strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon-ball across the
plain through the dense fog and find the fort. Isn’t it a daisy? If
Cooper had any real knowledge of Nature’s ways of doing things, he had a
most delicate art in concealing the fact. For instance: one of his acute
Indian experts, Chingachgook (pronounced Chicago, I think), has lost the
trail of a person he is tracking through the forest. Apparently that
trail is hopelessly lost. Neither you nor I could ever have guessed out
the way to find it. It was very different with Chicago. Chicago was not
stumped for long. He 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