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 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.