by Mark Twain
The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer
stand at the head of Cooper’s novels
as artistic creations. There are others of his
works which contain parts as perfect as
are to be found in these, and scenes even
more thrilling. Not one can be compared with
either of them as a finished whole.
The
defects in both of these tales are comparatively slight.
They
were pure works of art.—Prof. Lounsbury.
The
five tales reveal an extraordinary fulness of invention.
.
. . One of the very greatest characters in
fiction, Natty
Bumppo
. . . .
The
craft of the woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all
the
delicate
art of the forest, were familiar to Cooper from his
youth
up.—Prof. Brander Matthews.
Cooper
is the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction
yet
produced by America.—Wilkie Collins.
It seems to me that it was far from right for the
Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor
of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collies
to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without
having read some of it. It would have been much
more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk
who have read Cooper.
Cooper’s art has some defects. In one
place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted
space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114
offences against literary art out of a possible 115.
It breaks the record.
There are nineteen rules governing literary art in
the domain of romantic fiction—some say
twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen
of them. These eighteen require:
1. That a tale shall accomplish something and
arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes
nothing and arrives in the air.
2. They require that the episodes of a tale
shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help
to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is
not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere,
the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since
there was nothing for them to develop.
3. They require that the personages in a tale
shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and
that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses
from the others. But this detail has often been
overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
4. They require that the personages in a tale,
both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse
for being there. But this detail also has been
overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
5. They require that when the personages of
a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound
like human talk, and be talk such as human beings
would be likely to talk in the given circumstances,
and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable
purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the
neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting
to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when
the people cannot think of anything more to say.
But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning
of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.
