Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/80

 MARK TWAIN

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 &quot; 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 &quot;the caves&quot;; 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 your self; you can t go amiss. ^

If Cooper had been an observer his inventive faculty would have worked better ; not more interest ingly, but more rationally, more plausibly. Cooper s proudest creations in the way of &quot;situations&quot; suffer noticeably from the absence of the observer s pro tecting 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 disad vantage when he is constructing a &quot;situation.&quot; In the Deerslayer tale Cooper has a stream which is fifty feet wide where it flows out of a lake; it pres ently 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

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