Long ago, in the pre-internet era, I had read a masterful indictment\u00a0of Fenimore Cooper’s writing by\u00a0Mark Twain. It was \u00a0titled “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”.\u00a0 I am often reminded of that essay because one of the defects Twain identifies in Cooper is quite a common one:<\/p>\n
Cooper’s word-sense was singularly dull. When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but is not<\/em> the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he does not say<\/em> it. This is Cooper. He was not a word-musician. His ear was satisfied with the approximate<\/em> words.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I was once again reminded of it today. I don’t want to pick up a fight, so I will not explain why, but I tracked down the essay; and\u00a0I\u00a0find that it is even better than I remember it to be. Here is the link<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Long ago, in the pre-internet era, I had read a masterful indictment\u00a0of Fenimore Cooper’s writing by\u00a0Mark Twain. It was \u00a0titled “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”.\u00a0 I am often reminded of that essay because one of the defects Twain identifies in Cooper is quite a common one: Cooper’s word-sense was singularly dull. When a person has a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}