American Renaissance & American Romanticism

Reactions to Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales

by later authors Mark Twain & D. H. Lawrence

Comparative life spans and literary periods:

Period before Romanticism: late 1600s through 1700s, variously known as The Enlightenment, The Age of Reason, or the Neo-Classical Era. Examples: Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Benjamin Franklin, other Founders of USA.

Cooper, 1789-1851: Romanticism, early American Renaissance (period before Civil War)

Twain, 1835-1910: Realism, late 1800s (period after Civil War)--in England, Victorian era.

Lawrence 1885-1930: Modernism, early 1900s, period around World War 1 through World War 2

from Mark Twain.  "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." North American Literary Review.  CLXI (1895): 1-12.

Instructor's note: Twain's satire may not attack Cooper as much as the Romantic literature that flowered in Twain's childhood--for other examples, see Huckleberry Finn featuring Twain's digs at Sir Walter Scott and the sentimental poetry of Emily Grangerford. Implicitly Twain's essay defends the Realistic literary style that Twain and other writers developed following the American Renaissance or Romantic Era, which ended with the Civil War.

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. . . 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 offenses 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 . . . .  In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. . . .

            3. [The Rules] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the cases 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. . . .

            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. . . .

            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 of 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.

            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. . . .

            In addition to these large rules there are some little ones.  These require that the author shall . . . [e]mploy a simple and straightforward style. . . .

            The conversations in the Cooper books have a curious sound in our modern ears.  To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say, when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten . . . .

            Cooper was certainly not a master in the construction of dialogue. . . .  He even failed to notice that the man who talks corrupt English six days in a week must and will talk it on the seventh, and can't help himself.  In the Deerslayer story he lets Deerslayer talk the showiest kind of book-talk sometimes, and at other times the basest of base dialects. . . .

            Counting these out, what is left is Art.  I think we must all admit that.

D. H. Lawrence. "Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels."  Studies in Classic American Literature.  1923

Introduction: Lawrence was a dazzling, short-lived author who rose from the English coal district to become a powerful novelist, poet, and critic. Novels: Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love. Lived in Taos, New Mexico. Lawrence's essay, which revived interest in Cooper as a serious author, reflects the Modernist interest in primitive myth and the unstable reality of creative literature. 

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 . . . Fenimore, lying in his Louis Quatorze hotel in Paris, passionately musing about Natty Bumppo and the pathless forest, and mixing his imagination with the Cupids and Butterflies on the painted ceiling . . . .

            Fenimore, in his imagination, wanted to be Natty Bumppo . . . .  At the same time Mr. Cooper was nothing if not a gentleman.  So he decided to stay in France and have it all his own way. . . .

            [T]he Leatherstocking books are lovely.  Lovely half-lies.

            They form a sort of American Odyssey, with Natty Bumppo for Odysseus. . . .  Natty is a saint with a gun, and the Indians are gentlemen through and through, though they may take an occasional scalp. . . .

            Now let me put aside my impatience at the unreality of this vision, and accept it as a wish-fulfilment vision, a kind of yearning myth. . . .

            The passionate love for America, for the soil of America, for example. . . . When you are actually in America, America hurts . . . .  It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men, like some Eumenides, until the white men give up their absolute whiteness. . . .

            [I]n his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo he dreamed the nucleus of a new society.  That is, he dreamed a new human relationship.  A stark, stripped human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. . . .

            Pictures! Some of the loveliest, most glamorous pictures in all literature.

            Alas, without the cruel iron of reality. . . .

            [Regarding Mohicans]  Evidently Cooper--or the artist in him--had decided that there can be no blood-mixing of the two races, white and red.  He kills 'em off.

            Beyond all this heart-beating stand the figures of Natty and Chingachgook: the two childless, womanless men, of opposite races. . . .

            And Natty, what sort of a white man is he?  Why, he is a man with a gun.  He is a killer, a slayer.  Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer.  Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer. . . . He is the stoic American killer of the old great life.  But he kills, as he says, only to live. . . .

            Of course it never rains: it is never cold and muddy and dreary: no one has wet feet or toothache: no one ever feels filthy, when they can't wash for a week.  God knows what the women would really have looked like, for they fled through the wilds without soap, comb, or towel.  They breakfasted off a chunk of meat, or nothing, lunched the same, and supped the same.  Yet at every moment they are elegant, perfect ladies, in correct toilet.   Which isn't quite fair.  You need only go camping for a week, and you'll see.

            But it is a myth, not a realistic tale.  Read it as a lovely myth. . . .