We might have told them that
though the Leatherstocking Tales and Robinson Crusoe and Two Years
Before the Mast and Ivanhoe were all well enough in their way, the
trouble with them was that they mainly were so long-winded. It
took so much time to get to where the first punch was, whereas Ned
Buntline or Col. Prentiss Ingraham would hand you an exciting jolt
on the very first page, and sometimes in the very first paragraph.
You take J. Fenimore Cooper now. He meant well and he had ideas,
but his Indians were so everlastingly slow about getting under way
with their scalping operations! Chapter after chapter there was
so much fashionable and difficult language that the plot was
smothered. You couldn't see the woods for the trees, But it was
the accidental finding of an ancient and reminiscent volume one
Sunday in a little hotel which gave me the cue to what really made
us such confirmed rebels against constituted authority, in a
literary way of speaking. The thing which inspired us with hatred
for the so-called juvenile classic was a thing which struck deeper
even than the sentiments I have been trying to describe.
The basic reason, the underlying motive, lay in the fact that in
the schoolbooks of our adolescence, and notably in the school
readers, our young mentalities were fed forcibly on a pap which
affronted our intelligence at the same time that it cloyed our
adolescent palates.
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