cular
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