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PARTISAN REVIEW
nants at least, and men who are living now, or only a hundred years
ago, wrote about it from experience. It has been described by writers
so different as Cooper, Melville and Faulkner, to mention only three,
in almost identical terms: they have seen the primeval forest, as it
existed at the beginning of time, and could never forget it. "How
should a man who has lived in towns and schools know anything
about the wonders of the woods?" says Cooper. "No, no, lad; there
has that little stream of water been playing among these hills
since He
made the world,
and not a dozen white men have ever laid eyes on
it." And Melville, following the same train of thought: " . . . there
came into the mind of Pierre thoughts and fancies never imbibed
within the gates of towns; but only given forth by the atmosphere of
primeval forests, which with the eternal ocean, are the only un–
changed objects remaining to this day, from those that
originally met
the gaze of Adam."
And Faulkner, who juxtaposes the saga of the
McCaslins against this primeval "doomed wilderness whose edges
were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and
axes": "There was some of it left, although now it was two hundred
miles from Jefferson when once it had been thirty. He watched it,
not being conquered, destroyed, so much as retreating since its pur–
pose was served now and
its time an outmoded time."
It is un-his–
torical, prehistoric time.
Surely, to all these writers this was a tremendous experience,
whether in reality or in imagination, and neither Rousseau nor any
other European could have explained it to them.
It
is an experience
wholly autochthonous, and actually the more clearly and genuinely
realized the less the mind is influenced by European ideas of nature
or the picturesque. What they are trying to get at is not Emerson's
nature, philosophically conceived .and inspired by European thought,
which "wears the color of the spirit," but this raw breath of the
wilderness that modem Europeans never knew, in whose countries
every patch of woods has been cared for hundreds of years. Their
sense of nature has fed only on these thoroughly cultivated forests,
which are really parks compared to the American wilderness. It seems
therefore inaccurate to speak of this American experience in terms
taken from European history of thought: both romanticism and prim–
itivism belong to a frame of mind which craves to reach back to a
state of nature actually lost long ago. But to these Americans the wil-
