D. H. Lawrence.  Studies in Classic American Literature.  1923. 

From "Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels"

 . . . Fenimore, lying in his Louis Quatorze hotel in Paris, passionately musing about Natty Bumppo and the pathless forest, and mixing his imagination with the Cupids and Butterflies on the painted ceiling . . . .  Men live by lies. . . .

            Fenimore, in his imagination, wanted to be Natty Bumppo, who, I am sure, belched after he had eaten his dinner.  At the same time Mr. Cooper was nothing if not a gentleman.  So he decided to stay in France and have it all his own way. . . .

            Yet the Leatherstocking books are lovely.  Lovely half-lies.

            They form a sort of American Odyssey, with Natty Bumppo for Odysseus.

            Only, in the original Odyssey, there is plenty of devil, Circes and swine and all.  And Ithacus is devil enough to outwit the devils.  But Natty is a saint with a gun, and the Indians are gentlemen through and through, though they may take an occasional scalp. . . .

            Now let me put aside my impatience as the unreality of this vision, and accept it as a wish-fulfilment vision, a kind of yearning myth.  Because it seems to me that the things in Cooper that make one so savage, when one compares them with actuality, are perhaps, when one considers them as presentations of a deep subjective desire, real in their way, and almost prophetic.

            The passionate love for America, for the soil of America, for example.  As I say, it is perhaps easier to love America passionately, when you look at it through the wrong end of the telescope, across all the Atlantic water, as Cooper did so often, than when you are right there.  When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful disintegrative influence upon the white psyche.  It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men, like some Eumenides, until the white men give up their absolute whiteness.  America is tense with latent violence and resistance.  The very common sense of white Americans has a tinge of helplessness in it, and deep fear of what might be if they were not common-sensical.

            Yet one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for.  Then the true passionate love for American Soil will appear.  As yet, there is too much menace in the landscape.

            But probably, one day America will be as beautiful in actuality as it is in Cooper.  Not yet, however.  When the factories have fallen down again.

            And again, this perpetual blood-brother theme of the Leatherstocking novels, Natty and Chingachgook, the Great Serpent.  At present it is a sheer myth.  The Red Man and the White Man are not blood-brothers: even when they are most friendly. . . .

            Certainly, if Cooper had had to spend his whole life in the backwoods, side by side with a Noble Red Brother, he would have screamed with the oppression of suffocation. . . .

            Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe.  In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb.  But in America Democracy was always something anti-life.  The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices.  American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always.  Or of murdering somebody else. . . .

            What did Cooper dream beyond democracy?  Why, in his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo he dreamed the nucleus of a new society.  That is, he dreamed a new human relationship.  A stark, stripped human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. . . .

            Natty and the Great Serpent are neither equals nor unequals.  Each obeys the other when the moment arrives.  And each is stark and dumb in the other's presence, starkly himself, without illusion created. . . .

            Pictures! Some of the loveliest, most glamorous pictures in all literature.

            Alas, without the cruel iron of reality. . . .

            [Regarding Mohicans]  Evidently Cooper--or the artist in him--had decided that there can be no blood-mixing of the two races, white and red.  He kills 'em off.

            Beyond all this heart-beating stand the figures of Natty and Chingachgook: the two childless, womanless men, of opposite races. . . .

            And Natty, what sort of a white man is he?  Why, he is a man with a gun.  He is a killer, a slayer.  Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer.  Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer.

            Twice, in the book, he brings an enemy down hurtling in death through the air, downwards.  Once it is the beautiful, wicked Magua--shot from a height, and hurtling down ghastly through space, into death.

            This is Natty, the white forerunner.  A killer.  As in Deerslayer, he shoots the bird that flies in the high, high sky . . . .  He will bring the bird of the spirit out of the high air.  He is the stoic American killer of the old great life.  But he kills, as he says, only to live. . . .

            Of course it never rains: it is never cold and muddy and dreary: no one has wet feet or toothache: no one ever feels filthy, when they can't wash for a week.  God knows what the women would really have looked like, for they fled through the wilds without soap, comb, or towel.  They breakfasted off a chunk of meat, or nothing, lunched the same, and supped the same.

            Yet at every moment they are elegant, perfect ladies, in correct toilet.

            Which isn't quite fair.  You need only go camping for a week, and you'll see.

            But it is a myth, not a realistic tale.  Read it as a lovely myth. . . .