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342
PARTISAN REVIEW
Leatherstocking and
his
friends who are the spokesmen of this phil–
osophy. In
The Pioneers
the young hunter says, "The wolf of the
forest is not more rapacious for his prey than man is greedy of gold";
and Leatherstocking cries, "This comes from settling a country!"
when he sees the cruel, greedy slaughter of the pigeons. "The wicked–
ness and waste of the settlements" is a stock phrase of his, which is
contrasted to his own unambitious and rightful life in the wilderness.
Cooper, so different from Faulkner in all other respects, is indeed the
writer closest to him in this trend of thought.
Go Down, Moses
and
the Leatherstocking tales, above all
The Pioneers
and
The Prairie,
belong side by side in this peculiarly American tradition.
It has been pointed out by various critics! that Cooper in
his
Pioneers
and
Prairie
described a crucial stage of American history:
the receding of the wilderness before the victorious and irresistible
onslaught of civilization. This is also a significant part of the Ameri–
can experience. In this struggle, Cooper's sympathies were divided.
In part ag.ainst his own convictions, he created Leatherstocking with
unfailing sympathy to represent what he felt was, after all, a lost
cause. He himself was convinced "that the time will come when the
civilization of America will look down on that of any other section
of the world."
Nevertheless he gave to Leatherstocking's cause all the per–
suasiveness (and a bit more) possible to this character. There are
a number of statements in Natty's remarkable eloquence which are
made again and again; some of them not really proving very much,
but made nevertheless with a stubborn and forceful insistence. One
is Leatherstocking's age and the long time he has been living in the
forest; and that he is kinless, without wife or children, and solitary;
another one is the complaint about the greediness of the settlers, their
wickedness and wasteful manners. Opposed to that is the "rule" of
the forest, an unwritten law to kill only as much as is necessary for
one's subsistence: one should not "fish and hunt out of rule"; be–
cause God has put the animals into the wilderness and he "won't see
the waste of his creatures for nothing." Finally there is the question
of the land. Whose property is
it
rightfully? A disconcerting question
under the circumstances, it persistently crops up at various stages of
1 H. N. Smith,
Virgin Land
(Cambridge, 1950), p. 58ff. R. H.
Pearce~
"The Leatherstocking Tales Re-examined,"
South Atlantic Quart.,
Oct. 1947.
