Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (90 page)

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:

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.

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 author, 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.

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.

—September 1841

There are no authors, from whose works individual inaccurate sentences
may not be culled. But ... Mr. Cooper, no doubt through haste
or neglect, is remarkably and especially inaccurate, as a general rule.

—from Graham’s Magazine (November 1843)

The Deerslayer, the first novel in the series of the Leatherstocking Tales,
seems to us one of the most interesting of Cooper’s productions. He
has chosen for the scene of his story the Otsego lake, on whose banks
he lived and died, and whose scenery he has introduced into three, if
not more, of his novels. The Deerslayer, or Leatherstocking, here
makes his first appearance as a young man, in fact scarcely emerged
from boyhood, yet with all the simplicity, candor, feeling, and penetration,
which mark his riper years. The old buccaneer in his aquatic
habitation, and the contrasted characters of his two daughters, add a
human interest to the scene, for the want of which the highest skill in
mere landscape painting cannot compensate. The character of Judith
seems to us the best drawn, and by far the most interesting, female
portrait in any of Cooper’s novels with which we are acquainted. The
story, however, is not free from the characteristic faults of its author.
Above all, it contains, in one instance at least, a glaring exhibition of
his aptitude for describing horrors. When he compels his marvellously
graphic pen to depict scenes which would disgrace the shambles or
the dissecting table, none can wonder that ladies and young clergymen
regard his pages with abhorrence. These, however, are but casual
defects in a work which bears the unmistakable impress of his genius.

—from North American Review (January 1852)

[James Fenimore Cooper] wrote before the great American language
was born, and he wrote as well as any novelist of his time. If he pitches
upon episodes redounding to the glory of the young republic, surely
England has glory enough to forgive him, for the sake of his excellence,
the patriotic bias at her expense. The interest of his tales is convincing
and unflagging; and there runs through his work a steady vein
of friendliness for the old country which the succeeding generations
of his compatriots have replaced by a less definite sentiment.

-from Outlook (June 4, 1898)

Cooper is in our epoch the only author worthy of being put aside
Walter Scott: he does not equal him, but he has his genius. He owes
the high place he holds in modern literature to two faculties: that of
painting the sea and seamen; that of idealizing the magnificent landscapes
of America.... I feel for his two faculties the admiration Walter
Scott felt for them, which is still further deserved by the grandeur,
the originality of Leather-Stocking, that fine personality which binds
into one The Pioneers, The Mohicans, The Pathfinder and The Prairie. LeatherStocking
is a statue, a magnificent moral hermaphrodite, born of the
savage state and of civilization, who will live as long as literatures last.
I do not know that the extraordinary work of Walter Scott furnishes
a creation as grandiose as that of this hero of the savannas and the
forests. Gurth in Ivanhoe approaches Leather-Stocking. We feel that if
the great Scotchman had seen America he might have created LeatherStocking
. It is, especially, by that man, half Indian, half civilized, that
Cooper has risen to the level of Walter Scott.

—translated by K. P Wormeley,
from The Personal Opinions of Honore de Balzac ( 1899)

Natty was Fenimore’s great Wish: his wish-fulfilment.... Because it
seems to me that the things in Cooper that make one so savage, when
one compares them with actuality, are perhaps, when one considers
them as presentations of a deep subjective desire, real in their way,
and almost prophetic.

-from Studies in Classic American Literature ( 19 2 3 )

[The Deerslayer] is the tale of Natty’s coming of age. Already a hunter,
he here kills his first man and thus enters the long career which lies
before him. That career, however, had already been traced by Cooper,
and the distress with which Deerslayer realizes that he has human
blood on his hands, becomes, in the light of his future, immensely
eloquent. It gives the figure of the man almost a new dimension; one
remembers the deaths Natty has yet to deal. In other matters he is
nearer his later self, for he starts life with a steady if simple philosophy
which, through all his many adventures, keeps him to the end
the son of nature he was at the beginning.

-from The American Novel, 1789-1939 ( 1940)

1. Who is right about “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Mark Twain or Bruce L. R. Smith, the author of this edition’s introduction?

2. Consider Deerslayer’s rejection of Judith’s proposal. Is he to be praised or blamed? Can one tell Cooper’s own position? Can Deerslayer’s motives be understood?

3. What would you say are the reasons for this novel’s once immense and still substantial popularity? Are any of its themes current?

4. The characters and setting in The Deerslayer are American, and in that sense the novel is, of course, American-as the novels of Charles Dickens are English. But is there something beyond the characters and setting-some worldview, some unconscious drive, some way of being and acting-that is particularly and exclusively American?