Fenimore Coopers Literary Offences | Page 3

turned a running stream out of its course, and there, in the
slush in its old bed, were that person's moccasin-tracks. The current did
not wash them away, as it would have done in all other like cases--no,
even the eternal laws of Nature have to vacate when Cooper wants to
put up a delicate job of woodcraft on the reader.
We must be a little wary when Brander Matthews tells us that Cooper's
books "reveal an extraordinary fulness of invention." As a rule, I am
quite willing to accept Brander Matthews's literary judgments and
applaud his lucid and graceful phrasing of them; but that particular
statement needs to be taken with a few tons of salt. Bless your heart,
Cooper hadn't any more invention than a horse; and I don't mean a
high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes-horse. It would be very
difficult to find a really clever "situation" in Cooper's books, and still
more difficult to find one of any kind which he has failed to render
absurd by his handling of it. Look at the episodes of "the caves"; and at
the celebrated scuffle between Maqua and those others on the
table-land a few days later; and at Hurry Harry's queer water-transit
from the castle to the ark; and at Deerslayer's half-hour with his first
corpse; and at the quarrel between Hurry Harry and Deerslayer later;
and at--but choose for yourself; you can't go amiss.
If Cooper had been an observer his inventive faculty would have
worked better; not more interestingly, but more rationally, more
plausibly. Cooper's proudest creations in the way of "situations" suffer
noticeably from the absence of the observer's protecting gift. Cooper's
eye was splendidly inaccurate. Cooper seldom saw anything correctly.
He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly. Of course a
man who cannot see the commonest little every-day matters accurately

is working at a disadvantage when he is constructing a "situation." In
the Deerslayer tale Cooper has a stream which is fifty feet wide where
it flows out of a lake; it presently narrows to twenty as it meanders
along for no given reason; and yet when a stream acts like that it ought
to be required to explain itself. Fourteen pages later the width of the
brook's outlet from the lake has suddenly shrunk thirty feet, and
become "the narrowest part of the stream." This shrinkage is not
accounted for. The stream has bends in it, a sure indication that it has
alluvial banks and cuts them; yet these bends are only thirty and fifty
feet long. If Cooper had been a nice and punctilious observer he would
have noticed that the bends were oftener nine hundred feet long than
short of it.
Cooper made the exit of that stream fifty feet wide, in the first place,
for no particular reason; in the second place, he narrowed it to less than
twenty to accommodate some Indians. He bends a "sapling" to the form
of an arch over this narrow passage, and conceals six Indians in its
foliage. They are "laying" for a settler's scow or ark which is coming up
the stream on its way to the lake; it is being hauled against the stiff
current by a rope whose stationary end is anchored in the lake; its rate
of progress cannot be more than a mile an hour. Cooper describes the
ark, but pretty obscurely. In the matter of dimensions "it was little more
than a modern canal-boat." Let us guess, then, that it was about one
hundred and forty feet long. It was of "greater breadth than common."
Let us guess, then, that it was about sixteen feet wide. This leviathan
had been prowling down bends which were but a third as long as itself,
and scraping between banks where it had only two feet of space to
spare on each side. We cannot too much admire this miracle. A
low-roofed log dwelling occupies "two-thirds of the ark's length"--a
dwelling ninety feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us say a kind of
vestibule train. The dwelling has two rooms--each forty-five feet long
and sixteen feet wide, let us guess. One of them is the bedroom of the
Hutter girls, Judith and Hetty; the other is the parlor in the daytime, at
night it is papa's bedchamber. The ark is arriving at the stream's exit
now, whose width has been reduced to less than twenty feet to
accommodate the Indians--say to eighteen. There is a foot to spare on
each side of the boat. Did the Indians notice that there was going to be

a tight squeeze there? Did they notice that they could make money by
climbing down out of that arched sapling and just stepping aboard
when the ark scraped by? No, other Indians would