European, as proper as proper can be. And, safe inside the old skin, he
_imagined_ the gorgeous American pattern of a new skin.
He hated democracy. So he evaded it, and had a nice dream of something
beyond democracy. But he belonged to democracy all the while.
Evasion!--Yet even that doesn't make the dream worthless.
Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe
Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always
something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had
always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American
Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody
else.
Necessarily. It was a _pis aller._ It was the _pis aller_ to European
Liberty. It was a cruel form of sloughing. Men murdered themselves into
this democracy. Democracy is the utter hardening of the old skin, the
old form, the old psyche. It hardens till it is tight and fixed and
inorganic. Then it must burst, like a chrysalis shell. And out must come
the soft grub, or the soft damp butterfly of the American-at-last.
America has gone the _pis aller_ of her democracy. Now she must slough
even that, chiefly that, indeed.
What did Cooper dream beyond democracy? Why, in his immortal friendship
of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo he dreamed the nucleus of a new
society. That is, he dreamed a new human relationship. A stark, stripped
human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. Deeper than
property, deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than
love. So deep that it is loveless. The stark, loveless, wordless unison
of two men who have come to the bottom of themselves. This is the new
nucleus of a new society, the clue to a new world-epoch. It asks for a
great and cruel sloughing first of all. Then it finds a great release
into a new world, a new moral, a new landscape.
Natty and the Great Serpent are neither equals nor unequals. Each obeys
the other when the moment arrives. And each is stark and dumb in the
other's presence, starkly himself, without illusion created. Each is
just the crude pillar of a man, the crude living column of his own
manhood. And each knows the godhead of this crude column of manhood. A
new relationship.
The Leatherstocking novels create the myth of this new relation. And
they go backwards, from old age to golden youth. That is the true myth
of America. She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin.
And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth.
It is the myth of America.
You start with actuality. _Pioneer_ is no doubt Cooperstown, when
Cooperstown was in the stage of inception: a village of one wild street
of log cabins under the forest hills by Lake Champlain: a village of
crude, wild frontiersmen, reacting against civilization.
Towards this frontier-village, in the winter time, a negro slave drives
a sledge through the mountains, over deep snow. In the sledge sits a
fair damsel, Miss Temple, with her handsome pioneer father, Judge
Temple. They hear a shot in the trees. It is the old hunter and
backwoodsman. Natty Bumppo, long and lean and uncouth, with a long rifle
and gaps in his teeth.
Judge Temple is "squire" of the village, and he has a ridiculous,
commodious "hall" for his residence. It is still the old English form.
Miss Temple is a pattern young lady, like Eve Effingham: in fact she
gets a young and very genteel but impoverished Effingham for a husband.
The old world holding its own on the edge of the wild. A bit tiresomely
too, with rather more prunes and prisms than one can digest. Too
romantic.
Against the "hall" and the gentry, the real frontiers-folk, the rebels.
The two groups meet at the village inn, and at the frozen church, and at
the Christmas sports, and on the ice of the lake, and at the great
pigeon shoot. It is a beautiful, resplendent picture of life. Fenimore
puts in only the glamour.
Perhaps my taste is childish, but these scenes in _Pioneers_ seem to me
marvellously beautiful. The raw village street, with wood-fires blinking
through the unglazed window-chinks, on a winter's night. The inn, with
the rough woodsmen and the drunken Indian John; the church, with the
snowy congregation crowding to the fire. Then the lavish abundance of
Christmas cheer, and turkey-shooting in the snow. Spring coming, forests
all green, maple-sugar taken from the trees: and clouds of pigeons
flying from the south, myriads of pigeons, shot in heaps; and
night-fishing on the teeming, virgin lake; and deer-hunting.
Pictures! Some of the loveliest, most glamorous pictures in all
literature.
Alas, without the cruel iron of reality. It is all real enough. Except
that one realizes that Fenimore was writing from a safe distance, where
he would idealize and have his wish-fulfilment.
Because, when one comes to America, one finds that there is always a
certain slightly devilish resistance in the American landscape, and a
certain slightly bitter resistance in the white man's heart. Hawthorne
gives this. But Cooper glosses it over.
The American landscape has never been at one with the white man. Never.
And white men have probably never felt so bitter anywhere, as here in
America, where the very landscape, in its very beauty, seems a bit
devilish and grinning, opposed to us.
Cooper, however, glosses over this resistance, which in actuality can
never quite be glossed over. He wants the landscape to be at one with
him. So he goes away to Europe and sees it as such. It is a sort of
vision.
And, nevertheless, the oneing will surely take place--some day.
The myth is the story of Natty. The old, lean hunter and backwoodsman
lives with his friend, the grey-haired Indian John, an old Delaware
chief, in a hut within reach of the village. The Delaware is
christianised and bears the Christian name of John. He is tribeless and
lost. He humiliates his grey hairs in drunkenness, and dies, thankful to
be dead, in a forest fire, passing back to the fire whence he derived.
And this is Chingachgook, the splendid Great Serpent of the later
novels.
No doubt Cooper, as a boy, knew both Natty and the Indian John. No doubt
they fired his imagination even then. When he is a man, crystallised in
society and sheltering behind the safe pillar of Mrs. Cooper, these two
old fellows become a myth to his soul. He traces himself to a new youth
in them.
As for the story: Judge Temple has just been instrumental in passing the
wise game laws. But Natty has lived by his gun all his life in the wild
woods, and simply childishly cannot understand how he can be poaching on
the Judge's land among the pine trees. He shoots a deer in the close
season. The Judge is all sympathy, but the law must be enforced.
Bewildered Natty, an old man of seventy, is put in stocks and in prison.
They release him as soon as possible. But the thing was done.
The letter killeth.
Natty's last connection with his own race is broken. John, the Indian,
is dead. The old hunter disappears, lonely and severed, into the forest,
away, away from his race.
In the new epoch that is coming, there will be no Letter of the Law.
Chronologically, _The Last of the Mohicans_ follows _Pioneers._ But in
the myth, _The Prairie_ comes next.
Cooper of course knew his own America. He travelled west and saw the
prairies, and camped with the Indians of the prairie.
_The Prairie_, like _Pioneers_, bears a good deal the stamp of
actuality. It is a strange, splendid book, full of sense of doom. The
figures of the great Kentuckian men, with their wolf-women, loom
colossal on the vast prairie, as they camp with their wagons. These are
different pioneers from Judge Temple. Lurid, brutal, tinged with the
sinisterness of crime; these are the gaunt white men who push west, push
on and on against the natural opposition of the continent. On towards a
doom. Great wings of vengeful doom seem spread over the west, grim
against the intruder. You feel them again in Frank Norris' novel, _The
Octopus._ While in the West of Bret Harte there is a very devil in the
air, and beneath him are sentimental self-conscious people being wicked
and goody by evasion.
In _The Prairie_ there is a shadow of violence and dark cruelty
flickering in the air. It is the aboriginal demon hovering over the core
of the continent. It hovers still, and the dread is still there.
Into such a prairie enters the huge figure of Ishmael, ponderous,
pariah-like Ishmael and his huge sons and his were-wolf wife. With their
wagons they roll on from the frontiers of Kentucky, like Cyclops into
the savage wilderness. Day after day they seem to force their way into
oblivion. But their force of penetration ebbs. They are brought to a
stop. They recoil in the throes of murder and entrench themselves in
isolation on a hillock in the midst of the prairie. There they hold out
like demi-gods against the elements and the subtle Indian.
The pioneering brute invasion of the West, crime-tinged!
And into this setting, as a sort of minister of peace, enters the old,
old hunter Natty, and his suave, horse-riding Sioux Indians. But he
seems like a shadow.
The hills rise softly west, to the Rockies. There seems a new peace: or
is it only suspense, abstraction, waiting? Is it only a sort of beyond?
Natty lives in these hills, in a village of the suave, horse-riding
Sioux. They revere him as an old wise father.
In these hills he dies, sitting in his chair and looking far east, to
the forest and great sweet waters, whence he came. He dies gently, in
physical peace with the land and the Indians. He is an old, old man.
Cooper could see no further than the foothills where Natty died, beyond
the prairie.
The other novels bring us back east.
_The Last of the Mohicans_ is divided between real historical narrative
and true "romance." For myself, I prefer the romance. It has a
myth-meaning, whereas the narrative is chiefly record.
For the first time, we get actual women: the dark, handsome Cora and her
frail sister, the White Lily. The good old division, the dark sensual
woman and the clinging, submissive little blonde, who is so "pure."
These sisters are fugitives through the forest, under the protection of
a Major Heyward, a young American officer and Englishman. He is just a
"white" man, very good and brave and generous, etc., but limited, most
definitely _borné._ He would probably love Cora, if he dared, but he
finds it safer to adore the clinging White Lily of a younger sister.
This trio is escorted by Natty, now Leatherstocking, a hunter and scout
in the prime of life, accompanied by his inseparable friend
Chingachgook, and the Delaware's beautiful son--Adonis rather than
Apollo--Uncas, the Last of the Mohicans.
There is also a "wicked" Indian, Magua, handsome and injured incarnation
of evil.
Cora is the scarlet flower of womanhood, fierce, passionate offspring of
some mysterious union between the British officer and a Creole woman in
the West Indies. Cora loves Uncas, Uncas loves Cora. But Magua also
desires Cora, violently desires her. A lurid little circle of sensual
fire. So Fenimore kills them all off, Cora, Uncas, and Magua, and leaves
the White Lily to carry on the race. She will breed plenty of white
children to Major Heyward. These tiresome "lilies that fester," of our
day.
Evidently Cooper--or the artist in him--has decided that there can be no
blood-mixing of the two races, white and red. He kills 'em off.
Beyond all this heart-beating stand the figures of Natty and
Chingachgook: the two childless womanless men of opposite races. They
are the abiding thing. Each of them is alone, and final in his race. And
they stand side by side, stark, abstract, beyond emotion, yet eternally
together. All the other loves seem frivolous. This is the new great
thing, the clue, the inception of a new humanity.
And Natty, what sort of a white man is he? Why, he is a man with a gun.
He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer.
Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer.
Twice, in the book, he brings an enemy down hurling in death through the
air, downwards. Once it is the beautiful, wicked Magua--shot from a
height, and hurtling down ghastly through space, into death.
This is Natty, the white forerunner. A killer. As in _Deerslayer_, he
shoots the bird that flies in the high, high sky, so that the bird falls
out of the invisible into the visible, dead, he symbolises himself. He
will bring the bird of the spirit out of the high air. He is the stoic
American killer of the old great life. But he kills, as he says, only to
live.
_Pathfinder_ takes us to the Great Lakes, and the glamour and beauty of
sailing the great sweet waters. Natty is now called Pathfinder. He is
about thirty-five years old, and he falls in love. The damsel is Mabel
Dunham, daughter of Sergeant Dunham of the Fort garrison. She is blonde
and in all things admirable. No doubt Mrs. Cooper was very much like
Mabel.
And Pathfinder doesn't marry her. She won't have him. She wisely prefers
a more comfortable Jasper. So Natty goes off to grouch, and to end by
thanking his stars. When he had got right dear, and sat by the campfire
with Chingachgook, in the forest, didn't he just thank his stars! A
lucky escape!
Men of an uncertain age are liable to these infatuations. They aren't
always lucky enough to be rejected.
Whatever would poor Mabel have done, had she been Mrs. Bumppo?
Natty had no business marrying. His mission was elsewhere.
The most fascinating Leatherstocking book is the last, _Deerslayer._
Natty is now a fresh youth, called Deerslayer. But the kind of silent
prim youth who is never quite young, but reserves himself for different
things.
It is a gem of a book. Or a bit of perfect paste. And myself, I like a
bit of perfect paste in a perfect setting, so long as I am not fooled by
pretense of reality. And the setting of Deerslayer _could_ not be more
exquisite. Lake Champlain again.
Of course it never rains: it is never cold and muddy and dreary: no one
ever has wet feet or toothache: no one ever feels filthy, when they
can't wash for a week. God knows what the women would really have looked
like, for they fled through the wilds without soap, comb, or towel. They
breakfasted off a chunk of meat, or nothing, lunched the same, and
supped the same.
Yet at every moment they are elegant, perfect ladies, in correct toilet.
Which isn't quite fair. You need only go camping for a week, and you'll
see.
But it is a myth, not a realistic tale. Read it as a lovely myth. Lake
Glimmerglass.
Deerslayer, the youth with the long rifle, is found in the woods with a
big, handsome, blonde-bearded backwoodsman called Hurry Harry.
Deerslayer seems to have been born under a hemlock tree out of a
pine-cone: a young man of the woods. He is silent, simple, philosophic,
moralistic, and an unerring shot. His simplicity is the simplicity of
age rather than of youth. He is race-old. All his reactions and impulses
are fixed, static. Almost he is sexless, so race-old. Yet intelligent,
hardy, dauntless.
Hurry Harry is a big blusterer, just the opposite of Deerslayer.
Deerslayer keeps the centre of his own consciousness steady and
unperturbed. Hurry Harry is one of those floundering people who bluster
from one emotion to another, very self-conscious, without any centre to
them.
These two young men are making their way to a lovely, smallish lake.
Lake Glimmerglass. On this water the Hutter family has established
itself. Old Hutter, it is suggested, has a criminal, coarse,
buccaneering past, and is a sort of fugitive from justice. But he is a
good enough father to his two grown-up girls. The family lives in a log
hut "castle," built on piles in the water, and the old man has also
constructed an "ark," a sort of house-boat, in which he can take his
daughters when he goes on his rounds to trap the beaver.
The two girls are the inevitable dark and light. Judith, dark, fearless,
passionate, a little lurid with sin, is the scarlet-and-black blossom.
Hetty, the younger, blond, frail and innocent, is the white lily again.
But alas, the lily has begun to fester. She is slightly imbecile.
The two hunters arrive at the lake among the woods just as war has been
declared. The Hutters are unaware of the fact. And hostile Indians are
on the lake already. So, the story of thrills and perils.
Thomas Hardy's inevitable division of women into dark and fair, sinful
and innocent, sensual and pure, is Cooper's division too. It is
indicative of the desire in the man. He wants sensuality and sin, and he
wants purity and "innocence." If the innocence goes a little rotten,
slightly imbecile, bad luck!
Hurry Harry, of course, like a handsome impetuous meat-fly, at once
wants Judith, the lurid poppy-blossom. Judith rejects him with scorn.
Judith, the sensual woman, at once wants the quiet, reserved, unmastered
Deerslayer. She wants to master him. And Deerslayer is half tempted, but
never more than half. He is not going to be mastered. A philosophic old
soul, he does not give much for the temptations of sex. Probably he dies
virgin.
And he is right of it. Rather than be dragged into a false heat of
deliberate sensuality, he will remain alone. His soul is alone, for ever
alone. So he will preserve his integrity, and remain alone in the flesh.
It is a stoicism which is honest and fearless, and from which Deerslayer
never lapses, except when, approaching middle age, he proposes to the
buxom Mabel.
He lets his consciousness penetrate in loneliness into the new
continent. His contacts are not human. He wrestles with the spirits of
the forest and the American wild, as a hermit wrestles with God and
Satan. His one meeting is with Chingachgook, and this meeting is silent,
reserved, across an unpassable distance.
Hetty, the White Lily, being imbecile, although full of vaporous
religion and the dear, good God, "who governs all things by his
providence," is hopelessly infatuated with Hurry Harry. Being innocence
gone imbecile, like Dostoevsky's Idiot, she longs to give herself to the
handsome meat-fly. Of course he doesn't want her.
And so nothing happens: in that direction. Deerslayer goes off to meet
Chingachgook, and help him woo an Indian maid. Vicarious.
It is the miserable story of the collapse of the white psyche. The white
man's mind and soul are divided between these two things: innocence and
lust, the Spirit and Sensuality. Sensuality always carries a stigma, and
is therefore more deeply desired, or lusted after. But spirituality
alone gives the sense of uplift, exaltation, and "winged life," with the
inevitable reaction into sin and spite. So the white man is divided
against himself. He plays off one side of himself against the other
side, till it is really a tale told by an idiot, and nauseating.
Against this, one is forced to admire the stark, enduring figure of
Deerslayer. He is neither spiritual nor sensual. He is a moralizer, but
he always tries to moralize from actual experience, not from theory. He
says: "Hurt nothing unless you're forced to." Yet he gets his deepest
thrill of gratification, perhaps, when he puts a bullet through the
heart of a beautiful buck, as it stoops to drink at the lake. Or when he
brings the invisible bird fluttering down in death, out of the high
blue. "Hurt nothing unless you're forced to." And yet he lives by death,
by killing the wild things of the air and earth.
It's not good enough.
But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the
other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a
sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic,'
and a killer. It has never yet melted.
Of course the soul often breaks down into disintegration, and you have
lurid sin and Judith, imbecile innocence lusting, in Hetty, and bluster,
bragging, and self-conscious strength, in Harry. But there are the
disintegration products.
What true myth concerns itself with is not the disintegration product.
True myth concerns itself centrally with the onward adventure of the
integral soul. And this, for America, is Deerslayer. A man who turns his
back on white society. A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and
intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by
death, by killing, but who is pure white.
This is the very intrinsic-most American. He is at the core of all the
other flux and fluff. And when _this_ man breaks from his static
isolation, and makes a new move, then look out, something will be
happening.
VI. EDGAR ALLAN POE
Poe has no truck with Indians or Nature. He makes no bones about Red
Brothers and Wigwams.
He is absolutely concerned with the disintegration-processes of his own
psyche. As we have said, the rhythm of American art-activity is dual.
1. A disintegrating and sloughing of the old consciousness.
2. The forming of a new consciousness underneath.
Fenimore Cooper has the two vibrations going on together. Poe has only
one, only the disintegrative vibration. This makes him almost more a
scientist than an artist.
Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe's "morbid" tales need
have been written. They need to be written because old things need to
die and disintegrate, because the old white psyche has to be gradually
broken down before anything else can come to pass.
Man must be stripped even of himself. And it is a painful, sometimes a
ghastly process.
Poe had a pretty bitter doom. Doomed to seethe down his soul in a great
continuous convulsion of disintegration, and doomed to register the
process. And then doomed to be abused for it, when he had performed some
of the bitterest tasks of human experience, that can be asked of a man.
Necessary tasks, too. For the human soul must suffer its own
disintegration, _consciously_, if ever it is to survive.
But Poe is rather a scientist than an artist. He is reducing his own
self as a scientist reduces a salt in a crucible. It is an almost
chemical analysis of the soul and consciousness. Whereas in true art
there is always the double rhythm of creating and destroying.
This is why Poe calls his things "tales." They are a concatenation of
cause and effect.
His best pieces, however, are not tales. They are more. They are ghastly
stories of the human soul in its disruptive throes.
Moreover, they are "love" stories.
_Ligeia_ and _The Fall of the House of Usher_ are really love stories.
Love is the mysterious vital attraction which draws things together,
closer, closer together. For this reason sex is the actual crisis of
love. For in sex the two blood-systems, in the male and female,
concentrate and come into contact, the merest film intervening. Yet if
the intervening film breaks down, it is death.
So there you are. There is a limit to everything. There is a limit to
love.
The central law of all organic life is that each organism is
intrinsically isolate and single in itself.
The moment its isolation breaks down, and there comes an actual mixing
and confusion, death sets in.
This is true of every individual organism, from man to amoeba.
But the secondary law of all organic life is that each organism only
lives through contact with other matter, assimilation, and contact with
other life, which means assimilation of new vibrations, non-material.
Each individual organism is vivified by intimate contact with fellow
organisms: up to a certain point.
So man. He breathes the air into him, he swallows food and water. But
more than this. He takes into him the life of his fellow men, with whom
he comes into contact, and he gives back life to them. This contact
draws nearer and nearer, as the intimacy increases. When it is a whole
contact, we call it love. Men live by food, but die if they eat too
much. Men live by love, but die, or cause death, if they love too much.
There are two loves: sacred and profane, spiritual and sensual.
In sensual love, it is the two blood-systems, the man's and the woman's,
which sweep up into pure contact, and _almost_ fuse. Almost mingle.
Never quite. There is always the finest imaginable wall between the two
blood-waves, through which pass unknown vibrations, forces, but through
which the blood itself must never break, or it means bleeding.