of literature which has accumulated round the names of these two, only tends to confirm the essential justice of Carlyle's estimate. Nor need we dispute his estimate of the vigour and manliness of Burns.
He fails, and his failure has damaged his cause, for it leaves us to feel that the cause is as cold as his play; but when the Cause is a great one it is always vital, warm and passionate. It is for the sake of the Cause we ask that a play be made by a sincere man-of-letters, who will give us not propagandist literature nor art-for-art's-sake, but the throbbing heart of man.
Shaw's life we shall see that it has been spent somewhere mid-way between the lives of the man-of-action and the man-of-letters. He has been primarily and essentially a critic of the current ideas about existing facts, the ideas which are pre-supposed in the typical and habitual activities of our modern world.
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