reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale.
10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep
interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he
shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad
ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in
it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned
together.
11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly
defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given
emergency. But in the Deerslayer tale this rule is vacated.
In addition to these large rules there are some little ones. These
require that the author shall:
12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.
Even these seven are coldly and persistently violated in the Deerslayer
tale.
Cooper’s gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such
as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and
indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of
stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices
for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with,
and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things
and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread
in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail.
Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick.
Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently
was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his
effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book
of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds
and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is
in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure
to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on,
but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and
find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the
Leather Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.
I am sorry there is not room to put in a few dozen instances of the
delicate art of the forest, as practised by Natty Bumppo and some of the
other Cooperian experts. Perhaps we may venture two or three samples.
Cooper was a sailor–a naval officer; yet he gravely tells us how a
vessel, driving towards a lee shore in a gale, is steered for a
particular spot by her skipper because he knows of an undertow there
which will hold her back against the gale and save her. For just pure
woodcraft, or sailorcraft, or whatever it is, isn’t that neat? For
several years Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought
to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either
buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet
or so–and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place
he loses some “females”–as he always calls women–in the edge of a wood
near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to
show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader. These mislaid
people are hunting for a fort. They hear a cannonblast, and a cannon-
ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their feet. To
the females this suggests nothing. The case is very different with the
admirable Bumppo. I wish I may never know peace again if he doesn’t