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 have noticed these things, but Cooper’s Indians never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are marvelous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them.
The ark is one hundred and forty-feet long; the dwelling is ninety feet long. The idea of the Indians is to drop softly and secretly from the arched sapling to the dwelling as the ark creeps along under it at the rate of a mile an hour, and butcher the family. It will take the ark a minute and a half to pass under. It will take the ninety-foot dwelling a minute to pass under. Now, then, what did the six Indians do? It would take you thirty years to guess, and even then you would have to give it up, I believe. Therefore, I will tell you what the Indians did. Their chief, a person of quite extraordinary intellect for a Cooper Indian, warily watched the canal-boat as it squeezed along under him, and when he had got his calculations fined down to exactly the right shade, as he judged, he let go and dropped. And missed the house! That is actually what he did. He missed the house, and landed in the stern of the scow. It was not much of a fall, yet it knocked him silly. He lay there unconscious. If the house had been ninety-seven feet long he would have made the trip. The fault was Cooper’s, not his. The error lay in the construction of the house. Cooper was no architect.
There still remained in the roost five Indians. The boat has passed under and is now out of their reach. Let me explain what the five did—you would not be able to reason it out for yourself. No. 1 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water astern of it. Then No. 2 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water still farther astern of it. Then No. 3 jumped for the boat, and fell a good way astern of it. Then No. 4 jumped for the boat, and fell in the water away astern. Then even No. 5 made a jump for the boat—for he was a Cooper Indian. In the matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the Indian that stands in front of the cigar-shop is not spacious. The scow episode is really a sublime burst of invention; but it does not thrill, because the inaccuracy of the details throws a sort of air of fictitiousness and general improbability over it. This comes of Cooper’s inadequacy as an observer.
The reader will find some examples of Cooper’s high talent for inaccurate observation in the account of the shooting-match in The Pathfinder.
A common wrought nail was driven lightly into the target, its head having been first touched with paint.
The color of the paint is not stated—an important omission, but Cooper deals freely in important omissions. No, after all, it was not an important omission; for this nail-head is a hundred yards from the marksmen, and could not be seen by them at that distance, no matter what its color might be. How far can the best eyes see a common house-fly? A hundred yards? It is quite impossible. Very well; eyes that cannot see a house-fly that is a hundred yards away cannot see an ordinary nail-head at that distance, for the size of the two objects is the same. It takes a keen eye to see a fly or a nail-head at fifty yards—one hundred and fifty feet. Can the reader do it?
The nail was lightly driven, its head painted, and game called. Then the Cooper miracles began. The bullet of the first marksman chipped an edge of the nail-head; the next man’s bullet drove the nail a little way into the target—and removed all the paint. Haven’t the miracles gone far enough now? Not to suit Cooper; for the purpose of this whole scheme is to show off his prodigy, DeerslayerHawkeye-Long-Rifle-Leatherstocking-Pathfinder-Bumppo before the ladies.
“Be all ready to clench it, boys! cried out Pathfinder, stepping into his friend’s tracks the instant they were vacant. ”Never mind a new nail; I can see that, though the paint is gone, and what I can see I can hit at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquito’s eye. Be ready to clench!”
The rifle cracked, the bullet sped its way, and the head of the nail was buried in the wood, covered by the piece of flattened lead.
There, you see, is a man who could hunt flies with a rifle, and command a ducal salary in a Wild West show to-day if we had him back with us.
The recorded feat is certainly surprising just as it stands; but it is not surprising enough for Cooper. Cooper adds a touch. He has made Pathfinder do this miracle with another man’s rifle; and not only that, but Pathfinder did not have even the advantage of loading it himself. He had everything against him, and yet he made that impossible shot; and not only made it, but did it with absolute confidence, saying, “Be ready to clench.” Now a person like that would have undertaken that same feat with a brickbat, and with Cooper to help he would have achieved it.
Pathfinder showed off handsomely that day before the ladies. His very first feat was a thing which no Wild West show can touch. He was standing with the group of marksmen, observing—a hundred yards from the target, mind; one Jasper raised his rifle and drove the center of the bull’s-eye. Then the Quartermaster fired. The target exhibited no result this time. There was a laugh. “It’s a dead miss,” said Major Lundie. Pathfinder waited an impressive moment or two; then said, in that calm, indifferent, know-it-all way of his, “No, Major, he has covered Jasper’s bullet, as will be seen if any one will take the trouble to examine the target.”
Wasn’t it remarkable! How could he see that little pellet fly through the air and enter that distant bullet-hole? Yet that is what he did; for nothing is impossible to a Cooper person. Did any of those people have any deep-seated doubts about this thing? No; for that would imply sanity, and these were all Cooper people.
The respect for Pathfinder’s skill and for his quickness and accuracy of sight [the italics are mine] was so profound and general, that the instant he made this declaration the spectators began to distrust their own opinions, and a dozen rushed to the target in order to ascertain the fact. There, sure enough, it was found that the Quartermaster’s bullet had gone through the hole made by Jasper’s, and that, too, so accurately as to require a minute examination to be certain of the circumstance, which, however, was soon clearly established by discovering one bullet over the other in the stump against which the target was placed.
They made a “minute” examination; but never mind, how could they know that there were two bullets in that hole without digging the latest one out? for neither probe nor eyesight could prove the presence of any more than one bullet. Did they dig? No; as we shall see. It is the Pathfinder’s turn
now; he steps out before the ladies, takes aim, and fires.
But, alas! here is a disappointment; an incredible, an unimaginable disappointment—for the target’s aspect is unchanged; there is nothing there but that same old bullet-hole!
“If one dared to hint at such a thing,” cried Major Duncan, “I should say that the Pathfinder has also missed the target!”
As nobody had missed it yet, the “also” was not necessary; but never mind about that, for the Pathfinder is going to speak.
“No, no, Major,” said he, confidently, “that would be a risky declaration. I didn’t load the piece, and can’t say what was in it; but if it was lead, you will find the bullet driving down those of the Quartermaster and Jasper, else is not my name Pathfinder.”
A shout from the target announced the truth of this assertion.
Is the miracle sufficient as it stands? Not for Cooper. The Pathfinder speaks again, as he “now slowly advances toward the stage occupied by the females”:
“That’s not all, boys, that’s not all; if you find the target touched at all, I’ll own to a miss. The Quartermaster cut the wood, but you’ll find no wood cut by that last messenger.”
The miracle is at last complete. He knew—doubtless saw—at the distance of a hundred yards—that his bullet had passed into the hole without fraying the edges. There were now three bullets in that one hole—three bullets embedded processionally in the body of the stump back of the target. Everybody knew this—somehow or other—and yet nobody had dug any of them out to make sure. Cooper is not a close observer, but he is interesting. He is certainly always that, no matter what happens. And he is more interesting when he is not noticing what he is about than when he is. This is a considerable merit.
The conversations in the Cooper books have a curious sound in our modern ears. To believe that such talk really ever came out of people’s mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a 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 60ths!” 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, 60ths, 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 “inclosed” ; “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 fauldess—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 English of Deerslayer is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote.
I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that Deerslayer is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that Deerslayer is just simply a literary delirium tremens.
A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are—oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the au
thor, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
NEW-YORK MIRROR
Mr. Cooper is an exception to the general rule, that an author’s last works are generally inferiour to his first. The book before us is certainly the best which has issued from his pen in many years. There is so much real merit in Mr. Cooper that it gives us great pleasure to praise him whenever he puts it in our power to do so, which, we regret to say, has not always been the case. He is the most original thinker of any of our American novelists; the manliest, most vigourous and independent spirit of them all, unrivalled in descriptive powers, and unapproached in the heartiness of his patriotic feelings. If, with all these eminent qualities, he has defects and weaknesses, which, with the tenacity of his character, he too pertinaciously adheres to, it is a matter of regret, and for no worse feeling. In the present work, we are happy to say, none of those peculiarities are to be met with which some critics, and ourselves among the number, have found so offensive. Its principal personage, as the public are already aware, is our old friend Leatherstocking, who is drawn in the vigour of early manhood, thus completing the history of his life and death. Mr. Cooper could not have chosen a more popular hero, and he has felt that no apology was necessary for bringing so general a favourite on the stage again, though for the fifth time. The scene is laid on the borders of that beautiful lake near which the author himself resides. His descriptions of that fine sheet of water and the hills that encircle it are in his best style, that is, remarkably clear and minute, and exquisitely true to nature. We can almost fancy ourselves looking down on the unruffled surface of Ostego, and feel the night-breeze rising, damp and heavy with the odours of the forest. Mr. Cooper cannot delineate fashionable life, nor catch the tone of modern society, but here he has attempted nothing of the kind; ‘his foot is on his native heath,’ and he seems to breathe the freer for it; at least his style is certainly more easy and flowing than it was wont to be. The sketches of Indian character strike us as peculiarly masterly, and the surprises, scuffles, ‘skrimmages,’ and other incidents of border warfare, are of course capital. If there is any fault in the book, and one at least a reviewer must find, or the public will deem him unfit for his task, it is in the love of Judith for the Deerslayer, and the apparent coldness with which he repulses it. It seems too bad that so brilliant a beauty, with so many generous impulses and good qualities to enhance her outward advantages, should throw herself at the head of a rough hunter only to be rejected; and, moreover, the Deerslayer, trained in Indian habits of observation, could hardly have remained so long ignorant of what was going on in his pretty neighbour’s heart as to render so many pages of broad hints and circumlocutions necessary on her part. But, on the whole, the author is perhaps right, for a wife like Judith would have been a sad incumbrance to Natty; and, besides, her unhappy fate is such as the warmest feelings, when uncontrolled by principle, are too apt to lead to. Indeed, throughout the work there is more knowledge of human nature and more successful delineation of character than Mr. Cooper has generally had credit for. There is little of that heavy dialogue which encumbers most of his former works, and indeed everywhere we see signs of a better taste and kindlier feeling. We are glad to be able to say thus much of one whom we have always delighted to honour; who, whatever may be his errors of judgment, has shown a genuine American feeling which is unfortunately too seldom met with in American writers. Let him go on and write a few more such works as the Deerslayer, illustrating American history, scenery and manners, and identifying himself with his subject, and he cannot fail to reach a higher reputation than he has yet enjoyed. His own country will, of course, be the last to appreciate him, but, after his renown has been endorsed by England, France and Germany, it will begin to pass current here; and, it being proved already that he is a man of genius, it will go near to be thought so shortly.
Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 70
