Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (88 page)

1
(p. 389) it had been erased ... as to render it impossible to read it: Judith thus does not know her mother’s family name, the name of her grandfather, or that of her father. She realizes she is an illegitimate child. She has a greater identity crisis than does Deerslayer, who at least has a name and knows the names of his parents. The suggestion of traces of insanity on the mother’s part and the masochistic desire to punish herself and the British officer who has thrown her over (by marrying the outlaw Thomas Hovey) contribute to the characterization of The Deerslayer as Cooper’s “dark” novel. Judith realizes, moreover, that Deerslayer cannot fathom what she is thinking, and that she had no notion of what she expected from him in examining the contents of the trunk.

2
(p. 394) “they’ll not thank anybody for the key”: Deerslayer here displays his clear understanding of Iroquois negotiating tactics. He is less persuasive in arguing that keeping his word is a higher good than staying and contributing to the defense of his friends. But Judith understands and accepts his decision, although some readers may feel that Cooper has, after all, created a “monster of goodness.”

3
(pp. 399-400) Never before had so pleasing a vision ... by the light of the solitary lamp: This is one of the longest and most puzzling sentences in all of Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels. Why does the “highly moral being he was” negate the “so pleasing a vision [that] floated before the mind’s eye of the young hunter”? Is it because Judith is not a virgin that Deerslayer must reject her, or because his higher ethic of the woods calls for rejecting civilization? His later answer—after Judith says, ”I have no wish for a husband who is any way better than myself“—perhaps most fully reveals his thinking. ”A young man, in time, [might] forget his own onworthiness, Judith! Howsever, you hardly think all that you say. A man like me is too rude and ignorant for one that has had such a mother to teach her’ (p. 402). Translated into modern lingo this means: “It wouldn’t work; we’re too different.” Deerslayer and Judith leave the decision, however, unresolved with their penultimate exchange in the canoe following the great events of the next day.

1
(p. 414) “I’ve known white teachers ... be fri’nds there as we’ve been fri’nds here”: Deerslayer does not address here the question of whether Indians and whites have the same heaven. In The Last of the Mohicans he seems to suggest that there are two heavens, one for whites and one for Indians. Judith later (p. 416) asks him, “And what are your ideas of the fate of an Indian in the other world?” He gives a somewhat equivocal answer, but he does reject the notion that “there is one Manitou [God] for the redskin, and another for a paleface.”

1
(p. 434) “You’ll be Christianized one day”: Natty comments in chapter XII of The Pioneers that Chingachgook was Christianized by the Moravians at the time of “the last big war”—that is, the Revolutionary War.

1
(p. 441 ) the point where the Hurons were now encamped, nearly abreast of the castle: This is the Indians’ final and most northerly encampment on the western shore of the lake, only about half a mile from the castle. The British, who came from the east, circle around the northern tip of the lake.

2
(p. 444) The arches of the woods ... man got its idea of the effects of Gothic tracery and churchly hues: Cooper was extremely fond of Gothic architecture. When he bought back Otsego Hall, the family mansion, in 1834, he redecorated it in a Gothic style. The Fenimore Art Museum houses before and after models of the mansion. The mansion was sold after Cooper and his wife Susan died (1851 and 1852, respectively); it burned down in 1853. Cooper seems to have gotten his taste for the Gothic style not from the woods but from his visit to Europe.

1
(p. 466) Bacon: The reference is to Francis Bacon (1561-1626), jurist, natural philosopher, lord chancellor of England, and author of Novum Organum.

1
(p. 478) in the case even of Gesler’s apple: In the legend of William Tell, Governor Gesler of Austria, enraged by Tell’s refusal to obey an order, places an apple on the head of Tell’s son and orders Tell to shoot it off at a hundred paces. Tell does. The legend is celebrated in Guillaume Tell, Rossini’s 1829 opera, which Cooper probably saw while he was in Europe.

1
(p. 494) “miserable Briarthorn”: Briarthorn is the traitorous Delaware who betrays Hist, out of misguided love for her, and hands her to the Iroquois in an effort to deny her to Chingachgook.

2
(p. 498) the lot of a savage warfare: Cooper’s language in this paragraph—“the shrieks, groans, and denunciations” and “neither age nor sex forms an exemption”—leaves little doubt that the women and children were massacred along with the Indian men. The reference to “in our own times” presumably refers to President Andrew Jackson’s “Indian removal” policies and to President Martin Van Buren’s use of 7,000 federal troops in 1838 to drive more than 15,000 Cherokee Indians on a thousand-mile forced march to Oklahoma from the southeastern land guaranteed them by treaty More than 4,000 Indians died in the process.

1
(p. 499) When the sun rose on the following morning ... the basin of the Glimmerglass: This is the sixth day after Deerslayer and Harry’s first arrival at the lake.

2
(p. 506) “The Delaware saw us on the shore, with the glass”: If Chingachgook saw the British, did Judith see them, too, or had she already left the castle? If she had sighted them, her mission as agent of the Queen could then be seen not as a quixotic gesture but as an effort to stall for time until the British arrived. From her speech to the Indians in chapter XXX, however, it does not sound as though she knew of the imminence of the British soldiers.

1
(p. 514) “Do you really love war, Deerslayer, better than the hearth and the affections?”: Here, of course, Judith truly identifies what Deerslayer is—a man with a rifle (she has given it to him), a hunter, a fighter, a killer, an Achilles, and not a man for the hearth and home.

by Mark Twain
^m

The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer stand at the head of Cooper’s novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole.

The defects in both of these tales are comparatively slight. They were pure works of art.—Prof. Lounsbury.

The five tales reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention.

... One of the very greatest characters in fiction, Natty Bumppo....

The craft of the woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all the delicate art of the forest, were familiar to Cooper from his youth up.—Prof Brander Matthews.

Cooper is the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction yet produced by America.—Wilkie Collins.

 

It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.

Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in Deerslayer, and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 of fenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.

2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.

5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.

6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the Deerslayer tale, as Natty Bumppo’s case will amply prove.

7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale.

8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.

9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and 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.

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 Leatherstocking 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 toward 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 cannon-blast, 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 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.