Fenimore Coopers Literary Offences | Page 6

man's mouth
was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot
pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by
attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk
wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations
consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a
relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it
got there.
Cooper was certainly not a master in the construction of dialogue.
Inaccurate observation defeated him here as it defeated him in so many
other enterprises of his. He even failed to notice that the man who talks
corrupt English six days in the week must and will talk it on the
seventh, and can't help himself. In the Deerslayer story he lets
Deerslayer talk the showiest kind of book-talk sometimes, and at other
times the basest of base dialects. For instance, when some one asks him
if he has a sweetheart, and if so, where she abides, this is his majestic
answer:
"'She's in the forest-hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft
rain--in the dew on the open grass--the clouds that float about in the
blue heavens--the birds that sing in the woods--the sweet springs where
I slake my thirst--and in all the other glorious gifts that come from

God's Providence!'"
And he preceded that, a little before, with this:
"'It consarns me as all things that touches a fri'nd consarns a fri'nd.'"
And this is another of his remarks:
"'If I was Injin born, now, I might tell of this, or carry in the scalp and
boast of the expl'ite afore the whole tribe; or if my inimy had only been
a bear'"--and so on.
We cannot imagine such a thing as a veteran Scotch
Commander-in-Chief comporting himself in the field like a windy
melodramatic actor, but Cooper could. On one occasion Alice and Cora
were being chased by the French through a fog in the neighborhood of
their father's fort:
"'Point de quartier aux coquins!' cried an eager pursuer, who seemed to
direct the operations of the enemy.
"'Stand firm and be ready, my gallant Goths!' suddenly exclaimed a
voice above them; wait to see the enemy; fire low, and sweep the
glacis.'
"'Father? father!' exclaimed a piercing cry from out the mist; it is I!
Alice! thy own Elsie! spare, O! save your daughters!'
"'Hold!' shouted the former speaker, in the awful tones of parental
agony, the sound reaching even to the woods, and rolling back in
solemn echo. ''Tis she! God has restored me my children! Throw open
the sally-port; to the field, Goths, to the field! pull not a trigger, lest ye
kill my lambs! Drive off these dogs of France with your steel!'"
Cooper's word-sense was singularly dull. When a person has a poor ear
for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He
keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear
for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive

what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn't say it.
This is Cooper. He was not a word-musician. His ear was satisfied with
the approximate word. I will furnish some circumstantial evidence in
support of this charge. My instances are gathered from half a dozen
pages of the tale called Deerslayer. He uses "verbal," for "oral";
"precision," for "facility"; "phenomena," for "marvels"; "necessary," for
"predetermined"; "unsophisticated," for "primitive"; "preparation," for
"expectancy"; "rebuked," for "subdued"; "dependent on," for "resulting
from"; "fact," for "condition"; "fact," for "conjecture"; "precaution," for
"caution"; "explain," for "determine"; "mortified," for "disappointed";
"meretricious," for "factitious"; "materially," for "considerably";
"decreasing," for "deepening"; "increasing," for "disappearing";
"embedded," for "enclosed"; "treacherous;" for "hostile"; "stood," for
"stooped"; "softened," for "replaced"; "rejoined," for "remarked";
"situation," for "condition"; "different," for "differing"; "insensible," for
"unsentient"; "brevity," for "celerity"; "distrusted," for "suspicious";
"mental imbecility," for "imbecility"; "eyes," for "sight";
"counteracting," for "opposing"; "funeral obsequies," for "obsequies."
There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper
could write English, but they are all dead now--all dead but Lounsbury.
I don't remember that Lounsbury makes the claim in so many words,
still he makes it, for he says that Deerslayer is a "pure work of art."
Pure, in that connection, means faultless--faultless in all details and
language is a detail. If Mr. Lounsbury had only compared Cooper's
English with the English which he writes himself--but it is plain that he
didn't; and so it is likely that he imagines until this day that Cooper's is
as clean and compact as his own. Now I feel sure, deep down in my
heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our
language, and that the