NOVEL AND AMERICA
61
untended landscape, that has left the deepest impress on the
American mind. The heirs of Rousseau are Chateaubriand and
Cooper, after whom the world of togas and marble brows and
antique heroism is replaced by the sylvan scene, across which the
melancholy refugee plods
in
search of the mysterious Niagara, or
where Natty Bumppo, buckskinned savior, leans on
his
long rifle
and listens for the sound of a cr,acking twig. The bronze face of
a bewigged Washington gives way to the image of young Abe
splitting logs in a Kentucky clearing.
The dream of the Republic is quite a different thing from
that of the Revolution. The vision of blood and fire as ritual
purification, the need to cast down what is up, to degrade the
immemorial images of authority, to impose equality as the ul–
timate orthodoxy-these came from the
Encyclopedie,
perhaps,
as abstract ideas; but the spirit
in
which they were lived was that
of full-blown Romanticism. The Revolution of 1789 (for which
ours was an ideological dress rehearsal) may have set up David
as its official interpreter, but it left the world to Delacroix; and
though it enthroned Reason as its goddess,
it
prepared for a
more unruly Muse.
In Sentimentalism, the Age of Reason dissolves in a de–
bauch of tearfulness; sensibility, seduction, and suicide haunt its
art
even before ghosts and graveyards take over-strange images
of darkness to usher in an era of freedom from fear. And be–
neath them lurks the realization that the devils which had per–
sisted from antiquity into Christianity were not dead but only
driven inward; that the "tyranny of superstition," far from being
the fabrication of a Machiavellian priesthood, was a projection
of a profound inner insecurity and guilt, a hidden world of
nightmare not abolished by manifestos or restrained by barri–
cades. The final horrors, as modern society has come to realize,
are neither gods nor demons, but intimate aspects of our own
minds.
