¶ … Romanticism of Scott's Piracy with the Revolutionary realism of Cooper's Pilot
Great art is not supposed to come from anger or a sense of competition with authors. However, the first great sea tale The Pilot, by the American author James Fenmore Cooper, was written explicitly out of anger, in reaction to a romanticized account of piracy and sea life. The Pirate by the Scotsman Sir Walter Scott was a romantic account of why men took to sea, out of romantic despair, with little concern for the real damage done to the naval code of conduct and safety as a result of piracy on the waters. Cooper, in contrast, knew intimately the difficulties of fighting military conflict from a navel perspective, and did not see piracy as something to be valorized. Rather than a plot motivated by love, where the sea was a subsidiary...
The table talk had turned on the authorship of the Waverly Novels, which, in 1822, was still a matter of some uncertainty, and on its most recent volume, The Pirate, which had been published in December of the preceding year. The incidents of this story were brought forward as a proof of the thorough familiarity with sea life of the author, whoever he was. But Cooper contended that The Pirate was not the work of a sailor, but that of a landsman. His listeners could not be convinced by his arguments. He therefore determined to convince them by…
