WILDERNESS AND CIVILIZATION
345
derness was still there, receding but still existing, and they tried to
catch its last breath and to convey its sense of life, a remnant from
the world's beginnings: a-historic, un-human, and almost incompre–
hensible. When Cooper tries to describe the wilderness he does so in
the conventional language of his time. But he is really most expres–
sive when he abandons it under the impact of a powerful experience.
"What do you see when you get up there?" Leatherstocking is asked.
" 'Creation,' said Natty, dropping the end of his rod into the water
and sweeping one hand around him in a circle, 'all creation, lad.' "
Faulkner gives us a sense of wilderness, not any character's impression
of it. The words he uses to present it are: tremendous, brooding, sen–
tient, attentive or inattentive, impartial, omniscient. He gives not so
much a symbolization, as an impersonation, in the bear, the snake,
or the buck, whom Sam Fathers hails with "Oleh, Chief, Grand–
father." For "there was something running in Sam Fathers' veins
which runs in the veins of the buck too." In other words, America's
pre-history, the wilderness, is now in the process of being transformed
into myth, and the bear and Sam Fathers are taking the parts of the
trolls, the giants and the Rubezahls of Europe.
This deep attachment of the wilderness, to untouched, timeless
nature, reflects on the attitude toward civilization, its inevitable enemy
and destroyer. Here again is a genuinely American experience for
which Europe has no counterpart: the destruction of the wilderness
by civilization in one short, dramatic act taking less than a man's
lifetime. There is, to be sure, .a sentimentality in this feeling for the
wilderness: only as doomed and vanquished could it be lamented
and loved so much by writers who necessarily, just by picking up
pen and paper, have to confess themselves as part of the civilization
they accuse. But love and art feed well on contradictions; and it is
inevitable that the wilderness, achieving the revenge of the weak and
the vanquished, should engage the imagination of the American writer
in order to achieve its immortality with a vengeance. Cooper saw and
described with sad anger the slaughter of the pigeons. To kill them,
the settlers fire a cannon which otherwise is used for the celebrations
of the 4th of July; and one wonders how much symbolical weight
Cooper wanted to apply by that. He did not face the question whether
it is the "wickedness" of the settlers, or civilization as such, which is
to blame. Back in his mind there seems always to be the possibility of
