Chapter XXV: )

Such lax doctrine, to Cooper, was the evil fruit of the spirit of lawlessness that was laying a blight upon America. A retributive bullet ends the fierce career of old Thousandacres, but his tigress wife, his rough sons and slattern daughters are driven from their home to plunge deeper into the wilderness, there to beget other generations of squatters whose vicious doctrines return to plague society. No romance blends with the tale of their lives; no sympathy softens the picture of the stern old Yankee. He has set himself against law and order and must yield or be destroyed. It is the old story of the struggle for land, a struggle that went on for generations between speculator and squatter, between rich and poor, with much wrong and much right on both sides; yet Cooper’s sympathies are cold to the squatter’s plea and he enlists God, morality, and the law, in defense of a title to forty thousand acres wheedled from the Indians for ninety-six pounds, York currency, spent in trinkets. Righteousness without a sense of humor is not easy to live with.

In much of his later work Cooper’s romantic impulses are held in check by a growing tendency towards realism. It was there from the first but as he grew more critical it spread over more of his pages. He tried to hold the scales of his judgment even, but his realism was marred and distorted by his vehement nature. A mind exuding prejudice is ill equipped to deal objectively with material, and Cooper was too inveterate a moralist to accept the principle of impersonal detachment. He prided himself on facing fact, but he loved to preach; and having pointed out the wrongfulness of vicious morals he must follow it with a vigorous homily on right conduct. And yet despite his gross shortcomings there is a deal of realism scattered through his volumes. He consciously tried to be a chronicler of manners, to depict America truly, to recreate fairly present and past, red man and white, Dutch and Yankee. His prejudices certainly got the better of him in dealing with New England, and his romance certainly got the better of him in describing the Mohicans. Yet though he might romanticize Uncas he did not romanticize Saucy Nick in _Wyandotté_, but drew an excellent picture of the struggle between the drunkard and the warrior in the heart of the Tuscarora that reveals much of the Indian nature--an analysis that holds the scales more evenly than they are held in _The Last of the Mohicans_ or in Bird’s _Nick of the Woods_. The book as a whole, indeed, is an excellent example of Cooper’s desire to substitute a critical for a romantic treatment of materials. In his discriminating analysis of the motives separating families in the Revolutionary war, there is no glorification of partisanship, no prejudiced espousal of a sacred cause, no division of sheep and goats. Cooper will have none of the cheap romance of patriotism, but probes skillfully into the motives and impulses that divided honest men amid the difficulties of civil war. More than that, he makes his villain one of the patriot party who uses the unsettlement of the times to cover his dirty tracks. It is a characteristic document that deserves to stand beside _Satanstoe_ as an example of his later work.

Politics was all about Cooper while he was writing these tales, and his sporadic incursions into criticism led him into the field of political theory. So doughty a warrior must break a lance when all America was engaged in a great political tourney. While Whig and Democrat were loudly professing allegiance to the new doctrine of majority rule, Cooper was making his way back to the principles of the eighteenth century and discovering the essence of good government in self-restraint. The mistake of the new school, he was convinced, lay in confusing the present will of the majority with the rule of the people; the mistake of the old school lay in confusing the will of the minority with the rule of the people. Above and beyond both majority and minority is the eternal principle of justice, and any government that flouts that principle is bad government, no matter how sanctioned. In a republic which foolishly believes that the voice of the people is the sole criterion of right, the problem of justice is peculiarly difficult, for what remedies are available in cases “in which the people themselves happen to go astray, _en masse_”? It is the problem that attends every ethical interpretation of sovereignty, and it awakened acute concern in Cooper’s mind. He could find no solution except in the good sense of the people, and with a vicious press and persuasive demagogues doing their best to befuddle the public mind, the outlook seemed dark. It was not the people he distrusted, but the self-seekers who set up to be leaders of the people. All the noise was made by demagogues who proclaimed their own mouthings to be authentic public opinion. How ineffectively Cooper struggled with the problem is written down in many a passage in his critical novels.

God help the nation [he said in _The Redskins_] where
self-government, in its literal sense, exists.... When a people
that has been properly educated by experience calmly selects its
agents, and coolly sets to work to adopt a set of principles to
form its fundamental law or constitution, the machine is on the
right track, and will work well enough so long as it is kept there;
but this running off and altering the fundamental principles every
time a political faction has need of recruits, is introducing
tyranny in its worst form--a tyranny that is just as dangerous to
real liberty as hypocrisy is to religion. (Chapter XIII.)

Some observers pretend that ... respect for law is gradually
decreasing among us [he argued in _The Chainbearer_] and that
in its place is sensibly growing up a disposition to substitute
the opinions, wishes, and interests of local majorities, making
the country subject to men instead of principles. The last are
eternal and immutable; and coming of God, men, however unanimous
in sentiment, have no more right to attempt to change them, than
to blaspheme His holy name. All that the most exalted and largest
political liberty can ever beneficially effect is to apply these
principles to the good of the human race, in the management of
their daily affairs; but when they attempt to substitute for these
pure and just rules of right, laws conceived in selfishness and
executed by the power of numbers, they merely exhibit tyranny
in its popular form, instead of in its old aspect of kingly and
aristocratic abuses. It is a fatal mistake to fancy that freedom
is gained by the mere achievement of a right to govern, unless the
manner in which that right is to be both understood and practised
is closely incorporated with all popular notions of what has been
obtained. The right to govern means no more than the right of the
people to avail themselves of the power thus acquired to apply the
great principles of justice to their own benefit, and from the
possession of which they had hitherto been excluded. It confers
no power to do that which is inherently wrong, under any pretense
whatever. (Chapter XXVIII.)

Like Hugh Henry Brackenridge before him, Cooper was a democrat who criticized the ways of a reputed democracy because of his love for an ideal republic. Too few of his kind have arisen in America; too few who dare to speak their minds unterrified by public opinion. An individualist of the old English breed, he could not be intimidated or coerced in the matter of his rights by any clamor, whether of newspapers or mobs. He had his shortcomings in plenty, both as romancer and critic. Testy, opinionated, tactless, forever lugging in disagreeable truths by the ears, he said many wise things so blunderingly as to make truth doubly offensive, and he hewed at his art so awkwardly as well-nigh to destroy the beauty of his romance. Yet the more intimately one comes to know him, the more one comes to respect his honest, manly nature that loved justice and decency more than popularity. His daily life became a long warfare with his fellows, who exacted of him a great price for his idealism; but later generations should love him none the less for the battles he fought. That America has been so tardy in coming to know him as a man and a democrat, as well as a romancer, is a reflection upon its critical acumen.

Footnotes

[425] See the Preface to _The Redskins_.