FENIMORE COOPER’S LITERARY OFFENCES

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.