r
"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.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FENIMORE COOPER OFFENCES ***

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