The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott

Donald Davie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135698515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1961, this book examines a number of works popular in the Romantic period, during the heyday of Sir Walter Scott in the early part of the nineteenth century.

Encompassing works by the likes of Alexander Pushkin, Sir Walter Scott, Adam Mickiewicz and James Fenimore Cooper, this is also a meditation on the nature of Romanticism and its enduring value, as expressed in the novel form. Donald Davie also considers the meaning and importance of 'plot' and of 'realism'.

VIII

THE LEATHERSTOCKING NOVELS

COOPER in his own day was called ‘the American Scott.’ Lockhart decided he was the best of all Scott's imitators and Balzac coupled the two names together in a momentous appreciation of The Pathfinder. Cooper himself was proud enough of the title until he was incensed by Lockhart's Life of Scott. (Lockhart printed a journal-entry by Scott, dating from a period in the eighteen-twenties when the pair of them, ‘the Scottish lion and the American lion’, were being feted together in Paris. Scott remarked that Cooper had the typically American ‘manner or absence of manner’. In Lockhart this became ‘manners, or absence of manners’.) But times have changed; and in our own day when Marius Bewley wants to make a case for Cooper, he does so by angrily putting the blame for neglect of Cooper precisely on this label, ‘the American Scott’, and arguing, on the very slender grounds of Cooper's bad first novel Precaution, that Cooper's idea of plot came to him from Jane Austen, not from Scott at all.¹ When Mr. Bewley reprinted his essay in The Eccentric Design, he rightly omitted this and other disparaging references to Scott, but his first version is invaluable for showing what delicate ground it is, this whole question of Cooper's relation to the Scott tradition. On the one hand Leslie Fiedler can write:

A chief technical problem for American novelists has been the adaptation of nontragic forms to tragic ends. How could the dark vision of the American—his obsession with violence and all his embarrassment before love—be expressed in the sentimental novel of analysis as developed by Samuel Richardson or the historical romance as practised by Sir Walter Scott? These sub-genres of fiction, invented to satisfy the emotional needs of a merchant class in search of dignity or a Tory squirearchy consumed by nostalgia, could only by the most desperate expedients be tailored to fit American necessities.¹

On the other hand, we read:

Cooper, for all his historical importance, his status as the founding father of American fiction, cannot compare in literary merit with the founding father he derived from—Scott—or from other founding fathers like Lermontov or Manzoni; his importance, which is enormous, is historical; fascinating to read about, he remains a bore to read. His significance is that he established the themes that seem to have preoccupied American novelists constantly since his day.²

Mr. Fiedler is ready to allow that Cooper never ‘proved capable of achieving high art’; and Henry Bamford Parkes is not worried by having to concede that Cooper's myth continues to this day more influential on more people than any other (for in the Lone Ranger and Tonto on the T.V. screen we see Leather-stocking and Chingachgook still), at the same time as he reproaches Marius Bewley and Yvor Winters for pretending that Cooper is a great writer. It is best to say at the start that, however much I may differ from Mr. Winters and Mr. Bewley at specific points, I am impenitently of their opinion that Cooper is a very great writer indeed. Certainly, to investigate his relations with Scott is not the only way into seeing his greatness; yet between Cooper's admirers to whom Scott is an embarrassment, and Scott's admirers for whom Cooper is damned by the comparison, there is a confusion which seems to mirror the larger confusion about how much either writer is worth in himself. And there is so much reason to think that approaching Cooper with Scott in mind may be worthwhile.

THE PIONEERS

Cooper was also acquainted with Mickiewicz, and in 1830 in Rome Mickiewicz frequented Cooper's household so markedly that it was rumoured he was to marry the American's daughter. There are grounds for thinking that more may yet be discovered about this connection. Cooper was very active on his friend's behalf at the time of the November rising in Poland, and addressed to the Americans an appeal for aid to the Poles. It has been suggested that the Polish poet took hints from Cooper's Spy for his Konrad Wallenrod.

Certainly, to a reader who knows both works, Chapter XXII of Cooper's Pioneers, the earliest of the Leatherstocking books, is likely to recall the passages which lead up to the bear-hunt in Pan Tadeusz. There is no question of ‘influence’, narrowly considered; simply, both works are full of the sense of wilderness, of the lavishness of natural provision for man, and of the exactly intricate natural order which is disturbed by man's intrusion. The very type of the sportsman which is central to both the Polish poem and the American novel, drawing on the familiar but poignant paradox by which man is never so intimate with wild nature as when he hunts it down, binds the two works together and reveals how much the two men had in common. It is partly because both the Lithuanian wilderness and the American are forested that we do not relate this feature in both Cooper and Mickiewicz, as perhaps the contemporary reader did, to Scott's descriptions of the Highland wilderness, for instance in Rob Roy. But if this in Scott was to either or both of the others a precedent, each of them surpassed their master, not just in the closeness and vividness of their evocations, but in binding them up far more closely with the action and with what the action symbolizes, a confrontation of two incompatible norms of sentiment and conduct.

Yet The Pioneers is of all the Leatherstocking books the one which in structure most resembles the structures of Scott. For here the two norms are represented, as they are by Scott, as the past and the future confronting each other at a turning point in history. What Cooper was to discover—and this was to determine the whole exfoliation of the Leatherstocking saga— was that in American history this turning-point was to be repeated again and again as the frontier moved west. For at the frontier, wherever and whenever found, the past is symbolized by the settlement behind, the future by the wilderness in front. When in the later Leatherstocking books Cooper chose to operate always beyond the settled frontier, the structure of Scott could serve him no longer.

The Pioneers falls short of Waverley in that Cooper does not succeed in contriving a weak central character whose wavering from one allegiance to another shall mirror the confrontation of loyalties. His youthful hero, the disguised younger Effingham, is as shadowy and unsatisfactory as were to be all the later figures which Cooper cast for the Romantic lead; and it is he who shuttles to and fro between Leatherstocking and his Indian colleague on the one hand, and Judge Temple on the other, who stands for the settled law and order which Leatherstocking cannot abide. In fact it is the Judge himself who is poised uncertainly between the two extremes, between the lawlessness of the settlements themselves (represented by his kinsman Richard Jones) and the lawlessness of Leatherstocking's wilderness. But the existence of the unsatisfactory young Effingham serves to displace the Judge and obscure his centrality. However, The Pioneers continues to resemble Waverley, chiefly because Cooper's sympathies are in this book equally divided, in a way which was common for Scott and in tune with Scott's relaxed and permissive temperament, whereas it is uncharacteristic of the more rigid and irascible Cooper. Already in The Pioneers, though Cooper's sympathies are divided, it is plain that his principles must sway him decisively to one allegiance rather than the other, to the wilderness rather than the settlements; and so this first of the Leatherstocking novels contains all the others in embryo.

THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

D. H. Lawrence was indubitably right to insist that the five Leatherstocking novels should be read in the order in which they were composed: The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer. Read in this order, as Lawrence said, they represent a steady diminution of reality and a steady crescendo of beauty—or, as may be said, of myth. The series as a whole constitutes a uniquely clear case of how imagination gradually modifies actuality, steadily replacing the factual truth of record or chronicle by the imaginative truth of poem and myth.

To those who have blundered into reading the series in the reverse order, the process is even clearer if less enthralling. Certainly to come to The Last of the Mohicans after the apotheosis of The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, or even after the set-piece, as in a saint's life, of Leatherstocking's death at the end of The Prairie, is to realize with a shock how far Cooper was, at the beginning of his venture, from understanding where it was to lead him. The Last of the Mohicans is sub-titled, as it seems almost defiantly, ‘a narrative’—‘A Narrative of 1757’. And in his Preface, Cooper insists that his intention is, in the bleakest most uncompromising way, realistic:

The reader who takes up this volume in expectation of finding an imaginary and romantic picture of things which never had an existence, will probably lay it aside disappointed. The work is exactly what it professes to be in its title page—a narrative.

Though Cooper found it necessary to warn his first readers thus sternly, it must have come to them with much less of a shock than it does to us, to find Leatherstocking here naked of all the glamour that was to be cast about him so abundantly in the later books. In The Last of The Mohicans Leatherstocking is above all a bloodthirsty and superstitious figure, living by a code which the novelist disapproves of. Apart from anything else—and this is most striking in view of what was to come afterwards—Leatherstocking in this novel is a philistine. In Chapter VI, for instance, he reflects upon his private sanctuary behind a waterfall:

‘ Ay! there are the falls on the two sides of us, and the river above and below. If you had daylight it would be worth the trouble to step up on the height of this rock, and look at the perversity of the water. It falls by no rule at all; sometimes it leaps, sometimes it tumbles; there it skips; here it shoots; in one place ’tis white as snow, and in another ‘tis green as grass; hereabouts it pitches into deep hollows, that ramble and quake the ’arth; and thereaway it ripples and sings like a brook, fashioning whirlpools and gullies in the old stone, as if ’twas no harder than trodden clay. The whole design of the river seems disconcerted. First it runs smoothly, as if meaning to go down the descent as things were ordered; then it angles about and faces the shores; nor are there places wanting where it looks backward, as if unwilling to leave the wilderness, to mingle with the salt! Ay, lady, the fine cob-web-looking cloth you wear at your throat, is coarse, and like a fish net, to little spots I can show you, where the river fabricates all sorts of images, as if, having broke loose from order, it would try its hand at every thing. And yet what does it amount to? After the water has been suffered to have its will for a time, like a head-strong man, it is gathered together by the hand that made it, and a few rods below, you may see it all, flowing on steadily towards the sea, as was foreordained from the first foundation of the ‘arth!’

The touching distinction of this passage is in the way the speaker acknowledges a sort of beauty and impressiveness in the scene, which his opinions and convictions leave no room for. The beautiful sentence about how ‘the river fabricates all sorts of images’, in reticulations so fine that against it cambric seems ‘like a fish net’, represents a perception for which there is no room in a view of nature which depends upon ‘the argument from Design’, a view of nature which will acknowledge it to be beautiful only when it evinces symmetry and order which argue the wisdom of its Creator. Expressions like ‘perversity’, ‘no rule at all. . .’, ‘the whole design . . . seems disconcerted’, ‘loose from order’, ‘what does it amount to?’ show that the speaker is employing an outdated, a pre-Romantic set of standards. And Cooper underlines this:

While his auditors received a cheering assurance of the security of their place of concealment, from this untutored description..., they were much inclined to judge differently from Hawk-eye, of its wild beauties. But they were not in a situation to suffer their thoughts to dwell on the charms of natural objects; . . .

In none of the later novels would Cooper thus permit his genteel characters to condescend to the hunter; nor in those books does he allow that the hunter's responsiveness to natural beauty was in any way limited.

Leatherstocking's philistinism is brought out also by his exchanges with the New England choirmaster, David Gamut. Gamut, as his name implies, is a Jonsonian humour such as Scott's Peregrine Touchwood (in St. Ronan's Well). There is one of these in nearly every one of Cooper's novels, and very tedious they are. In The Pathfinder it is Mabel Dunham's uncle, the saltwater sailor who interminably rings the changes upon his contempt for the freshwater sailors of the Great Lakes; in The Prairie it is (most fatuous of them all) Dr. Battius, the naturalist, who incongruously accompanies the squatter Ishmael Bush. These figures appear to represent Cooper's gestures towards comic relief; but it is impossible to think that anyone ever found them humorous. Gamut is much the most support-able of them—partly because he has little to say and only hovers on the fringes of the story, but more because, as explicitly a representative of the Arts, he is made to reveal very clearly one of Leatherstocking's limitations. For Leatherstocking is made to treat him and his function with contempt and a sort of baffled derision. And while the hunter is at one point (Chapter XII) allowed to score over him, in rejecting his Calvinist idea of providence, more telling is the exchange in Chapter XXVI, where Leatherstocking leaves Gamut in peril:

‘If, however, they take your scalp, as I trust and believe they will not, depend on it, Uncas and I will not forget the deed, but revenge it, as becomes true warriors and trusty friends.’

‘Hold!’ said David, perceiving that with this assurance they were about to leave him; ‘I am an unworthy and humble follower of one, who taught not the damnable principle of revenge. Should I fall, therefore, seek no victim to my manes, but rather forgive my destroyers: and if you remember them at all, let it be in prayers for the enlightening of their minds, and for their external welfare!’

The scout hesitated, and appeared to muse deeply.

‘There is a principle in that,’ he said, ‘different from the law of the woods! and yet it is fair and noble to reflect upon.’ Then, heaving a heavy sigh, probably among the last he ever drew in pining for the condition he had so long abandoned, he added— ‘It is what I would wish to practise myself, as one without a cross of blood, though it is not easy to deal with an Indian, as you would with a fellow Christian. God bless you friend; I do believe your scent is not greatly wrong, when the matter is duly considered, and keeping eternity before the eyes, though...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott
• Title page
• Copyright
• Title page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• I ‘THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER’: PUSHKIN’S PROSE AND RUSSIAN REALISM
• II ‘THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN’
• III ‘WAVERLEY’
• IV ‘PAN TADEUSZ’
• V ‘ROB ROY’
• VI MARIA EDGEWORTH
• VII SCOTT AND THE NOVEL IN IRELAND
• VIII THE LEATHERSTOCKING NOVELS
• IX ‘THE PIONEERS’
• X COOPER AND SCOTT: ‘THE WATER WITCH’
• INDEX