Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
as to render the evils of a general monopoly impossible, a landed
gentry is precisely what is most needed for the higher order of
civilization, including manners, tastes, and the minor principles,
and is the very class which, if reasonably maintained and properly
regarded, would do the most good at the least risk of any social
caste known. (Chapter XXVI.)
It is not hard, indeed, to understand Cooper’s preference for Stephen
Van Rensselaer the Patroon, to John Jacob Astor the fur trader, or
Commodore Vanderbilt the ferryman; yet such preference was charged
against him as un-American.
It was this revulsion from the meanness of the present that sent
Cooper into the wilderness or out on the high seas, to seek adventure
in the company of nature’s noblemen, and forget the sordidness of the
real. Here again the French school prompted his thinking, if only to
supplement the romance of his boyish recollections. Natty Bumppo is
quite evidently man as he came from the hand of nature, uncorrupted by
the vices of the settlements; indeed one might question whether the
back-to-nature literature can show another figure so enduringly vital
as the Leatherstocking. From this same material is fashioned Uncas
and the younger Chingachgook and still other lovable figures of his
romances. They belong to the free wilderness beyond the settlements,
where the dramatic flight and pursuit go on unchecked by impertinent
fences. Here their native virtues expand and their generous gifts find
ample play. They shunned the settlements as Cooper shunned them. On the
frontier, the middle ground between nature and civilization, Cooper’s
spirits flagged. He had no love for the stumpy clearings, the slovenly
cabins, the shiftless squatters; the raw devastation of the ax grieved
him and he breathes contentedly only after he has left the last scars
behind and is in the deep woods beyond the smell of rum. Such a man
obviously was unfitted to write a just account of the frontier as
it straggled westward. He hated its ways too fiercely to do justice
to it, and when he comes upon it in his tales, when he introduces a
frontier figure such as Ishmael Bush in _The Prairie_ or old Aaron
Thousandacres in _The Chainbearer_, it is to depict the unhappy state
of society where the virtues of nature are gone and the refinements
of civilization not yet come. No writer has set down a more sweeping
indictment of the frontier than Cooper, and he set it down because the
frontier seemed to him the muddy source of the vulgar leveling he hated
so heartily. A gentleman, whether Indian or squire or scout, Cooper
loved to be with; but a vulgarian he could not endure, and a rascal
stirred his Puritan wrath. In consequence there runs through his work
little of the amusing picaresque strain that the heartier nature of
Gilmore Simms delighted in, and that made him a truer chronicler of
frontier ways.
Democrat though he professed to be, Cooper shrank from the logical
application of the democratic principle. The adoption of manhood
suffrage in New York brought in its train a sorry scramble of
demagogues to sway the popular will, a debasement of the press, and
a vulgarizing of political life that proved a sore trial to Cooper’s
faith. He was too severely moralist to enjoy the little weaknesses of
human nature, but must set himself up as custodian of public morals.
Affronted by a bumptious vulgarity, he became the assailant rather than
the critic of Jacksonian ways. The land to which he returned in 1833
was a broad target for his shafts and he sent them into the white. The
America of log cabins and hard cider seemed to him to have repudiated
the traditional standards, moral as well as cultural, and he attributed
the disintegration to the corruption that came from the extension of
the suffrage to classes unprepared to use it wisely. It was this that
embittered his criticism in the caustic pages of _Homeward Bound_ and
_Home as Found_. He was startled and resentful at the changes. “You
have been dreaming abroad,” remarked one of the characters in the
former, “while your country has retrograded, in all that is respectable
and good, a century in a dozen years” (_Homeward Bound_, Chapter XVII).
The colossal brag, the meaningless unrest, the abysmal provincialism,
he marked as the natural by-products of the mob mind. In throwing off
its old restraints America was coming to deny all standards of decency
and excellence. “What then do you deem our greatest error--our weakest
point?” asks one of his characters, and the reply is explicit:
Provincialisms, with their train of narrow prejudices, and a
disposition to set up mediocrity as perfection, under the double
influence of an ignorance that unavoidably arises from a want of
models, and of the irresistible tendency to mediocrity in a nation
where the common mind so imperiously rules. (_Home as Found_,
Chapter XXV.)
It was during the bustling decade of the forties, when the agrarian
unrest in York State was putting in jeopardy the old manorial system,
that Cooper’s antagonism to the spirit of leveling became bitterest;
and it was in defense of the old system that he wrote the Anti-Rent
trilogy that should always be set over against the Leatherstocking
tales. Taken together the two series contain pretty much the whole
of Cooper, his sea tales excepted; either alone gives an inadequate
and partial view. The one is a social study, the other a romantic
epic. The one gives a picture of the changes the years have brought
to a given region, the other follows the retreating wilderness as the
frontier moved westward. The Anti-Rent novels present the reverse of
the romantic picture of the Leatherstocking tales. Their central figure
is Aaron Thousandacres the squatter, who has come out of Connecticut
to possess what pleases him, regardless of legal rights. Offspring of
generations of covetous, psalm-singing Puritans, he has no difficulty
in justifying his lawlessness by Yankee logic. The devil can quote
Scripture, and in this respect old Thousandacres is the devil’s own
son. When Scripture fails the easy gospel of natural rights comes to
his aid; the written law may be on the side of the title-holder, but
natural law is on the side of the squatter.
“There’s two rights to all the land on ’arth, and the whull world
over,” the squatter replied to Chainbearer’s legal argument. “One
of these rights is what I call a king’s right, or that which
depends on writin’s, and laws, and sich like contrivances; and
the other depends on possession. It stands to reason, that fact
is better than any writin’ about it can be.” (_The Chainbearer_,
Chapter XXV.)
Such lax doctrine, to Cooper, was the evil fruit of the spirit of
lawlessness that was laying a blight upon America. A retributive bullet
ends the fierce career of old Thousandacres, but his tigress wife,
his rough sons and slattern daughters are driven from their home to
plunge deeper into the wilderness, there to beget other generations of
squatters whose vicious doctrines return to plague society. No romance
blends with the tale of their lives; no sympathy softens the picture of
the stern old Yankee. He has set himself against law and order and must
yield or be destroyed. It is the old story of the struggle for land, a
struggle that went on for generations between speculator and squatter,
between rich and poor, with much wrong and much right on both sides;
yet Cooper’s sympathies are cold to the squatter’s plea and he enlists
God, morality, and the law, in defense of a title to forty thousand
acres wheedled from the Indians for ninety-six pounds, York currency,
spent in trinkets. Righteousness without a sense of humor is not easy
to live with.
In much of his later work Cooper’s romantic impulses are held in check
by a growing tendency towards realism. It was there from the first but
as he grew more critical it spread over more of his pages. He tried
to hold the scales of his judgment even, but his realism was marred
and distorted by his vehement nature. A mind exuding prejudice is
ill equipped to deal objectively with material, and Cooper was too
inveterate a moralist to accept the principle of impersonal detachment.
He prided himself on facing fact, but he loved to preach; and having
pointed out the wrongfulness of vicious morals he must follow it
with a vigorous homily on right conduct. And yet despite his gross
shortcomings there is a deal of realism scattered through his volumes.
He consciously tried to be a chronicler of manners, to depict America
truly, to recreate fairly present and past, red man and white, Dutch
and Yankee. His prejudices certainly got the better of him in dealing
with New England, and his romance certainly got the better of him in
describing the Mohicans. Yet though he might romanticize Uncas he
did not romanticize Saucy Nick in _Wyandotté_, but drew an excellent
picture of the struggle between the drunkard and the warrior in the
heart of the Tuscarora that reveals much of the Indian nature--an
analysis that holds the scales more evenly than they are held in _The
Last of the Mohicans_ or in Bird’s _Nick of the Woods_. The book as a
whole, indeed, is an excellent example of Cooper’s desire to substitute
a critical for a romantic treatment of materials. In his discriminating
analysis of the motives separating families in the Revolutionary war,
there is no glorification of partisanship, no prejudiced espousal of a
sacred cause, no division of sheep and goats. Cooper will have none of
the cheap romance of patriotism, but probes skillfully into the motives
and impulses that divided honest men amid the difficulties of civil
war. More than that, he makes his villain one of the patriot party who
uses the unsettlement of the times to cover his dirty tracks. It is a
characteristic document that deserves to stand beside _Satanstoe_ as an
example of his later work.
Politics was all about Cooper while he was writing these tales, and
his sporadic incursions into criticism led him into the field of
political theory. So doughty a warrior must break a lance when all
America was engaged in a great political tourney. While Whig and
Democrat were loudly professing allegiance to the new doctrine of
majority rule, Cooper was making his way back to the principles of
the eighteenth century and discovering the essence of good government
in self-restraint. The mistake of the new school, he was convinced,
lay in confusing the present will of the majority with the rule of
the people; the mistake of the old school lay in confusing the will
of the minority with the rule of the people. Above and beyond both
majority and minority is the eternal principle of justice, and any
government that flouts that principle is bad government, no matter
how sanctioned. In a republic which foolishly believes that the voice
of the people is the sole criterion of right, the problem of justice
is peculiarly difficult, for what remedies are available in cases “in
which the people themselves happen to go astray, _en masse_”? It is the
problem that attends every ethical interpretation of sovereignty, and
it awakened acute concern in Cooper’s mind. He could find no solution
except in the good sense of the people, and with a vicious press and
persuasive demagogues doing their best to befuddle the public mind,
the outlook seemed dark. It was not the people he distrusted, but the
self-seekers who set up to be leaders of the people. All the noise was
made by demagogues who proclaimed their own mouthings to be authentic
public opinion. How ineffectively Cooper struggled with the problem is
written down in many a passage in his critical novels.
God help the nation [he said in _The Redskins_] where
self-government, in its literal sense, exists.... When a people