The Influence of Scott and Cooper on Simms

Abstract

Wl 7 ILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS'S historical novels have usually been classified as frank imitations of those by James Fenimore Cooper.' Most of those who have questioned this view have gone to the other extreme of asserting that a picaresque realist with no debt whatsoever to Cooper, except in The Yemassee.2 Although a few have seen in Simms's historical novels a combined influence of Cooper and Sir Walter Scott,3 no one has examined the nature of these influences. The result has been a tendency either to ignore or to oversimplify the effect upon Simms's novels of his predecessors in the historical romance. Although Scott and Cooper were not the only writers who influenced Simms,4 this essay will examine the ways in which their works affected Simms's 'Grant C. Knight, in The Novel in English (New York, I93I), pp. II6-iI7, gives a succinct statement of this view, saying that was a frank imitator of Cooper, doing for Marion's guerilla warfare what the northerner had done for the Revolution and the western movement. A similar view is expressed in John Erskine, Leading American Novelists (New York, I910), pp. I3I-I77; William P. Trent, William Gilmore (Boston, I892), pp. IIo, 24I, 3I6, 329-330; Carl Van Doren, The American Novel 17891939 (rev. ed.; New York, 1940), pp. 50-55; Arthur Hobson Quinn, American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (New York, 1936), pp. II4-I23; and Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York, I948), pp. 228-246. ' Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York, I927), II, I25-I36; Walter Fuller Taylor, A History of American Letters (New York, 1936), pp. 2I62I8; Russell Blankenship, American Literature as an Expression of the National Mind (rev. ed.; New York, I949), pp. 235-237; Bernard Smith, Forces in American Criticism (New York, I939), pp. I25-I3I; and Fred Lewis Pattee, The First Century of American Literature 1770o-870 (New York, 1935), pp. 427-433. 'Notably Ernest E. Leisy, in The American Historical Novel (Norman, Okla., ig50), pp. I2-I3, 35-36, I06-I07. Professor Leisy asserts the existence of mutual influences without discussing their nature. 'Other important ones were William Godwin, the British dramatists, and Thomas Carlyle. acknowledged Godwin's influence in a letter of December, I846, reprinted in part in Passages from the Correspondence and Other Papers of Rufus W. Griswold (Cambridge, Mass., I898), pp. 8o-86. For the influence of the dramatists, see C. Hugh Holman, Simms and the British Dramatists, PMLA, LXV, 346-359 (June, 1950). Carlyle's influence, although clearly present, has not been examined in detail; see, however, Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven, I949), PP. 33-35.