60
LESLIE
FIEDLER
world of unredeemed pagans, a reservoir of souls providentially
kept in darkness until they were needed to replace the lapsed
Christians of heretical northern Europe?
It is however, the Enlightenment's vision of America rather
than that of the Church that was written into our documents
and has become the substance of our deepest sense of ourselves
and our destiny.
If
North America had remained Latin, the story
might have been different; but Jefferson himself presided over
the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, which settled that ques–
tion once and for all. History sometimes provides suitable sym–
bolic occasions, and surely one of them is the scene that finds
Jefferson and Napoleon, twin heirs of the Age of Reason, pre–
paring the way for Lewis and Clark, that is to say, for the first
actors in our own drama of a perpetually retreating West. Nape–
leon, it must be remembered, was the sponsor of the painter
David and Jefferson the planner of Monticello; good neo-classi–
cists
both, they place the American myth firmly in the cla$iciz–
ing, neo-Roman tradition of the late eighteenth century. The
New World is, of course, in one sense an older one than Europe,
a preserve of the primitive, last refuge of antique virtue; indeed
the writers and artists of the Empire period could never quite tell
the difference between Americans, red or white, and the inhabi–
tants of the Roman Republic. The face of Washington, as rend–
ered in bronze by Houdon, is that of the noblest Roman of them
all, or, in Byron's phrase (already a cliche), "the Cincinnatus
of the West."
But America is not exclusively the product of Reason-not
even in the area of legend. Behind its neo-classical facade, ours is
a nation sustained by a sentimental and Romantic dream, the
dream of an escape from culture and a renewal of youth. Beside
the
philosophes,
with whom he seemed at first to accord so well
that they scarcely knew he was their profoundest enemy, stands
Rousseau. It is
his
compelling vision of a society uncompromised
by culture, of simple piety and virtue bred by "Nature," i.e., the
