Twain on Cooper

Recently Jeff posted a quote by James Fenimore Cooper. I cannot let that stand without pointing you in the direction of this great piece by Mark Twain. Read it and weep (or laugh so hard you nearly wet yourself, almost wake everyone up in the house by nearly falling out of your chair, and come close to breaking the computer trying to use the keyboard to right yourself). An exerpt:

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 life-likeness, 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.