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

. . . 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.