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PARTISAN REVIEW
an ideal solution in which good settlers take the preachings of Leather–
stocking to their heart and respect and preserve nature. In that sense
he can in the end somewhat inconsistently celebrate Leatherstocking
as "the foremost in that band of pioneers who are opening the way
for the march of the nation across the continent." Not so Faulkner,
who recognizes the inevitable, tragic conflict. His sorrow about the
vanishing of the wilderness is as acute and more articulate than
Cooper's, and he comes to a conclusion which to my knowledge no
European has ever drawn with such severity: at the root and be–
ginning of civilization and all its achievements is rapacity, and civil–
ized man has to bear the burden of this guilt always and everywhere.
If
this is, in the end, a critique of the empire builders, it is at
bottom a questioning of the basis of our civilization: property, spe–
cifically the property of the land. Even the property-minded Cooper
felt uneasy about this question and could not help dealing with it.
Clumsily he used it as the nail on which to hang his plot of the
Pioneers;
and the property of the land, or rather its "dispossession,"
is a topic of discussion between Indians and whites throughout the
Leatherstocking tales. Again, American experience is here sharper,
more dramatic, and above all more recent than that of any of the
European nations, for most of whom a similar act of dispossession and
appropriation has happened at least as far back as the migration of
tribes, and therefore cannot sting the awareness of a modern writer
very acutely.
Ownership of the land is the basic theme of the stories in
Go
Down, Moses.
The book relates the story of a family, the McCaslins,
their white and their black branch, narrated not in novel form but
in more or less long short stories (the most substantial being "The
Bear") which are focused on various members and events in the
family history. This
is
their common background: Old Carothers
McCaslin bought his land "with white man's money" from the In–
dian chief Ikkemotubbe, who in turn possessed it by treachery. (There
is no sentimentalizing about the Indians here; they share the guilt.)
McCaslin "tamed and ordered or believed he had tamed and ordered
(the wilderness) for the reason that the human beings he held
in
bondage and in the power of life and death had removed the forest
from it and in their sweat scratched the surface of it to a depth of
perhaps fourteen inches in order to grow something out of it which
