Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
and he early came to distrust all banks and banking. His political
views, indeed, were pretty much determined by the Physiocratic
convictions that underlay his thinking. He had been a Jeffersonian
long before the rise of Jacksonianism. Portions of his _Letters from
the South_, published in 1817, seem like excerpts from the agrarian
writings of John Taylor of Caroline. There is the same contemptuous
analysis of the “shin-plaster dynasty,” the same concern at the growth
of trading towns, the same conviction that cities and poverty and low
morals go hand in hand, the same trust in the perennial wholesomeness
of country life. Such a passage as this will suffice to reveal his
leanings towards a Physiocratic economy:
I was saying, that we have too many people living in cities,
in proportion to our farmers, who, after all, are the backbone
of every country, whence originates its riches and its solid
strength.... Yet our people cling to the towns and cities,
attracted by the hope of sudden wealth, and despising the slow,
yet sure, rewards of agriculture, which, without leading a man to
inordinate riches, secure him for ever from the chances of sinking
into beggary or want. The race of paupers receives no recruits
from them; for in all my sojournings, I may say with truth, that
I never saw an industrious farmer forsaken, “or his seed begging
bread.” One great cause of the disproportion of numbers ...
between the agricultural and other classes of the community, is
the great system of paper money, which has struck at the root of
regular, persevering industry, whose rewards, though slow, are
always certain. For some years back, hardly a tradesman in our
cities, and of late in our little towns (each of which, however
insignificant, has now its snug little bank) thinks of growing rich
by his industry. No; he must get accommodations at some bank, and
plunge into speculations: nor can you now go into a cobbler’s stall
without seeing a bank notice, or perhaps two or three, stuck up
with an awl at the chimney-piece, to remind the honest gentleman
that he owes a great deal more than he can pay. Thus is the axe
laid to the very root of national morals, and consequently national
prosperity, and the whole American people, farmers excepted, sunk
into an abject subjection to banks and their directors. (_Letters
from the South_, Vol. I, pp. 100-102.)
So confirmed an agrarian would easily arrive at agrarian conclusions in
his meditations on the nature and functions of the political state.
Unlike Irving, who, having no political convictions, was equally
pleased with Whig or Democrat if he happened to be a gentleman,
Paulding was something of a political philosopher with clear-cut
doctrines. He was too shrewd an observer of ways political to be
caught by party cries, or to ignore the class selfishness that would
make government a party to its ends. As a Jeffersonian he retained an
old-fashioned distrust of the political state. As an eighteenth-century
liberal he would keep the state within narrow bounds. Jealous for a
freedom worthy of free citizens, he wanted government to keep hands
off what did not concern it. He would not have the state used as a
cat’s-paw to pull anybody’s chestnuts out of the fire, whether in the
form of Clay’s American System, or what not. For protective tariffs
and internal improvements--those grandiose schemes for hastening
prosperity--he felt an old-fashioned repugnance that found issue
in amusing caricature. In _Westward Ho!_ he introduces a French
publican of a Mississippi River village who does not care for Yankee
improvements and describes them thus:
Diable! monsieur, another improvement; last year they assess me for
one grand public improvement! one road to go somewhere, I don’t
know. Eh bien! I pay the money. Well, this year they assess me for
one other grand public improvement--very grand--voilà, monsieur,
one other road, right alongside the other, both going to the same
place. Diable! I no want to travel on two turnpike roads. Ah!
monsieur le colonel, I shall be very rich, O! very rich indeed,
by these grand improvements. They take away all my land to make
room for the grand improvement; they take away all my money to
pay for him, and then they tell me my land worth four, six time
so much as before. Peste! what that to me when my land all gone
to the dem public improvement, hey? I shall be very rich then.
Diable! I wish myself gone to some country where every thing was
go backwards--what you call tail foremost, instead of forwards,
for the dem march of improvement shall ruin me at last. (Vol. II,
Chapter XVI.)
Satire aimed at the new gospel of progress is not infrequent in
Paulding. In _Koningsmarke_ he drew the picture of a politician that
was perhaps intended for a burlesque of Henry Clay. The worthy Wolfgang
Langfanger, member of the council of Elsingburgh, having “brought
his private affairs into great confusion, by devoting too much time
to the public good,” began “to think it high time the public good
should repay some part of its weighty obligations. He had accordingly
invented, and persuaded the Heer Piper to put into practice, a system
of internal improvement, which has been imitated, from time to time,
in this country ever since with great success. The essence of his plan
consisted in running in debt for the present, and living afterwards
upon the anticipation of future wealth” (Book Second, Chapter VI). Big
with his wonderful idea the busy councilor projected great docks and
wharves for the commerce that was to be invited to come, a fine canal
that would cut off a full six miles for barges that were not yet on
the stocks, and a magnificent plan of new streets that led through
houses that must be pulled down and fields that must forego their
usual harvests. Such goodly improvements naturally cost money, and to
maintain the public credit taxes were levied, and still more taxes,
until, like the French tavern-keeper, the good people of Elsingburgh
were brought to doubt the wisdom of investing in future prosperity at
so high a present cost.
But the masterpiece of Langfanger’s policy was that of pulling
down an old market, and building a new one in another part of the
village, in the management of which business he is supposed to have
laid down the first principles of the great and thriving science of
political economy, or picking people’s pockets on a grand scale.
He caused the people living near the old market to pay roundly
for its removal as a nuisance; and then he caused the people that
lived about where the new one was to be built, to pay roundly for
the vast pleasure and advantage of its neighbourhood. Thus he
pinched them through both ears, and got the reputation of a great
financier. (Book Seventh, Chapter III.)
_Koningsmarke_ is Paulding’s most interesting work, and the utter
neglect that has overtaken it is far from deserved. It is native and
original, full of shrewd comment and sly satire, and it embodies most
of Paulding’s pet theories and aversions. Few books of the time are
more amusing than this tale of the Long Finne who moves in a dark cloud
of mystery woven by Bombie of the Frizzled Head, barks his sturdy
shins on many a blood-curdling adventure, proves a true knight to his
lady, and in the end turns out to be a very ordinary fellow who has
been blown up to heroic size by the black art of romance. Paulding
must have had great fun writing it, for his wit still preserves its
freshness after a hundred years. It is a whimsical satire on the ways
of the hour, literary and other, set against the background of an
old Swedish settlement on the banks of the Delaware; but the chief
purpose of its quizzical pages is the pouring of a broadside into
the picturesque hull of contemporary fiction. It is an attack on the
abundant extravagance of current romance that had been inflated by
“Monk” Lewis and Sir Walter. Paulding cleverly hits off the high-flown
and ghostly, the love of blood pudding, the snobbish contempt for the
homely and native. Written in 1823, the year of Cooper’s _Pioneers_,
it defends the realism of characters and setting in that work against
the charge of vulgarity and commonplace, but it takes pains to satirize
Cooper’s noble red man of the forest. Paulding’s Indians are more like
Bird’s than Cooper’s, material for burlesque rather than romance, but
as he runs over the names of the warriors--“the Big Buffalo, the Little
Duck-Legs, the Sharp-Faced Bear, the Walking Shadow, the Iron Cloud,
the Jumping Sturgeon, the Belly Ache, and the Doctor, all legitimate
sovereigns, with copper rings in their noses, blanket robes of state,
and painted faces”--amusement at their childishness is tempered by the
recognition that they have been overreached and dispossessed by the
grasping white men.
In some of his later work the line between burlesque and serious is not
so clearly marked, and one hesitates to pronounce whether _Westward
Ho!_ is a sober attempt at popular romance or a _reductio ad absurdum_
of the current romantic flummery. Certainly it is a preposterous story
with its melancholy hero driven mad by fear of madness and indulging in
gibberish that comes straight out of Shakespeare, and with its ample
crop of stock characters--Master Zeno Paddock and Mrs. Judith Paddock
with their prying inquisitiveness, Colonel Dangerfield the easy-going
Virginia gentleman who in staking his estate on a horse race embodies
the plantation tradition, and Bushfield the backwoodsman who cannot
live in a world that has left off its moccasins, and removes to a place
where there are no laws and no lawyers and where constables do not
visit a man who has thrashed his neighbor. _Westward Ho!_ is not an
amusing book; it is quite lacking in local color, and its casual bits
of realism and occasional satire are too inconsequential to signify.
_The Dutchman’s Fireside_, written at about the same time, is far more
successful. It purports to be an account of the Knickerbocker society
in the days of the Old French war, and it contains some lovely pictures
of old times that one reads with pleasure; but it indulges somewhat
freely in adventure amongst the Indians and in the war, and its love
story is needlessly romantic. Although Paulding still protests against
a blood-pudding diet, he indulges occasionally in the high-flown, to
the detriment of the idyllic note. Romance was all about him and
he could not wholly escape its compulsions. Too casual in his work,
too undisciplined in the craft of writing, he remained to the end an
amusing amateur, a homespun man of letters who never took the trouble
to master his technic. There was excellent stuff in him, solider
perhaps than in Irving, but his failure suggests the difference between
the journeyman and the artist.
Footnotes
[423] Writing to his wife a month afterwards, Cooper said: “By the
way, Mrs. Willing has let out the secret of Irving’s appointment. He
wrote to Webster to remember him _if any good thing offered_. So that
instead of not asking for the office, he asked for anything that was
good. There has been more humbug practised concerning this man than
concerning any other now living” (Cooper, _Correspondence of James
Fenimore-Cooper_, Vol. II, p. 469).
[424] See _Letters from the South_, Vol. I, _Letter XXII_.
Chapter IV • James Fenimore Cooper • Critic
Fenimore Cooper is one of the puzzling figures of his generation.
In his substantial character was embodied what may well appear no
more than a bundle of contradictions. Romancer and social critic,
feudal-minded yet espousing a republican faith, he pretty much baffled
his own generation in its testy attempts to understand him, as he has