Beyond the Land Itself: Views of Nature in Canada and the United States [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674181656, 9780674181649

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Essays in History and Literature

Beyond the Land Itself Views of Nature in Canada and the United States

Marcia Β. Kline

Beyond the Land Itself Views of Nature in Canada and the United States

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 1970

© Copyright 1970 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Published with assistance from the Edward Chandler Cumming Fund Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-114407 SBN 674-06915-3 Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Beyond the Land Itself Views of Nature in Canada and the United States 1 Bibliography 65 Notes 69

Beyond the Land Itself

Views of Nature in Canada and the United States

Beyond the Land Itself Views of Nature in Canada and the United States

In 1852, the New York publishing firm of G. P. Putnam and Sons issued a book called The Home Book of the Picturesque. It was a deluxe volume—large size with gilt-edge pages—that contained a collection of essays and engravings on American scenery by such prominent writers and artists as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Thomas Cole, and Asher Durand. In the opening chapter, one of the essayists set down what he believed to be the significance of the work : To our mind this book on American Scenery has an import of the highest order. The diversified landscapes of our country exert no slight influence in creating our character as individuals, and in confirming our destiny as a nation. Oceans, mountains, rivers, cataracts, wild woods, fragrant prairies, and melodious winds are elements and exemplifications of that general harmony which subsists throughout the universe . . . We procede to show that, in the physical universe, what is most abundant, is most enobling; what is most exalted, is most influential on the best minds; and that, for these reasons, national intellect receives a prevailing tone from the peculiar scenery that most abounds.1 This statement, which at once exults in the sheer bulk and

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diversity of the American landscape and asserts that this landscape has some animistic power to influence the lives of individuals and the destinies of nations, would have struck a familiar chord in the minds of the readers of the mid-nineteenth century. For the age was one of faith in the land, and faith in the country that had the land. For a few decades after about 1820, the American landscape seemed to permeate all thought. Even the literary battle, fought to decide whether America needed a truly national literature, was reduced largely to a discussion of setting: Should an American literature glorify the American landscape? If it did would the result be provincial (and poor) or unique (and wonderful)? On one side, James Russell Lowell was firm : "There is no time or place in human nature, and Prometheus, Coriolanus, Tasso and Tell are ours if we can use them, as truly as Washington or Daniel Boone. Let an American author make a living character, even if it be antediluvian, and nationality will take care of itself . . ." 2 Coriolanus would do as well as Boone, and Lowell certainly would not have wanted some enthusiastic national celebrant to picture Coriolanus cavorting around the log cabins or teepees of the American forest. Human nature was human nature for him, and landscape had nothing to do with it. But on the other side, opposing the cautious Lowell, there were men like South Carolina's William Gilmore Simms. Simms did not want to be trapped into the provincialism of saying that a writer must write only about America; but he felt compelled to point out, nevertheless, that "the national themes seem to be among the most enduring," and that "the true and most valuable inspiration of the poet will be found either in

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the illustration of national history, or in the development of the national characteristics." 3 And the geographic background for such work was of the utmost importance. Noting in a review that America's "poets and artists, to feel her wants, her hopes, her triumphs, must be born of the soil and ardently devoted to its claims," Simms has high praise for the author who wrote: "The physical attributes of our country are all partial to the loftiest manifestations of mind. Nature here presents her loveliest, sublimest, aspects. For vastness of extent, grandeur of scenery, genial diversities of climate, and all that can minister to the comforts and tastes of man, this heritage of ours is without a parallel." 4 For suitable subject matter, Simms suggested the great potential in Benedict Arnold, Hernando De Soto, Daniel Boone, and Pocahontas—all of whom should be portrayed against the grandeur of American scenery. American landscape permeated economic and political thought, too, for this was the era of Manifest Destiny. The argument that justified America's land grabbing was a complex and not very rational one; but, basically, its proponents were sure that America needed more land and that she alone had a right to it. Land fever sent Americans into Texas and Mexico; it raised the cry of "54° 40° or fight" to gain land in the Oregon territory; it sent Webster to negotiate the Webster-Ashburton Treaty that settled the Maine-New Brunswick boundary question. And the hope to dominate the land, to span the gap from the Alleghenies to California and to carve out a mighty empire in the territory in between, set Senator Thomas Hart Benton to work, throughout the 1840's, lobbying for the Transcontinental Railroad.

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At times the vision of empire sanctioned by Manifest Destiny reached ludicrous extremes. One William Gilpin, for example, a friend of Fremont and Andrew Jackson and "expert advisor to Benton, Buchanan, Polk and other statesmen during those crowded months of Manifest Destiny," 6 was led to declare that the configuration of American mountains and rivers and the location of the great concave Mississippi Valley were such that the whole continent had to stay together. Union, under one flag, was the only possible course; once that had happened the potential was unlimited: "The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent—to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean . . . to establish a new order in human affairs." β It is not Gilpin's idea of the "untransacted destiny" of the United States that is particularly startling; rather it is his ready assumption that what dictates union and "establishes a new order" is geographic configuration. For most readers of today territorial acquisitions are not justified by geography, and it is quite possible that an unbiased source might find the Rocky Mountains a divisive factor in America's supposed geographic unity. But that is just the point: Gilpin saw a unity dictated by nature, and he, along with the rest of the Manifest Destiny advocates, is betraying much the same conviction that Simms does or that can be seen in the opening of The Home Book of the Picturesque: Nature, in all her abundance, her beauty, and her richness of natural resource, has blessed America greatly—and uniquely. The objection could be made that there has already been injected into this essay a running confusion between two ideas of America's wild land. First there is 'land," the geo-

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graphic reality, and then there is "Nature," that state in which the universale of Truth, Beauty, and Harmony reign. Benton, Gilpin, and other spokesmen of Manifest Destiny are concerned, for instance, with the geographic land that holds potential resource and power. Simms, on the other hand, and to a greater extent the authors of The Home Book of the Picturesque, are talking almost completely about Nature. Almost, but not quite, and the qualifier is important: in the American thought of this time, the two strands, of land and Nature, can never quite be separated, and confusion is inevitable. Thus the essayists, discussing "that general harmony which subsists throughout the Universe," insist that such harmony is manifested in the wild land to the west; Gilpin, discussing the economic empire that will be carved out of the Great Plains, believes he will find there a Nature that will establish a "new order in human affairs." In effect, both sets of people are succumbing to the temptation— perhaps a temptation inherent in the settling of a new continent—to equate the nature of the western lands with the Nature of the moralizing human mind. But bearing in mind that there is this overlap between the land as a reality and the land as a metaphor for Nature, it is possible to concentrate on one of the two strands. My concern, in establishing a climate of response to the natural world in America, will be with those who saw the wilderness land as an example of Nature within their country. Investigation of this lauding of the wild American landscape can begin with Daniel Drake, the Cincinnati doctor who was born in New Jersey and raised on the Kentucky frontier. Drake, described by Harriet Martineau as a "complete and favorable

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specimen of a Westerner," was a tireless promoter of the advantages of life in the West. In 1834, he published his Discourse on the History, Character and Prospects of the West, which set forth the educational possibilities of settlement Ufe. Although conventional eastern schools and educations have their purpose, he wrote, they have no monopoly, "for the pathless wilderness may be made a Schoolbook, and nature is the institution." No one can do so much as walk in the country "for mere pastime," without "acquiring knowledge at every step." 7 Institutionalized learning has its merits, but it can never produce the kind of mind that is bred by curiosity and close attention to the natural world: I feel strong in the conviction, that with all its deficiencies in literature and science, the mind of the WEST is at least equal to that of the East and of Europe, in vigor of thought, variety of expedient, comprehensiveness of scope, and general efficiency of execution; while in perspicacity of observation, independence of thought, and energy of expression, it stands on ground unobtainable by the more literary and disciplined population of older nations. 8 About ten years after Drake had written about the prospects and merits of the unsettled West, John Banvard, also born on the East Coast but raised on the Kentucky frontier, was preparing another version of a suitable testament to the American landscape. Banvard was a painter, and the title of the pamphlet describing his finished work runs like this: A Description of Banvard's Panorama of the Mississippi

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River, painted on 3 miles of canvas: Exhibiting a view of the country 1200 miles in length extending from the mouth of the Missouri River to the City of New Orleans; being by far the largest Picture ever executed by Man. The biographical section of the description of this splendid achievement noted that Banvard was "spurred on by the assertions of foreign writers that America had no artists commensurate with the grandeur and extent of her scenery . . . He was actuated by a patriotic and honorable ambition that America should produce the largest painting in the world." 9 And not only was it the largest painting in the world, but it was—Oh, wonderful thing—absolutely true to life: more than one hundred twenty Mississippi River captains and pilots signed a statement certifying the accuracy of Banvard's presentation of the mighty American Mississippi, and the Mayor of Louisville certified the honesty, good character, and veracity of all the men. It was not only the American geography that was wonderful when viewed through this climate of mid-century landscape and Nature worship. The native occupants of the wilderness also partook of its natural virtues, as evidenced by the letters and notes of George Catlin, the famous painter of Indians. Catlin spent months in the far west, traveling from Mexico to Lake Winnipeg, painting the Indians, the wild animals, and the landscape. He was no Sunday afternoon celebrant of Nature, yet he writes: I have for a long time been of opinion, that the wilderness of our country afforded models equal to those from which the Grecian sculptors transferred to the marble such

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inimitable grace and beauty; and I am now more confirmed in this opinion, since I have immersed myself in the midst of thousands and tens of thousands of these knights of the forest . . . No man's imagination, with all the aids of description that can be given to it, can ever picture the beauty and wildness of scenes that may be daily witnessed in this romantic country.10 Catlin was probably not counting on the imagination of Henry T. Tuckerman, however. Here is Tuckerman, who had never been to Kentucky but who did have an uncommon ability at picturing, on Daniel Boone. It is the dawn of a spring day in the wilderness . . . as the sun rises higher, [Boone] penetrates deeper into the vast and beautiful forest; each form of vegetable life, from the enormous funghi to the delicate vine wreath, the varied structure of the trees, the cries and motions of the wild animals and birds, excite in his mind a delightful sense of infinite power and beauty; he feels, as he walks, in every nerve and vein the "glorious privilege of being independent"; reveries that bathe his soul in a tranquil yet lofty pleasure, succeed each other; and the sight of some lovely vista induces him to lie down upon a heap of dead leaves and lose himself in contemplation.11 The nature that could transform Daniel Boone from a crafty and uncouth backwoodsman to one who contemplated "upon a heap of leaves" is indeed powerful.

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The mid-nineteenth century of Simms, Drake, Banvard, Catlin, and Tuckerman was the high-water mark of the faith in the moral power of the land. Each of these men affirms an aspect of that faith, Simms in the belief that the finest and most instructive literature will be set in the American landscape; Drake in the belief that attention to natural phenomena will produce an agile and truly educated mind; Banvard in his simple awe at the immensity of the landscape; Catlin in his veneration for the pure, classically beautiful savage; and Tuckerman, with his wonderfully overdone effort to make a national frontier hero into a contemplative Nature worshipper. If there was a discernible high-water mark, however—when nature, Nature, and America seemed one and the same—it would be a mistake to assume that the attitude sprang, fully grown, onto the America of the 1830's. Antecedents can be found running all through the American experience, starting two hundred years earlier with John Winthrop, who, in "A Model of Christian Charity," wrote of his hope for the settlement in the wilderness. "[God] shall make us a praise and a glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: 'The Lord make it like that of New England.' For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us." 12 How much Winthrop's followers came to glory in the natural as well as the spiritual state of their plantation is eloquently suggested in Samuel SewalTs Phaenomena: "As long as Plum Island shall faithfully keep the commanded p o s t . . . as long as any salmon or sturgeon shall swim in the streams of the Merrimac . . . as long as nature shall not grow old and dote . . . so long shall Christians be born there." 13 As long as the

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natural world shall last in New England, so shall the spiritual. It would also be a mistake to assume that the tradition was quite as positive and confident as has been implied by consideration of the strain of thought running from Winthrop and Sewall through Drake, Tuckerman, and Banvard. At the same time as the confidence, there is also a discernible element of distrust, usually functioning as an undercurrent and often occurring within a work or passage that otherwise expresses the usual praises of the American landscape. A fear is present that, somehow, wild nature may represent something that is certainly irrational and possibly dark and bloody. Even in the exuberant writing of the Hudson River romantics there are traces of this ambiguity. Here, for example, is a passage from a letter of 1825 that describes a magnificent cavern high up in the Catskills : The first impression is overwhelming—you hesitate for a moment and are awe-struck : such a wide and towering vault of solid rock, as if built by art!—what supports it? may it not possibly fall, and crush and bury you forever under its massy ceiling, nearly one hundred feet thick? But your feelings become too sublime to be restrained by your timidity, and you rush forward with a dauntless and ambitious step, as if bent on an achievement that is to immortalize your name, especially if you should have the good luck to be crushed, and buried like king Cheops, under a pyramid of rocks. 14 It is this lack of restraint in the face of sublimity—this sug-

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gestion of the overwhelming irrational force of the natural world that might make a man do something he would not do when "in his right mind"—that sets this passage off from myriads of similar exhibitions of romantic excess. This irrational and potentially dangerous aspect of the natural world, to be examined in greater depth later, is introduced here because, although it is not the dominant strain in the American attitude, it does manifest a certain ambiguity that existed throughout even the confident era of Tuckerman, Drake, and Banvard. And it should be realized that when, after its flowering in the 1840's, wonderful Nature suddenly lost its power in America, the concept of nature that took its place was not a totally new element, but a release of something that had earlier been checked.15 These ambiguities should not be overstressed, however, and at the time they were quite outshouted by the bombastics of Tuckerman and Banvard. Nor did the ambiguous or "dark" view of Nature triumph totally in the years to come. For, at the end of the century, the West that Drake had described in his Discourse had one final flowering, in Frederick Jackson Turner's famous frontier thesis. Although itself outside the time span covered by this essay, the thesis can certainly be seen as a testament to the strength of the thought that went before it. What is of interest here is not the ultimate validity of Turner's thesis, which has been questioned so much in recent years, but the very fact of its promulgation. For Turner was not simply saying that geography was the single variable of American history, and that American development could be explained by the continuous westward advance of the frontier. What he also insisted upon

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was that the unique synthesizing process, born of the contact between virgin land and civilizing man, that produced America would not end even when the land was used up. Instead the land would have a continuous influence in American life, long after the closing of the frontier : "As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its trace behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics." 16 When America was completely settled, then Turner could still expect to find the democratic institutions, the constitutional thought, and the characteristic American intellect that were the legacies of the country's forest heritage. Turner affirms the belief of his predecessors, that the land in America exerts a positive influence on both individual and national life. Beyond that, he leads into the question that lies behind the rest of this essay. The underlying assumption of the frontier thesis is that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development."17 Free land, continuous recession, and the advance of settlement produced, for Turner, the unique American character and institutions. If Turner was right, and the land was the signal factor in the making of the nation, is it not possible to ask whether the land had a similar effect across the Canadian border? And the inquiry can be pursued one step further: it was, after all, this same land, with its continuously receding frontier and advancing settlement, that suggested to the Drakes, Banvards, Catlins and Tuckermans, as well as to Cooper, Emerson and Thoreau, the metaphor for a Nature

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that provided the positive values in their work. What would happen to Nature across the border? Could there be a Canadian romance comparable to Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, in which the forest hero was an incarnation of Natural Law? Could an area of wild land, so vast that it made the infant civilization look insignificant by contrast, be joyfully accepted in Canada? Or does it take more than the Mississippi River to make a Banvard? Before setting out to answer these questions, what sort of land it was that confronted the Canadians should be considered briefly. If a country were largely rocks and ice, for instance, that might make some différence in attitude. In 1838, following a rebellion of some backwoods Canadian settlers, England sent a new governor to the provinces with instructions to prepare a report on the state of the Canadian territories and to recommend a suitable course of action. The result was the famous Lord Durham's Report, a massive survey of the political, social, and economic aspects of mid-nineteenth-century Canada. In the report there are also some very fine descriptions of the land, and at one point Lord Durham writes : It might be supposed by persons unacquainted with the frontier country, that the soil on the American side is of very superior natural fertility. I am positively assured that this is by no means the case; but that, on the whole, superior natural fertility belongs to the British territory. In Upper Canada [an area roughly equal to the present province of Ontario], the whole of the great peninsula

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between lakes Erie and Huron, comprising nearly half the available land of the Province, consists of gentlyundulating alluvial soil, and, with a smaller proportion of inferior land than probably any other tract of similar extent in that part of North America, is generally considered the best grain country on the continent.18 The peninsula between the lakes is by no means all of present-day Canada, and much of today's Canadian land lies "outside the limits set by soil and climate for successful farming." 1 9 Surrounding Hudson's Bay, there is the vast U-shaped Pre-Cambrian shield—two million square miles of granite and other rock, with enough topsoil to support some forest but very little farming. But in spite of these considerations, the Durham Report is a fairly accurate picture of the landscape that impinged on English-speaking Canadians of the mid-nineteenth century. The peninsula between the lakes, with its "gently-undulating alluvial soil," was the home of the majority of the English-speaking inhabitants of the time. Roughly the size of the state of New York, it provided more than ample space for a population estimated in 1851 at slightly less than one million.20 There was also space for the future : to the north lay the granite rock, but for hundreds of miles to the west there was prime land for the expansion of an agrarian civilization. As a historian of today writes : "The challenge of the land steadily led men across it, from east to west . . . West of the Great Lakes the great plains spread out, easy to travel, and deep-layered in black topsoil that promised the future golden treasury of Canadian wheat." 2 1 As early as 1813, the

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Scot Lord Selkirk had started the Red River Settlement, which lies about as far west as the Dakotas in this country. There were also new immigrants arriving all the time to carry on the expansion: in 1832 alone some fifty-two thousand Scottish, Irish, and English settlers came to start a new life in English Canada. 22 The climate of Upper Canada is fairly cold in the winter— the Great Lakes region averages about twenty degrees—but very little of its populated region lies north of the northern part of New York State, Vermont, New Hampshire, or Michigan. Toronto, for example, is on approximately the same latitude as Portland, Maine, and Windsor, across the river from Detroit, is much farther south than that. The English settlers who came to Upper Canada during the early part of the nineteenth century were, then, certainly not living in any barren, rocky wasteland. On the contrary, Nature had blessed the growing Canadian nation: There was good farming land, a temperate climate, and even a supply of natural wonders that included the Saint Lawrence River, the cliffs of Quebec, and Niagara Falls—any of which were a good match for the sublimities in America. Given these conditions, it can be said that the Canadian land, of itself, would not work against the formation of attitudes comparable to those already observed in American writing. It should be noted that discussion of the Canadian land has been limited thus far to the area settled by Englishspeaking Canadians; the same limitation will be maintained throughout this study. Not only would the addition of FrenchCanadian material add a new factor and make the essay unwieldy, but it would also destroy the basis for valid com-

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parison. The Americans and the English Canadians came from the same European background, went to lands with much the same climate and the same wilderness to the west, and developed similar patterns of settlement. French Canadians, with their different European background, different reasons for settling the New World, and very different patterns of settlement are excluded because the subject to be explored here is the differing attitudes toward the natural world that could arise from two initially similar situations. Exploration of Canadian and American attitudes toward the natural world might begin with a glance at that type of fiction which, by its very definition, involves itself with the problem of man in nature: the romance. In 1814 Walter Scott wrote Waverly, opening up a new fictional approach to the treatment of this problem. Scott described his book as "a chapter from the great book of Nature"; as Perry Miller has pointed out, that Nature was interpreted as both universal human nature and the nature of the physical landscape. The new approach, which represented a turning away from the stylized Gothic of Mrs. Radcliffe and the beginning of a treatment of wild nature, was immensely successful: Waverly was both acclaimed and imitated in England, Canada, and America. And if Scotland and medieval England presented a tableau of uncorrupted human nature amid unspoiled mountains and rills, then what splendid opportunities did America offer the Romancer 1 Ruined castles, old traditions, ancient wrongs—these were not necessary; the

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only materials required for the "higher order" of composition were natural men and maidens amid the virgin forest. These materials America could furnish in abundance. 23 Canada, too, could furnish them in abundance, and so she did, although she never had the surfeit of romances that America did in the post-Waverly deluge. What is important, however, is not so much the availability of materials in the New World, but the change that this availability brought about in interpretation of the romance. The Scottian romance, transferred to a New World context, was liable to significant change : Scott and his readers could never ultimately confuse the landscape of Waverly with the solid soil of England and Scotland, but for the New World romancer this was not the case. Where Scott had provided a "holiday excursion into the excitements of flight and pursuit" 24 and onto moors and heaths, the New World romancers were suddenly called upon to do something quite different: They were to romance about an excursion into the world of nature that was not a holiday excursion at all, but the national experience of carving a country out of a wilderness continent. Such a transformation placed a weight of significance upon the romance that Scott's had certainly never borne. The transformation had another, related effect also, which was to elevate to new heights the conflict between those age-old polar opposites Nature and civilization. If the romancer was not talking about excursions of the mind into the therapeutic world of Nature, but, instead, about the process of settling the wilderness, he was dealing with a

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Nature far more vulnerable to civilization than Scott's ever was. The romance in this context—that of an attempt to interpret the national experience and come to some terms with the battle between Nature and civilization for possession of the New World—is the concern of this section. By far the best known of the early nineteenth-century Canadian romancers was Major John Richardson, an army officer who served in the Great Lakes region during the War of 1812. That area was the setting for Richardson's first two books, Wacousta and The Canadian Brothers, published in 1833 and 1840 respectively. Wacousta is a tale of. the Pontiac conspiracy of 1763; the second book involves the exploits of two Canadian-born regimental officers during the border warfare with the United States in the War of 1812. In Wacousta, Richardson follows the romance pattern suggested above and presents the reader with a very clear distinction between the world of Nature and the world of civilization : inside the fort, behind the stockade, is the wellrun world of army officer life, with its dress parades, brandy and cigars after dinner, and efficient military regulations. Just outside those walls lie the forest, the Indians, and the unknown. Again on the inside, there is the stubborn nononsense officer in charge of the fort, Colonel De Haldimar; his counterparts "outside" are the Indian chief Pontiac and a frightening unknown warrior called Wacousta. As might be expected in this situation, much of the book's action grows out of the conflict generated when the colonel tries to meet the demands posed by natural life outside the fort with the civil codes that would be applicable inside. There is a great deal of other action in the book, too,

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however—Richardson has not quite overthrown the tradition of Mrs. Radcliife—and it would be impossible to summarize the love intrigues, captures and escapes, coups and countercoups, and coincidences of all sorts that carry the reader through Wacousta. The situation is basically this: the soldiers in the British fort at Detroit have become aware of Pontiac's plans to lead an Indian uprising. Faced with the threat, they are trying to prepare to repulse the attack, whenever it may come, and also to get word to the other British forts along the Great Lakes. Their efforts are vastly complicated by the intrigues mentioned and also by the possibility of treason among them. Out of all this, the striking thing that emerges in Wacousta is the overpowering sense of a little band of men, cooped up in a wooden fort, trying to protect themselves from the outside world. Here are the opening sentences: It was during the midnight watch, late in September, 1763, that the English garrison of Detroit was thrown into the utmost consternation by the sudden and mysterious introduction of a stranger within its walls. The circumstances at this moment was [sic] particularly remarkable; for the period was so fearful and pregnant with events of danger, the fort being assailed on every side by a powerful and vindictive foe, that a caution and vigilance of no common kind were unceasingly exercised by the prudent governor for the safety of those committed to his charge.25 That atmosphere—fearful and pregnant with danger—is

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sustained throughout the book. When day finally dawns in this first chapter, after thirty-five pages of mysterious thumps, bumps, and whoops in the night, the first thing it reveals is the body of a British soldier, unwittingly killed by one of his fellow officers in the effort to beat off the unknown foe. By far the greater part of the action is set at night, which augments the fear, and day or night there are Indians skulking around, each one 'like some dark spirit moving cautiously in its course of secret destruction, and watching the moment when he might pounce unnoticed upon his unprepared victim." 26 As the story progresses, more and more men are lost to the Indians. The soldiers do not dare to leave the fort except when armed and in large groups, and the colonel's stubborn resolve to deal with suspected treason by using military justice seems a less and less adequate way to deal with the problems at hand. Even the well-run military society is powerless against the darkness, the Indians, and the forest. As the soldiers' situation becomes more and more hopeless, the forest becomes the "interminable forest," and the "merciless foe" that chokes them off from all they ever knew and loved. When the eye turned woodward it fell heavily and without interest upon a dim and dusky point known to enter upon savage scenes and unexplored countries, whereas whenever it reposed upon the lake it was with an eagerness and energy that embraced the most vivid recollections of the past, and led the imagination buoyantly over every well-remembered scene that had previously been traversed, and which must be traversed again before the

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land of the European could be pressed once more. The forest, in a word, formed . . . the gloomy and impenetrable walls of a prison house, and the bright lake that lay before it the only portal through which happiness and liberty could again be secured.27 The forest is not a "gloomy prison" simply because it is the home of the Indians and the dark nights, and this fact is at the heart of Richardson's concept of the landscape and the life it fosters. Eventually, the Indians get inside the fort itself and wreak havoc on that pocket of civilization. Richardson, who revels in descriptions of blood, gore, and savage atrocities, writes of "reeking scalps," men who are "matted with blood" and "covered with gore spots," and blood that "oozed through the imperfectly closed planks" of the wall. "The confusion of the garrison had now reached its acme of horror . . . And yet the sun shone in yellow lustre, and all nature smiled and wore an air of calm, as if the accursed deed had had the sanction of heaven and the spirits of light loved to look upon the frightful atrocities then in perpetration." 28 The forest all around the men prevents their escape to civilization; the Indians, as children of the forest, chop them up with savage ferocity; and the world of Nature looks on and smiles. The only hope is to look out over the lake and "embrace the vivid recollections of the past." In many ways, Wacousta and the first of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, The Pioneers, invite comparison, although Cooper is unquestionably the greater artist. The Pioneers is also the first of a series of romances dealing with the histori-

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cal past; it, too, concerns life in a small settlement in the midst of the natural world and plays on the disparity between civil and natural law. Here the conflicting forces are the settlement of Templeton, as opposed to the wilderness of the Mohawk Valley; or the civil law of the settlement's originator and proprietor, Judge Marmaduke Temple, as opposed to the natural law of Natty Bumppo. Natty Bumppo pervades the novel as the wise old man of the forest, as the man in nature. He remembers the land as it was, and can tell Temple that . . your betterments and clearings have druv the knowing things out of the country; and instead of beaver-dams, which is the nater of the animal, and according to Providence, you turn back the waters over the low grounds with your mill-dams, as if 'twas in man to stay the drops from going where He wills them to go." 29 He is the expert hunter and shooter, who can bring down one particular pigeon out of a flock of a million on the wing. But he uses his skill to take what he needs and only that; the men of the settlement slaughter the pigeons with guns, rocks, and even a cannon, but Leatherstocking does not "relish to see these wasty ways that you are all practysing, as if the least thing wasn't made for use, and not to destroy." 30 Driven by his own internal law of morality—which is the law of Nature in Cooper's work—Natty comes into conflict with the judge when he shoots a deer out of the season defined by Templeton's new game laws. Then he complicates his situation by threatening to shoot the officer of the law who comes to fine him. Natty has his apologists in the book, who argue his ignorance of such matters as hunting

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laws and his lifelong habits of freedom, but the judge, as civil law, is adamant: he asks, "would any society be tolerable, . . . where the ministers of justice are to be opposed by armed men with rifles? Is it for this that I have tamed the wilderness?" 3 1 The Pioneers presents a situation in which each man has violated the law of the other: Temple is clearly implicated in trying to defy Providence with his milldams, and with the shameful "wasty" episodes of slaughtering pigeons and catching thousands of unneeded fish. But, just as clearly, Natty is a precursor of anarchy in Templeton if men who are less restrained and moral than he—who are, in other words, unguided by the laws of Nature—should kill deer out of season and gun down the restraining officers. At this point, Cooper appears to have balanced the conflict between Nature and civilization so neatly that it is insoluble : the Cooper who created Judge Temple and wrote the American Democrat could not permit the violation of a civil law; yet the Cooper who created Leatherstocking, and who had him exclaim from the top of the Catskills that what he saw was "Creation" and "a second paradise," 32 could not deny the inherent goodness of his natural hero by sending him permanently off to jail. What happens, of course, is that Leatherstocking goes off to the Great Lakes, where he will not be bothered with civilization, and Marmaduke continues to rule his civil society of Templeton. Neither side "wins." In Richardson's treatment of the conflict between Nature and civilization, however, one side or the other has to win. Man cannot stay in the wilderness around the fort of Detroit without paying

24

a terrible price; imprisoned by the forest, he will most likely be slaughtered. Nature offers him no comforts, no peace of mind, no lessons. There is no natural man—especially no natural white man—who functions as the interpreter of the laws of Nature; there are only the Indians, who reflect, rather than interpret, a savage and chaotic nature. Conflict is the normal state: either the "merciless foe" subdues the men and forces them back to England, or else the men finally gather together enough people, equipment, and courage to tame a section of the wilderness and defeat it. The resolution that Richardson looks for will only occur when there are so many men—so much civilization—that wild nature is no longer a match for the forces of good. And the sooner the better is the implication. To consider Cooper and Richardson together again, in Cooper the situation is one of Nature and civilization in some sort of balance. Neither is seen as absolute evil, although the Nature of Natty Bumppo is "better" than what Judge Temple stands for. In Richardson's work, on the other hand, Nature overbalances, and destroys, civilization, although Richardson's preference for the losing force, even though it is civilization, is clear. The implications of this sharp divergence are fairly significant if one is expecting to see, within the romance, some comment on the process of settling an empty continent and making a nation out of that settlement. The natural world that Cooper portrays is moral and understandable. It is not pastoral—there are wild panthers, forest fires, falling trees, and cruel Indians—and it also has a trace of that ambiguity that admits of the irrational and

25

the dangerous. The staid Temple, for example, feels hotblooded and savage at the pigeon shoot, but this is not his normal state. But Cooper's Nature never smiles on atrocity, and it does provide laws by which human conduct can be evaluated, such as the "law" that you do not despoil nature by taking more than you need. And Cooper's treatment of Natty Bumppo suggests that land for him is both the geographic land and the metaphor for Nature : Leatherstocking belongs both to the Mohawk Valley and to Nature, and America will be the better for having the West that is both 'land" and Nature. Not very logically, perhaps, but very persistently, Cooper asserts the value of Natty Bumppo and Natural Law. He will keep sending Leatherstocking west, but he will not destroy him. And Natty Bumppo, sent to the Great Lakes, is still the superior man, still above the laws of Marmaduke Temple. It is not as the exile, but as the perfect natural American that he heads west, "foremost in that band of Pioneers who are opening the way for the march of our nation across the continent," 33 and leaves behind him the settlement that is better for his presence there. Richardson, on the other hand, does not seek to illustrate that the natural environment is a moral one that leads men to right conduct. The land around Detroit has nothing to do with a metaphor for that harmonic and superior state, Nature, but is instead part of a world that is terrifying, hostile to human values and human endeavor, and inferior to civilization. The best nature is tamed, impotent nature— the tidy nature of hedgerows and gardens. This, of course, is not the nature that was to be found in nineteenth-century Canada. What this means is that where Cooper, through

26

Natty Bumppo, affirms the American experiment in the wilderness, Richardson denies the state of being that is Canada. Life in Canadian nature is not valuable or noble, but something which must be overcome so that the path to civilized Europe can be kept open. To conclude: the central condition of the Scottian romance is, essentially, the same condition that lies at the center of life in westward-marching nineteenth-century Canada and America: man is acting in an environment of wild nature. It is this parallelism that gave the romance its significance when transplanted to the New World. If, then, Richardson denied in Wacousta the value of the Canadian experience, it might be expected that he would be unable to follow up with another romance, and that is exactly what happened. Richardson could not talk about "the great book of Nature," if it was to be Canadian Nature, without introducing savages and monsters and probing a kind of evil that is altogether out of place in an orthodox romance. Evil was supposed to be wicked counts—or possibly those who chopped down trees, if the romance was the New World version—but it was not to be a deep-seated, all-permeating, terror. The Scottian romance, the saga of man in his natural environment, could not be recast to explain Canadian development. The territory in which Pontiac and Wacousta dwelt was not a Nature where harmony reigned, but a plot of ground so isolated, embattled, and antithetical to civilized human life that it colored Richardson's whole view of the divine powers that could be in charge of such a ground. Significantly, he soon backed out of the task of creating a

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Canadian romance. The Canadian Brothers, the sequel to Wacousta, is far more concerned with officers and ladies and strange, extraordinary coincidences than anything else; the land is never allowed to get out of hand as it does in the first book. And after The Canadian Brothers, Richardson drifted downhill steadily to sex, violence, and other sensationalism—to books little read and totally irrelevant to the Canadian environment. Cooper, on the other hand, went on to the rest of the Leatherstocking Tales, on to The Deerslayer. Firm in his conviction of a benign and moral Nature, convinced of the value of Nature in the American experience even though civilization was cutting down the trees and eating up nature, he translated the Scottian romance into a national epic. In doing so, he moved from the relative realism of The Pioneers to the romantic Deerslayer—with Leatherstocking moving backward to the prime of his youth, as if the influence of Nature in America could somehow keep her young and unique, with all the future of innocence and dawn in front of her. In their romances, Richardson and Cooper indicate radically different views of the natural world. And in a larger context, what has been observed in the previous section would seem to suggest that the American attitudes toward landscape illustrated in the first portion of this essay were not duplicated in Canada. But thus far the basis for establishing such a disparity rests on a fairly narrow sampling of material; the focus has been limited largely to writers who discuss a Nature that is not their natural environment. They

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either imagine their Nature, as did Cooper to a large extent, or else they are like Catlin, who made trips across the country to find Nature and then returned to the civilized sphere. The one exception to this general pattern is Daniel Drake, that "complete specimen of a Westerner" who wrote about the natural environment of his native Cincinnati, and who wrote the following about Mr. Cooper's romances : . . . a respectable number of writers have already seized upon different features of our scenery, the incidents of our early history, and aspects of society among the pioneers, and worked them up into tales and odes, many of which possess great freshness, and have been read with interest both in and out of the [Mississippi] VALLEY . . . [But] the failure of Mr. Cooper, in his Prairie . . . is conclusive evidence, that in delineating the West, no power of genius, can supply the want of opportunities for personal observation on our natural and social aspects. No western man can read those works with interest; because of their want of conformity to the circumstances and character of the country, in which the scenes are laid.34 If the Westerner Drake feels that Cooper's account is questionable, perhaps descriptions of settlement life that are more the work of "personal observation" than they are of "genius" should be explored. If writers live on the land they

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are describing, what happens to the disparity between the Canadian and the American attitude? Almost surely these writers, whether Canadian or American, will not talk about the spiritual kind of Nature that motivates Natty Bumppo; what can be expected from them is some comment as to whether their daily life in the forest environment is a valuable experience or one without either reward or justification. And it should be possible to extrapolate that comment to see what kind of Nature their forest life suggests to them. The best contemporary descriptions of life in the new settlements of both countries during this period are the products of women writers who followed their husbands out to a new life in the West. In Canada, several of these books were published following the large wave of immigration in the thirties; two of the best known are Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush and her sister Catharine Parr Traill's The Backwoods of Canada. The American version of the genre is less common, and less well known today, but Caroline Kirkland's description of life in the Michigan settlements entitled A New Home—Who'll Follow is a good example. Reading the three books together gives the impression that life in a new and rough-hewn community was very much the same on either side of the border. All suggest that it was the woman's lot that was particularly difficult: the man was occupied clearing land and growing crops, but when he came home at night, weary and exultant, he found, as Mrs. Kirkland put it, "the home bird weary and disconsolate." Living in a one-room cabin in the backwoods was simply something the "home bird" had not been prepared for.

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The first view of the intended homesight was particularly depressing : The clearing round the house was very small, and only just reclaimed from the wilderness, and the greater part of it was covered with piles of brushwood, to be burnt the first dry days of spring. The charred and blackened stumps on the few acres that had been cleared during the preceding year were everything but picturesque; and I concluded, as I turned, disgusted . . . that there was very little beauty to be found in the backwoods.35 Eventually the clearing housewife learned the hard lesson that reality would be very different from all of her romantic misconceptions of life among the noble savages. As one of them wrote, "the circumstance of living all summer, in the same apartment with a cooking fire, I had never happened to see alluded to in any of the elegant sketches of western life which had fallen under my notice. It was not until I actually became the inmate of a log dwelling in the wilds, that I fully realized what living all in one room' meant." 3 6 But if the initial shock passed after one had lived in a log cabin for a number of months, other drawbacks did not. The outstanding disagreeable feature of life in the settlements, as described by all three women, was the neighbors: most new immigrants and settlers lived a hand-to-mouth existence, verging on abject squalor, and they tended to solve their most pressing needs by "borrowing" from the better-off. "Woe to him that brings with him any thing like an appearance

31

of abundance," wrote Mrs. Kirkland after giving up her sifter, sugar, and tea to a six-year-old who informed her that, as she seemed to have plenty, she could easily spare the needed items.37 And Mrs. Moodie, after surrendering her only breadpan, several chickens, and a decanter of whiskey to the shiftless borrowers, wrote of the neighbors : They no sooner set foot upon the Canadian shores than they become possessed with this ultra-republican spirit. All respect for their employers, all subordination is at an end; the very air of Canada severs the tie of mutual obligation which bound you together. They fancy themselves not only equal to you in rank, but that ignorance and vulgarity give them superior claims to notice.38 All three women ultimately abandoned the backwoods life, leaving in their books a variety of comments and explanations for their decisions. The reaction of the two Canadian sisters is suggested by Mrs. Moodie's comment, just quoted: Canada was no place for people of rank. 39 Gentlemen, they found, were expected to work hard in the fields, clearing and planting, and women were forced to wash, cook, and sew under the most primitive conditions. Not only was this galling in itself, but it was, beyond that, to no avail : nature was not bountiful enough to reward the hard work. Mrs. Moodie's parting comment on the "bush" country is worth quoting at length : Reader I it is not my intention to trouble you with the sequel of our history. I have given you a faithful picture

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of a life in the backwoods of Canada, and I leave you to draw from it your own conclusions. To the poor, industrious working man it presents many advantages; to the poor gentleman, nonel The former works hard, puts up with coarse, scanty fare, and submits, with a good grace, to hardships that would kill a domesticated animal at home. Thus he becomes independent, in as much as the land that he has cleared finds him in the common necessaries of life; but it seldom, if ever, in remote situations, accomplishes more than this. The gentleman can neither work so hard, Uve so coarsely, nor endure so many privations as his poorer but more fortunate neighbor. Unaccustomed to manual labour, his services in the field are not of a nature to secure for him a profitable return. The task is new to him, he knows not how to perform it well; and, conscious of his deficiency, he expends his little means in hiring labour, which his bush farm can never repay. Difficulties increase, debts grow upon him, he struggles in vain to extricate himself, and finally sees his family sink into hopeless ruin.40 This is a picture of hard work, privation, and no reward. For the poor man, willing to submit to a workload that an Englishman would not make his animal perform, backwoods life may provide the grim necessities; for the gentleman, it provides less than that. There is nothing valuable or noble about life in the forest environment. Returning to the American account, the Kirklands' reaction to settlement life sounds, initially, every bit as negative

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as the Canadians'. The couple found, Mrs. Kirkland's husband William wrote, that: Of the half-dozen families within the circle of our observation who came to the wilds with a larger share of intelligence and refinement than is possessed by the settlers generally, there is not one that is not degenerating in manners and mental habits; not one (we say it with sorrow) where the children are not inferior to the parents, or in fact, where they are materially above the uninstructed mass around them. The very atmosphere of the society is averse to mental culture. 41 If the Canadian immigrant sees his family sink to hopeless ruin, and the Kirklands' neighbors degenerate in manners and mental habits, it would seem perhaps that the romancers—and Cooper especially—are not to be trusted: Nature may be fine as a topic for romances, but the life of the man in nature, when that man is a settler, is neither elevating nor rewarding. But before assuming that the differences between the American woods of Natty Bumppo and the Canadian woods of the warrior Wacousta are rendered entirely insignificant by the realities of settlement life, alike in both countries, it might be wise to take a further look at the women's descriptions. Mrs. Moodie rejects backwoods life because it is neither pleasant nor rewarding to live in the barely tamed wilderness and because such a situation destroys the order and social stability that she favors. Mrs. Kirkland's reaction is quite

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different. Her husband may write of degeneracy in the forest, but that degenerative dictum is very much mitigated by the content of A New Home. Life is hard in the Montacute settlement, yet Mrs. Kirkland notes the joy of the settler who tells of working from sunrise to sunset burning brush and then adds, "that's all over now; and we've got four times as much land as we ever should have owned in New York state." 42 The borrowing neighbors and the settlers content to live in pigsty squalor are troublesome and discouraging, but there is hope : there are schools and churches, and there is even the Montacute Female Beneficent Society. Mrs. Kirkland may not herself elect to stay, but she does not, ultimately, deny what is going on in Montacute. In summing up her forest life, she writes: "After allowing due weight to the many disadvantages and trials of a new-country life, it would scarce be fair to pass without notice the compensating power of a feeling, inherent as I believe, in our universal nature, which rejoices in that freedom from the restraints of pride and ceremony which is found only in a new country." Slightly later she specifically refers to this feeling that is inherent in universal human nature as the "compensating power of the wilderness." 43 Such a statement may be a cautious acceptance of settlement life, but it is also a highly significant one; for the quality that Mrs. Kirkland praises as the compensating power of the wilderness is exactly the same quality of forest life that Mrs. Moodie terms ultrarepublicanism—and categorically rejects. The two women both see the trials and disadvantages of settlement life, and neither minimizes them in her book. But in those conditions, Mrs. Moodie sees only the discontinuity of accepted civilized pat-

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terns of life. Mrs. Kirkland, however, seeing beyond the discontinuity, strikes a note that is reminiscent of the essays in The Home Book of the Picturesque: obviously her point, relative to the essayists, is toned down considerably, but what they both have in common is the idea that the wilderness that was so abundant in America has some special ability to gratify needs, inherent in human nature, that civilization does not have. Thus, what for Mrs. Moodie was proper subordination and due deference to rank becomes, to the American woman, the unnatural restraint imposed by pride and ceremony.44 It could certainly be said that none of these books—whatever their final verdict on frontier life—are primarily descriptions of Nature. Yet each of them describes the environment of the author, and in doing so gives information that is vital to the understanding of the way she and other writers do describe the natural world. Thus, when Mrs. Traill's feelings about settlement life are understood (she has not yet been quoted, but she feels exactly as her sister Mrs. Moodie does), it is clear that she is making more than a "pictorial" complaint when she writes that Canada does not resemble the well-kempt land of her native Gloucestershire. In the backwoods, she writes, "you want . . . the charm with which civilization has so eminently adorned that fine country, with all its romantic villages, flourishing towns, cultivated farms, and extensive downs." 45 In both the Canadian books, there is an atmosphere that is a combination of failure on the farms, distaste for the levelling process and freedom of forest life, and lament for the want of associations and charm in the landscape. In effect, this is the total repudia-

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tion of whatever was non-English about Upper Canada, and it defines an attitude that is certainly implicit in Richardson's view of Canadian life in the wilderness and his concern with keeping the path to Europe open. The women and Richardson are writing on different planes, perhaps (and Richardson forces himself to discuss a wild nature that the women do not face), but they all make the same rejection of Canadian life as a unique experience in the natural world. And Mrs. Kirkland, too, although she paints a view of forest life that sounds very little like Cooper's, represents a view that is vital to Cooper. Like Drake before her—who also suggested that the author of The Prairie was not describing the West as the settler saw it—Mrs. Kirkland's disagreement with Cooper is over the method of presenting a common assumption. Neither of them sees Nature as a force that is antithetical to human endeavor; both of them ultimately accept forest life. Thus where Cooper treats the squatter Ishmael Bush with very little sympathy, he insists on a Natty Bumppo; analogously, where Mrs. Kirkland treats aspects of settlement life with very little sympathy, she insists on "the compensating power of the wilderness." Had the Leatherstocking Tales, then, rested on Mrs. Moodie's experience in the backwoods, it would have to be said that not only was Cooper romanticizing, but he was also changing an essentially negative verdict into a positive one. Resting on the assumptions of A New Home, however, Cooper is merely romanticizing—which is something that Mrs. Kirkland does herself in some of the more fictional chapters of her book. A point that takes us beyond direct consideration of

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Roughing It, The Backwoods of Canada, and A New Home but which is very much related to discussion of these books might be appended here. The final verdicts of the authors may be different, but none of these women describe a dayto-day forest life that is particularly rosy: there is too much ague and hard work, too many chapped hands and blackened tree-stumps, for any rosy view. Settlement life, whether Canadian or American, was not prime material for a literary treatment of life in the New World. Given this situation, writers on both sides of the border tended to avoid the drab realities of the belt of land that the settlement ladies had described. But the manner in which they avoided it on either side of the border was very different. Mrs. Moodie and Mrs. Traill, for instance, were prolific contributors to a Montreal periodical The Literary Garland. (The Garland was generally the same sort of publication as the American Knickerbocker Review, except that it carried a much higher proportion of English as opposed to domestic material than did the Knickerbocker.) In her Backwoods, Mrs. Traill had written : As to ghosts or spirits they appear totally banished from Canada. This is too matter-of-fact country for such supernaturals to visit. Here there are no historical associations, no legendary tales of those that came before us. Fancy would starve for lack of marvellous food to keep her alive in the backwoods. We have neither fay nor fairy, ghost nor bogle, satyr nor wood nymph; our very forests disdain to shelter dryad or hymadryad. 46 What the sisters wrote for the Garland was in keeping with

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those sentiments about lack of "associations," charms, and "hymadryads" in Canadian nature. They wrote novels of English middle-class manners that were certainly not set in Canada. They also wrote nature poems that may have had "Canada" in the title but that describe no nature to be found in mid-century Canada. The following selection from Mrs. Moodie will demonstrate the transformation that came to the backwoods when rendered poetically: Canadian Hunter's Song The northern lights are flashing, On the rapids' restless flow; But o'er the wild waves dashing, Swift darts the light canoe. The merry hunters come— "What cheer! what cheer!" "We've slain the deer!" "Hurrah! you're welcome home!" The blithesome horn is sounding, And the woodsman's loud halloo; And joyous steps are bounding, To meet the birch canoe . . . 47 Very little of the backwoods experience is distilled into those verses. Another way in which the Canadians avoided discussion of the frontier realities is illustrated by the Nova Scotian Joseph Howe in his long narrative poem "Acadia." Howe describes the "weary cottar" after a long day in the fields:

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He lifts his eye and sees his flag unfurl'd, The hope—the guide—the glory of a world, Surveys the fabric, splendid and sublime, Whose arch, like Heaven's, extends from clime to clime.48 Howe means here, quite literally, the flag of the British Empire, and he thus grounds Canadian settlement of the New World firmly within the context and experience of English life. Like Mrs. Moodie, he, too, avoids frontier realities by seeking a continuity with the Old World and reverting to a nature that is tamer, more pastoral, and more understandable than the Canadian one. Americans, on the other hand, had a very different solution for avoiding those realities. They praised Mrs. Kirkland for her truthfulness in depicting frontier life—Poe, for instance, saw a "fidelity and vigor that prove[d] her pictures to be taken from the very life" 49 —but they then forgot her truthful pictures as an ingredient of the response to Nature when the myth forged by Emerson, Thoreau, and Cooper began to take shape. It was real "Nature," not forest life corrupted by civilization, that these men were interested in. This attitude of contempt for the whole belt of land that Mrs. Kirkland describes is clearly indicated in a passage by the painter George Catlin: In traversing the immense regions of the classic West, the mind of the philanthropist is filled to the brim with feelings of admiration; but to reach this country, one is obliged to descend from the light and glow of civilized atmosphere, through the different grades of civilization, which gradually sink to the most deplorable condition

40

along the extreme frontier; thence through the most pitiable misery and wretchedness of savage degradation; where the genius of natural liberty and independence have been blasted and destroyed by the contaminating vices and dissipations introduced by the immoral part of civilized society. Through this dark and sunken vale of wretchedness one hurries, as through a pestilence, until he gradually rises again into the proud and chivalrous pale of savage society.50 When one hurries by the frontier as though it were a pestilence, Mrs. Kirkland is left out. Her "compensating power" is fettered in the settlements, but in the "classic West" it reigns free and untrammeled. 51 In conclusion, the characteristic Canadian and American attitudes can be represented very simply: Mrs. Moodie and Mrs. Kirkland describe a frontier region that most of the writers in their countries are unwilling to embody in literary expression. Americans were able to bypass this region by evoking a purer, more wild state, but Richardson's experience in Wacousta suggests that no such thing was possible in Canada. The wild state was too terrifying. So the answer in Canada was to evoke a nature in the tradition of Wordsworth—or perhaps Mrs. Hemans—that concerned itself with "merry hunters" and "blithesome horns" and that was firmly grounded on English soil. Schematically, this means that the Canadian skips the frontier and looks east—east to the landscapes of Gloucestershire and the all-protective Union Jack. But the American, while ignoring Mrs. Kirkland

41

or Ishmael Bush, never goes East; instead he confidently "lights out for the West" and the home of Natty Bumppo. At this point it might be helpful to abstract, from what has been presented, the possible ingredients of an American or Canadian attitude toward landscape and the life it fostered. First, the consideration of Richardson and Cooper suggests that the Canadian experience did not foster a romance set in the Canadian West, whereas Cooper's America allowed him—and a host of others with less talent but similar goals— to affirm the American march into the virgin land. Second, it has been noted that these attitudes of the romancers were to a certain extent repeated in the nonfiction accounts of settlement life. Canadian nature is, for Mrs. Moodie, both troubling and inferior to English patterns of civilization. But Mrs. Kirkland, after detailing all the troubles and hardships of life on the frontier, suprises her readers by suggesting that the special positive feature of settlement life, which compensates for the negative features, is the element of wilderness Nature that seeps into Montacute. Finally, there is in both countries an unwillingness to accept the frontier as a suitable condition for literary expression. In Canada the frontier is indicted because it gives too much scope to the forces of a wild environment, and writers respond by evoking a tamer and more pastoral environment. In the American experience, Mrs. Kirkland's admission of Nature in the settlements was not enough to redeem them for most writers; like Catlin, they asserted that the frontier was not acceptable because it introduced the vices of civiliza-

42

tion into hitherto uncorrupted wild Nature and then passed on to regions never "invaded by the axe . . . [or] outraged by the plough." 82 All of this, however, increases our knowledge of how Canadians and Americans reacted to the land—as a reality and as a metaphor for their concept of Nature—without giving any very clear idea of why they reacted as they did. Ultimately there must lie, beneath the question of whether a country does or does not foster a national romance, and beneath the question of whether writers flee "east," or "west," from the frontier, some very basic cleavage in the way these writers see and confront the natural world. The cleavage can best be dealt with by thinking back, for a moment, to the section on Richardson and Cooper. The outstanding element of Richardson's book—the one that destroyed both his garrison and his romance—was seen to be the hostile, terrifying forest. Cooper, on the other hand, seems hardly to have been aware of this terror of the forest. This disparity must be treated next. Canadian writing, looked at in this light, is marked by a profound fear of the natural world. If Mrs. Moodie is silent about this aspect, it is because she has decided to write about merry hunters and blithesome horns and not to confront the wilderness that could be terrifying. At least she was consistent in her attitude; there were others who were not. One John Howison, for example, wrote a book in 1825 called Sketches of Upper Canada, in which he raved about the "sublime flow of ideas that is generated by solitary wanderings in the pathless wilderness." 53 Yet, faced with the pathless wilderness on a snowy afternoon, he has this to

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say: "It seemed almost inconceivable, that human beings should be permanent inhabitants of this wilderness—that domestic ties and affections should often brighten the gloom of such a solitude—and that those leading passions, which agitate the hearts of all men, should be elicited and brought into action amidst the apalling loneliness and depressing monotony of the boundless forest." 54 It is that inhuman quality of the wilderness—that fear that the forest has nothing to do with human passions and values but might instead be hostile to them—that echoes Richardson and is of concern here. Eventually, the terror triumphed in Canadian writing about the natural world, at the expense of Mrs. Moodie's horns and hunters. But before that triumph was complete, many writers managed, like Howison, to hold both the pastoral and the terrifying strands in their minds at once. And it is in these transitional figures that we can see clearly the role of terror in the Canadian imagination and the dilemma of the Canadian author who would write about Nature. The poet Charles Sangster, who published his first volume of poetry, The Saint Lawrence and the Saguenay, in 1856, is just such a figure. Like Joseph Howe and Mrs. Moodie, Sangster had his eye on the conventions of English Nature poetry, and his work is full of stately elms, majestic stags, zephyrs, barks, and idyls that were never seen in nineteenthcentury Canada. 55 And his most ambitious work, the title poem of his first volume, is modeled after Byron's Childe Harold and is highly derivative thereof in form as well as diction. A look at Sangster's most derivative (and in that sense

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least Canadian) poetry illustrates what it was that worked against the takeover of terror in his verse. In "The Saint Lawrence and the Saguenay," the intention is to present the Saint Lawrence River valley as that part of the Canadian landscape which is domesticated and vulnerable to the control of man, and the Saguenay as that part which cannot be assimilated and brought down to the level of human comprehension, even by the imagination. Here is the Saint Lawrence : Red walls of granite rise on either hand, Rugged and smooth; a proud young eagle soars Above the stately evergreens, that stand Like watchful sentinels on these God-built towers; And near yon beds of many-colored flowers Browse two majestic deer, and at their side A spotted fawn all innocently cowers; In the rank brushwood it attempts to hide, While the strong-antlered stag steps forth with lordly stride, And slakes his thirst, undaunted, at the stream. Isles of o'erwhelming beauty! surely here The wild enthusiast might live, and dream His life away . . . 6 e The intention of the poem being what it is, we might not expect fear at the thought of the Saint Lawrence even if it were treated without mention of those beds of flowers and the "spotted fawn, all innocently cowering." Significantly, however, the atmosphere changes very little as we move on

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to the Saguenay, supposedly the symbol for all that is uncontrollable and incomprehensible in Nature. Sangster does note that the mountains become "sterile," where before they were "rugged and smooth;" that the granite turns from "walls" to more formless "masses"; and that . . . vegetation fails to reconcile The parchéd shrubbery and the stunted trees To the stern mercies of the flinty soil.57 But he goes on, unfortunately, to explain the desolation of the area by noting that there is no life except where whales bask "or the gay grampus, sportive as a hare / Leaps and rejoices." 58 Where there is a grampus gaily leaping there can be very little terror, and very little awe at the desolation and the mighty cliffs of the Saguenay. Occasionally, however, and especially when he is not imitating Byron, Sangster breaks out of the imitative and derivative pattern and describes a Nature that is indeed found in Canada and that is indeed frightening. The following few lines, for example, open a poem entitled "The Frost King's Revel." They are perhaps not great poetry, but they are a very different sort of achievement from most of The Saint Lawrence and the Saguenay. It was a night of terror—fiercely bleak! The winds like haggard demons leaped along The whitened fields. Far o'er the piney hills, Far up among the mountain fastnesses, Their horrid laughter and avenging tones,

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Shook the red granite to its base. The trees Sprang from the frozen ground in fear, and fell Death-doomed to earth. Indifferent were they, These unrelenting and malignant winds, What poor misguided wretch they scourged to death . . . And he was forced to hug the ground and die, A victim to the Frost King's Judas kiss—59 Sangster's ability here to free himself from the conventions of English country-estate vocabulary that flaw much of his other poetry is highly suggestive. What prevented him, in the first poem quoted, from expressing the terror he expressed in "The Frost King," was his consciousness of falling within the tradition of the English Nature poet's response to a pastoral situation. In other words, as long as discussion of gay grampuses, sportive as hares, and spotted fawns defined Sangster's response there was no cause for fear. But when he was not talking about the spotted fawn—when he could not, in effect, interpret Canadian Nature through English eyes— Sangster became the creature of an all-powerful, malignant, and capricious Nature that ruled as Frost King. Sangster's best poetry, then, concerns experiences that he cannot bend to the confines of English vocabulary, and it also shows the poet in terror at the face of Nature. What happened to Sangster happened, to a greater extent, after him : as the century wore on and the Canadian artist became more mature and less provincial, more confident and less burdened by the insecurities that led Sangster to talk about spotted fawns, this terror became more pronounced. And it became more pronounced in spite of the increased efficiency

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and scope of the machines used by modern man to mitigate and control his natural environment. Richardson's Wacousta had set the tenor of Canadian writing: the lonely garrison was soon replaced by the more populous town, but the indifferent spirits of Nature that Richardson had described continued to smile down on later atrocities. To follow out this strain of terror in the work of such later writers as Archibald Lampman, D. C. Scott, or even the twentieth-century poet E. J. Pratt lies outside the scope of this essay, but a final statement by the contemporary critic Northrop Frye is relevant here : I have long been impressed in Canadian poetry by a tone of deep terror in regard to nature . . . It is not a terror of the dangers or discomforts . . . but a terror of the soul at something that these things manifest. The human mind has nothing but human and moral values to cling to if it is to preserve its integrity or even its sanity, yet the vast unconsciousness of nature in front of it seems an unanswerable denial of those values.60 Richardson, Sangster, Howison and their fellow Canadians do exhibit a "terror of the soul" at the utter indifference of Nature to the values and efforts of puny men—to the utter indifference of the Frost King as he capriciously flings men to a cold death. In their work, this terror manifests itself in the fear—or even the conviction—that the geographic realities of New World mountains and forests are not symbols of that metaphor for moral goodness, Nature, but symbols instead of Chaos and Indifference. Where such

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a belief exists, savage atrocity and irrational action are the normal course of events in the natural world. The warrior Wacousta and the cold frosty night are perfectly adapted to such an environment. Frye makes it quite clear, in the passage just quoted, that it is not climate, nor the "discomforts" of climate, that cause terror. A writer is not terrorized by what he finds specifically in Ontario or upper New York state, but by something inhuman and hostile in the universe that could just as well be found in South Carolina or the South Sea Islands. If all, then, are equally vulnerable to "the vast unconsciousness of nature," might not the same response which characterizes Canadian writing also be expected in American? As suggested above, there are shades of this attitude: it is terror that would be produced, and a fear of the savage and the irrational, if those flickers of ambiguity mentioned earlier were allowed to develop fully, if, for instance, the letterwriter who described the Catskill cavern saw nothing there but his uncontrollable wish to run to a sublime death. The same truth would hold if Cooper saw nothing in the world of Natty Bumppo but Marmaduke Temple's sudden and uncontrollable desire to slaughter pigeons, when moments before he had preached against pigeon slaughter. These examples, however, are just traces, small instances that mean little by themselves; and Cooper and the letterwriter did see much more in Nature than those "dark" suggestions. But was there no one in America, in the confident era of the thirties and forties when Banvard was painting and Tuckerman writing about Boone the contemplative, who saw "the vast unconsciousness of nature" and was terrified

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by the sight? Or was there no one who saw what was far worse—not the unconsciousness, but the Satanic in the natural world that Natty Bumppo had said was innocent? There are certainly antecedents for this devastating point of view in the American tradition. From both seventeenthcentury Puritan thought and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, two periods in which men like Winthrop and Jefferson contributed so much to the positive view of the American landscape, come also traces of fear in the descriptions of the natural world. In an essay called "Puritanism, the Wilderness and the Frontier," for example, Alan Heimert shows what the combination of waning faith and the postulated "wilderness condition" did to arch-Puritan Cotton Mather's view of the New England land. Gradually, Heimert notes, Mather was brought face to face with "the dark conclusion that New England was perhaps a permanent and hideous wilderness," a place spiritually and physically abandoned by God, no longer controlled by Divine Law. 61 And in the writing of the environmentalist J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur there is also fear. Crèvecoeur is best known for his assertion of the power of the land to regenerate men, but his faith is very clearly in the farm and not the forest : lurking under his belief in the agrarian virtues lies a deep-seated terror of the dark and bloody forces of Nature as represented by the Indian, the hunter, and the meat-eater.62 The current which eventually triumphed in Canada was not, then, missing from the early American consciousness. It is also there in the era of Cooper, Drake, and Banvard. Certainly Thoreau, from the top of Mount Ktaadn (Katahdin), sees what it is that troubles S angster. When man is on

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the mountaintop, Thoreau writes, "vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the plains, [but] seems to say . . . Ί have never made this soil for thy feet. . . Shoulds't thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear.' " 6 3 Thoreau knows that sometimes man may freeze and capricious Nature will not care. Later, on the way down the mountain, he continues the theme: "This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor wasteland . . . Man was not to be associated with i t . . . There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man." 64 If Nature was a force not bound to be kind to man, as Thoreau said, that force took every liberty with the Francis Parkman who wrote The Oregon Trail. Parkman made his trip west in 1846, encountering a prairie that was both hostile and terrible. It formed man's character and made the mules disordered and perverse. It was monotonous, uncomfortable and muddy; it was filled with snakes and insects and had a harsh and cruel climate. Natty Bumppo had never seen that prairie, and the Greco-heroic Indians that Catlin described were nowhere to be found: Parkman's Indians, unless saved by agriculture, were superstitious, cunning, malignant, cowardly, and, culturally, in the Stone Age. As the trip across the wasteland continued, Parkman increasingly projected it as a struggle between man and the natural world. The sun glared down with a "pitiless penetrai-

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ing h e a t . . . If a curse had been pronounced upon the land, it could not have worn an aspect more forlorn. There were abrupt, broken hills, deep hollows, and wide plains; but all alike glared with an unsupportable whiteness under the burning sun. The country, as if parched by the heat, was cracked into innumerable fissures and ravines, that not a little impeded our progress." 6 5 Richardson's sun, smiling down on savage and bloody atrocity, is not very different from Parkman's. It is perhaps after having been conditioned by the above experience that Parkman noticed, in a pool of fish, the larger ones eating the smaller; he was led to pronounce: "Softhearted philanthropists . . . may sigh long for their peaceful millenium; for, from minnows to men, Ufe is incessant war." 6 6 One need only look into the work of John James Audubon to find support for Parkman's conviction that all life is war. In the journals, Audubon records the "terrific grandeur" of the fiercely destructive hurricane and the total helplessness of the "Lost One," who is made to wander for days through the bog, blinded by an impenetrable fog. In the famous engravings, the eagle devours the mouse, the hawk tears apart the rabbit, the snake invades the brown thrasher's nest. 67 The roots for the attitude of terror are present in Mather and Crèvecoeur, and certainly Thoreau, Parkman, and Audubon have faced the American landscape and seen what the Canadians saw: the void where there is supposed to be the morality of natural law, and the inhumanity where there is supposed to be a deity that cares for man. But what these men saw did not have the same effect that it did in Canada.

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The terror never took over—not in their own minds, and not in the characteristic expression of the first half of the nineteenth century. Thoreau came down from Mount Ktaadn and went to Waiden. There he found that the red ants ate the black ants and he was seized with a barely controllable desire to devour a woodchuck raw. Yet this was not the Primeval Chaos of the mountaintop : Man was permitted in Walden's nature, and Thoreau was 'linked up to Nature again" when he went fishing: "It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook." 68 The Mount Ktaadn experience wrought no permanent terror in Thoreau's mind. Nature was still good, and for Thoreau the wildness of Nature never got out of balance; it was always a healthy thing, that prevented over-refinement, for this man who could write that "in wildness is the preservation of the world." Parkman and Audubon perhaps come closer than Thoreau to confronting a hostile and unknowable Nature, yet neither of them are daunted : Audubon knows he might be crushed in the winds of the hurricane, but he exults in the display of force and seeks such display in his further wanderings; Parkman goes West to prove to himself that he can conquer the prairie, and he does it. This reaction is quite different from Richardson's. Richardson saw a terrifying Nature, and he therefore repudiated the natural environment altogether. In his book, he wrote of a wilderness that killed most of the soldiers and sent the survivors scurrying back to England; in his own life, he stopped writing about that natural envi-

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ronment and soon went back to England and civilization himself. Parkman and Audubon, on the other hand, never make that repudiation. Their Nature is vast and filled with superhuman forces, but it is still the environment that makes, and tests, the finest men. The natural world remains, for them, something to be mastered—and mastered in its wild state, by sheer force of will and strength, not mastered by civilization and thus made impotent. Thoreau, Parkman, and Audubon can be said to have had inner convictions that prevented an atmosphere of terror from becoming the dominant one in their work. But inner conviction alone cannot explain the very significant differences in the writing of the two countries. In America the "dark" side represents, at its most powerful, an ambiguity: for every Parkman, there are two Coopers, or two Daniel Drakes. And even a Parkman or a Thoreau would not civilize away that dark Nature they see. But across the border the tradition is monolithic : nowhere is there a joyful affirmation of wild nature, and for every Richardson there is only a Sangster. The difference is clarified by looking at an essay written by the Canadian John P. Matthews. On the relations between Canada's literature and her social values, Matthews suggests that what came to be important in the way the Canadian settlers met the New World environment was something he terms instrument. Instrument is, basically, whatever allows one to wipe out the effects of environment. It can be a physical instrument, such as the plow that brings food out of the recalcitrant earth and the house that keeps out the rain and cold; it can also be a cultural instrument,

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which is whatever emotional and intellectual heritage the Canadian has that allows him to reject the untamed New World and say, with Mrs. Traill, that "home" will forever be Britain.69 Matthews explains the development of this concept of instrument by going back to the contrast between the settlement of the American land and the Canadian, as those settlements were interpreted in the light of the Revolution of 1776. The American land, he writes, was endowed with a sometimes mystical, always animistic power to bless the new Unfällen Adam. His political organization proclaimed that he had certain natural rights—not earned but his by virtue of his very humanity—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were all his as a birthright in America. They were proclaimed as universale, but in America only, the universal natural law sprung as a gift from the occupation of the land itself.70 But the Canadians, on the other hand, had rejected that Revolution that was an affirmation of natural rights. They believed that rights were derived from "the toils of previous generations," and from civilization: "Any mystical element came, therefore, not from the land as in the United States, but from the nature of the responsibility which one held as a link in the chain between the past and the future . . . The land itself in Canada took no animistic role in this process.'"71 What counted in Canada, then, was the link in the chain, the institutional continuity between the Canadian settle-

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ments and Great Britain. Such links—the army garrison of Wacousta, the neat hedgerows and the traditional social stability that Mrs. Moodie wanted in Upper Canada—would be the instruments to overcome environment and make the Frost King harmless. The result of this difference suggested by Matthews is that the Canadians came to lump together America, the land, and natural rights in one large bundle, called environment— and then to define themselves as the opposite of all that. So environment could not be just the physical environment of the New World; it also had to include the American response to that New World, which was a repudiation of England and a joyful acceptance of Nature. Having rejected one of these facets—the American response so dramatically stated in 1776—the Canadians had to reject the other. And once having made those rejections, of course, it became impossible to see the significance of Canada as related in any way to the country's possession of thousands of square miles of wilderness land. As Richardson found, too, it became impossible to affirm the validity of the life of the natural man, unencumbered by institutions. In this light, the attitude of Richardson, Sangster, and their terrified posterity becomes more understandable. Forced to define themselves as polar opposites of Revolution, environment, and America, the Canadians were given very little emotional security with which to combat an awesome force like Niagara's torrent—little more than the diction of gracefully leaping waterfalls, the knowledge that they were part of the British Empire, and an attitude toward the nat-

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ural world that looked to the time when the wild and the natural could be overcome and replaced with the domesticated. And that was not enough: The environment, in nineteenth-century Canada is terrifyingly cold, empty and vast, where the obvious and immediate sense of Nature is the late Romantic one, increasingly affected by Darwinism, of nature red in tooth and claw. [The result is] . . . shipwreck, Indian massacres, human sacrifices . . . animals screaming in traps . . . in short, the "shutting out of the whole moral creation." Human suffering, in such an environment, is a by-product of a massive indifference which, whatever else it may be, is not morally explicable. What confronts the poet is a moral silence deeper than any physical silence.72 The American landscape, however, was not morally silent. On the contrary, it spoke out loud and clear to men like the landscape painter Thomas Cole, who wrote that "American scenes are not destitute of historical and legendary associations; the great struggle for freedom has sanctified many a spot, and many a mountain stream and rock has its legend." 73 This is the attitude—such an exuberant affirmation of the validity of the New World environment—that renders the Americans immune from the terror. It is also this attitude, in which every American rock seems to cry out its role in the great American experiment, that Perry Miller sums up in his essay "The Romantic Dilemma." He draws attention to the fact that America, by the 1840's, had "nationalized"

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Nature. She had made the very presence and abundance of the land within her boundaries an indication that there was to be found there a new order of human existence. Nature was to be the key factor in the new order. England, institutions, traditions, civilization—all these were to go so that Nature could be put up in their place. And for the generation of the 1830's and 1840's, America became what Miller calls Nature's Nation: "So then—because America, beyond all nations, is in perpetual touch with Nature, it need not fear the debauchery of the artificial, the urban, the civilized. Nature . . . by her unremitting influence . . . would guide aright the faltering steps of a young republic." 74 No wonder a Cole, or a Banvard or Cooper, could not agree with the Canadians and suggest that the sooner the country became civilized the sooner it would be fit for Ufe. This country of America, founded not only on the Revolution of 1776, but on the revolution in the minds of the first Puritans and in the minds of those who came to America and not to British Canada, was peopled by those who had rejected the old order of things and chosen a world that had little to offer but its nature and its freedom. But they believed that they had made a wonderful choice. As one of the "rebels" wrote : God has promised us a renowned existence, if we will but deserve it. He speaks this promise in the sublimity of Nature. It resounds all along the crags of the Alleghenies. It is uttered in the thunder of Niagara. It is heard in the roar of the two oceans, from the great Pacific to the rocky ramparts of the Bay of Fundy . . . The august TEMPLE

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in which we dwell was built for lofty purposes. Ohl that we may consecrate it to LIBERTY and CONCORD, and be found fit worshippers within its holy wall. 7 5 What if the mighty Niagara could crush men with its powers — t h a t only made the falls all the more sublime, and all the more wonderful for the nation that owned them. If Old World Nature (the kind Canadians wrote about when they were avoiding the terror to the west) did not promise salvation to America, then Nature could be redefined. And the American nation, so insistent on self-discovery and national self-justification that it gave birth to national covenants in the seventeenth century and to Walt Whitman in the nineteenth, made the redefinition in the predictable manner : the Nature they evolved was America's guide of right conduct, her symbol of uniqueness, her justification for being. Proof of this divinely ordained state of affairs lay in every rock, tree, mountain, and waterfall in America—and more especially in all of them taken at once. As the essayist in The Home Book of the Picturesque had said, all these things were "exemplifications of that general harmony which subsists throughout the universe," and they were all found abundantly in America. The evolution of this Nature clearly suggests reasons for the terror in the Canadian response to the natural world, and for the lack of that terror in America as more than an ambiguity that was quickly outshouted by those of the orthodox faith. These responses, having very little, if anything at all, to do with the climate of the land, are conditioned almost entirely by the way the two countries have defined them-

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selves in terms of the great conflict between Nature and civilization—a conflict which in the New World became synonymous with the one between America and England. Thus the Canadians, rejecting the New World environment, opted for an instrumentality that fostered their dependence on the parent civilization—thereby opening the floodgates to terror when they did have to meet the wild and natural. But the Americans, cutting themselves loose from civilization so that they could be "born free," as de Tocqueville said it, went happily into their New World, defending themselves from the terror with the construct of Nature's Nation. Sooner or later, of course, the Americans had to accept the paradox implicit in their choice. It was fine to draw cosmic differences between the Children of the British Empire and the Children of Nature, but the situation could not last forever. Joyfully singing of their natural environment, the Americans were tearing its heart out while they sang: even they, blessed with seemingly boundless acres, had eventually to see that Whig energy, Yankee practicality, and pioneer axes were revitalizing the national bank, building the mills at Lowell, chopping down the forests, and sending railroads past one end of Waiden Pond and all the way out to the Pacific. Nature's own nation was, indubitably, building a civilization that was destroying her Nature. And such an admission was highly unsettling : because the link had once been made between the American wilderness and the tutelary goddess Nature, the admission begged the question of whether America was anything at all but her sublime western land and her Nature. As Miller has pointed out,76 what happened when America

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did realize that "the sublime was ephemeral" was that there occurred a soul-rending shifting of gears as the country decided it was not Nature's Nation after all and transferred its faith to something else. Melville might be categorized as a product of that shift; certainly an aspect of the world he reflects is one in which Nature, denationalized, is no longer a priori good, moral, and understandable. And in Moby Dick and Pierre, without such a Nature, the dark and irrational suddenly swells to fill the gap. But certainly before Melville's dark vision, and to a lesser extent after it, the contrasts in the American and the Canadian attitude had implications far beyond the pages of romances and descriptions of settlement life. Matthews asserts that the Canadians rejected both America and natural environment; for the Canadians themselves this has always meant that, although they have been spared the anguish of shifting gears, they have also always been caught between English colonialism and the American environment that is regarded both as sinister and as inferior to England. And certainly the dictum could be turned around and applied to America also : accepting the validity of the natural environment, Americans also accepted the validity of their country —if the environment was good, the country was unique. So, accepting Natty Bumppo not only as the natural man, but also as the American man, the Americans were able to release a kind of enthusiasm and excitement into their expanding civilization that has always been lacking in Canada. They went into their continent joyfully and sometimes voraciously; and, whether as Henry T. Tuckerman or as

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Thomas Hart Benton, they went convinced that they were enacting a divine mission. Nor did the spirit die with the generation of the midnineteenth century. Surely only a nation that had once been under the special providence of Nature could join with Frederick Jackson Turner and write—three years after the closing of the frontier and more than forty years after Moby Dick and Pierre—that forest democracy, the forest intellect, and, above all, the "buoyancy and exuberance that comes with [frontier] freedom" 77 would last forever in America.

Bibliography and Notes

Bibliography

A brief comment on the Canadian secondary sources is in order. The negative attitude toward that which is specifically and uniquely Canadian has meant, among other things, that there has been very little work done with Canadian intellectual history. There is, for example, no probing of "the life of the mind in Canada" comparable to Perry Miller's study of the topic in America, nor is there anything that surveys the role of the land in Canadian thought and development in the way that Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land does in this country. Matthews' essay on the concept of instrument is a highly useful study of a specific idea; significantly, perhaps, Matthews was born and raised in Australia and thus brings the outsider's perspective to Canadian studies. His Tradition in Exile is a study of what happened to the English tradition when it was transplanted to Canada and Australia; these two provincial literatures are also related to developments in American thought and writing. Northrop Frye's concluding essay for Carl Klinck's anthology is a highly insightful summary and delineation of major themes in Canadian literature. It is, however, an overview which does not attempt to analyze the roles of individual writers. The November 1964 Atlantic Monthly is a special issue devoted to Canada. Its articles cover many fields and periods, but John Conway's study of the absence of a RomanticRevolutionary tradition in Canada is of special interest. Primary Sources Audubon, John James. Delineations of American Scenery and Character, ed. Francis Hobart Herrick. New York, 1926. Banvard, John. A Description of Banvard's Panorama of the Mississippi River . . . Boston, 1847.

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Catlin, George. North American Indians. 2 vols. New York, 1842. Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. The Prairie. New York: Rinehart and Co., 1959. Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters from an American Farmer. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. [1782]. Drake, Daniel. Discourse on the History, Character and Prospects of the West. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1955. Durham, Earl of (J. G. Lambton). The Report and Despatches of the Earl of Durham. London, 1839. The Home Book of the Picturesque. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852. Howe, Joseph. Poems and Essays. Montreal, 1874. Howison, John. Sketches of Upper Canada. Edinburgh, 1825. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Trenton, 1803. Kane, Paul. Wanderings of an Artist, vol. VII in series "Masterworks of Canadian Authors," ed. John W. Garvin. Toronto: The Radisson Society of Canada, 1925. Kirkland, Caroline. A New Home—Who'll Follow, ed. William S. Osborne. New Haven: College and University Press, 1965. Literary Garland (Montreal), vol. 1, NS, 1843. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. Pierre. New York: Grove Press, 1929. Miller, Perry, ed. The American Puritans. Garden City: Doubleday, 1956. Moodie, Susanna. Roughing It in the Bush. New York : Dodge Publishing Company, 1913. Noble, Louis Legrand. The Life and Work of Thomas Cole, ed. Elliot S. Vesell. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1964.

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Parkman, Francis. The Oregon Trail. Boston : Little, Brown, 1907. Rahv, Phillip, ed. Literature in America. Cleveland : Meridian, 1965. Richardson, John. The Canadian Brothers. Montreal, 1840. Wacousta. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1923. Sangster, Charles. The Saint Lawrence and the Saguenay. New York, 1856. Simms, William Gilmore. Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction, ed. Clarence Hugh Holman. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1962. Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods. Cambridge, Mass., 1864. Waiden. New York: New American Library, 1960. Traill, Catharine Parr. The Backwoods of Canada. London, 1836. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947. Secondary

Sources

Bissell, Claude. "Main Traditions in English-Canadian Literature." Unpublished lecture, University of Toronto. Born, Wolfgang. American Landscape Painting: An Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948. Careless, J. M. S. Canada: A Story of Challenge. Toronto: MacMillan, 1964. Conway, John. "What is Canada?" Atlantic Monthly, 214, no. 5 (November 1964), 100-105. Encyclopedia Americana, vol. V. New York, 1966. Frye, Northrop. "Conclusion," in Literary History of Canada: Canada's Literature in English, ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965.

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Harper, J. Russell. Painting in Canada: A History. Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1966. Helmert, Alan. "Puritanism, the Wilderness, and the Frontier," New England Quarterly, 26, no. 2 (September 1953), 361-382. Klinck, Carl F., ed. Literary History of Canada: Canada's Literature in English. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. Le Pan, Douglas. "The Dilemma of the Canadian Author," Atlantic Monthly, 214, no. 5 (November 1964), 160164. Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. Lower, Arthur R. M. Colony to Nation: A History of Canada. Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1946. Matthews, John P. "The Canadian Experience," in Commonwealth Literature, ed. John Press. London : Heinemann, 1965. Tradition in Exile. Toronto, 1966. Miller, Perry. Nature's Nation. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1967. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land. New York: Vintage, 1959. Soby, James Thrall, and Dorothy C. Miller. Romance Painting in America. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943. Van Zandt, Roland. The Catskill Mountain House. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1966.

Notes

1. E. L. Magoon, "Scenery and Mind," The Home Book of the Picturesque (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852), pp. 3, 4. 2. Quoted in Phillip Rahv, Literature in America (Cleveland, 1965), p. 83. 3. William Gilmore Simms, Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 50, 53. 4. Ibid., pp. 16; Simms is quoting Alexander B. Meek, Americanism in Literature: An Oration before the Phi Kappa and Demosthenes Societies of the University of Georgia, at Athens, August 8, 1844 (Charleston: Burges and James, 1844). 5. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (New York, 1959), pp. 38, 39. 6. Quoted in ibid., p. 40; other material in this paragraph is from pp. 38-44 passim. 7. Daniel Drake, Discourse on the History, Character and Prospects of the West (Gainesville, 1955), p. 7. 8. Ibid., pp. 12-13. 9. A Description of Banvard's Panorama of the Mississippi River . . . (Boston, 1847), p. 9. 10. George Catlin, North American Indians (New York, 1842), I, 15. 11. Tuckerman in The Home Book of the Picturesque, p. 121.

12. Quoted in Perry Miller, American Puritans (Garden City, 1956), p. 83. 13. Ibid., pp. 214-215. It is an arbitrary decision to pick Winthrop and Sewall, instead of Jefferson, for example, to illustrate the antecedents. The Jefferson who distrusted the landless element of society, or the Jefferson who wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (Trenton, 1803) that the passage through the Blue Ridge Mountains was "one of the most stupendous scenes in nature" and "worth a voyage across the Atlantic" to see, is a clear forecast of the attitude we are discussing; see Jefferson's Notes . . . , Query IV.

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14. Quoted in Roland Van Zandt, The Catskill Mountain House (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1966), p. 132. 15. Thus Moby Dick and Pierre, produced from the shattered wreckage of the use of Nature as a metaphor for moral goodness, are not without precedent in America even though there are no Greco-Roman Indians, no Boones on heaps of leaves, in the frightening parody of a romance that Pierre is. 16. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1947), p. 4. The similarities between Turner and the men of the mid-century, Drake particularly, are most strongly called to mind by comparing Drake's idea of the vigorous, independent mind produced in the West with Turner's famous summary of the frontier intellect: "That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive, turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance that comes with freedom—these are the traits of the frontier" (p. 37). 17. Ibid., p. 1. 18. The Earl of Durham (J. G. Lambton), The Report and Despatches of the Earl of Durham (London, 1839), p. 153. 19. J. M. S. Careless, Canada: A Story of Challenge (Toronto, 1964), p. 4. 20. Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 5 (New York, 1966), pp. 289ff. 21. Careless, Canada, p. 4. 22. Arthur R. M. Lower, Colony to Nation: A History of Canada (Toronto, 1946), p. 183. Most of the English who did not settle in Upper Canada were in the Maritime Provinces of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. The Maritimes, which also had a temperate climate, had been largely settled before Upper Canada. They received, for example, the bulk of the esti-

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mated 35,000 United Empire Loyalists who fled the American colonies at the time of the Revolution. See ibid., pp. 112ff. 23. Perry Miller, Nature's Nation (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 247, is the source of the quotation and of material for the preceding paragraph. 24. Iibid. 25. John Richardson, Wacousta (Toronto, 1923), p. 3. 26. Ibid., p. 244. 27. Ibid., pp. 244-245. 28. Ibid., pp. 269, 271, 267. 29. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (New York, 1960), p. 400. 30. Ibid., p. 249. 31. Ibid., p. 354. 32. Ibid., pp. 297, 298. 33. Ibid., p. 476. Just how persistent, but illogical, is Cooper's insistence on the value of Natty Bumppo can be seen from the paradox implicit in this quotation. Leatherstocking, fleeing civilization, paves the way for settlers who will bring the civilization that destroys him. But the subject of this study is not Cooper, and the paradox must remain unresolved here. Whatever the final outcome between Leatherstocking and the settlers, it is quite clear that the natural world of Leatherstocking holds no terror for Cooper, as Wacousta's world does for Richardson. Natty Bumppo is simply not an emblem of the dark and terrible forces of the universe. 34. Drake, Discourse, app. c, pp. 54-55. 35. Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (New York, 1913), p. 290. 36. Caroline Kirkland, A New Home—Who'll Follow (New Haven, 1965), p. 82. 37. Ibid., p. 102. 38. Moodie, Roughing It, p. 248. 39. The sisters, both wives of former British Army officers, were therefore "of rank."

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40. Moodie, Roughing It, pp. 562-563. 41. Kirkland, A New Home; quoted in William S. Osborne's intro., p. 20. 42. Ibid., p. 53. 43. Ibid., p. 189. 44. It may be objected that too much is based here on Mrs. Kirkland's mention of the "compensating power." I think the positive verdict which that idea implies is borne out by the general tone of A New Home, and I thus disagree with the usual reading of the book as an indictment of frontier life. In Mrs. Kirkland's attitude there is a general levity —an ability to laugh at herself and her erroneous preconceptions, a willingness to put away the china teaset when she sees how useless it will be, and an interest in her less educated neighbors that is genuine if patronizing at times—that is totally missing from either of the Canadian books. This is not to say that she does not criticize aspects of frontier life, but instead to suggest that she does not deny it as a potentially valuable experience. 45. Catharine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada (London, 1836), p. 56. 46. Traill, Backwoods, p. 153. 47. Susanna Moodie, "Canadian Hunter's Song," The Literary Garland, 1, NS (January 1843), 63. Mrs. Moodie's poem has been selected because she was discussed earlier, but it is highly representative of the Garland's verse. 48. Joseph Howe, Poems and Essays (Montreal, 1874), p. 17. Howe was primarily an essayist, newspaperman, and professional patriot rather than a poet; but in all his work he displays the same combination of sentiments suggested here, strong attachment to his native Nova Scotia but an overriding conviction of Canada's blood ties with England and her place within the Empire. 49. Kirkland, A New Home; quoted in intro. by William S. Osborne, p. 24. 50. Catlin, North American Indians, p. 60.

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51. It is interesting here to think of Turner in connection with this tendency to avoid the frontier and take flight in an imagined West or state of wild nature. Initially, the "frontier historian" seems to run counter to this tradition, yet ultimately Turner, too, flees the settlements. His frontier is not a good in itself; it is good because it brings American man into contact with the beneficial state of wilderness. Thus, as it recedes west, it leaves behind it unique, and successively higher, stages of development. 52. Washington Irving in The Home Book of the Picturesque, p. 72. 53. John Howison, Sketches of Upper Canada (Edinburgh, 1825), p. 180. 54. Ibid., pp. 200-201. 55. This does not imply that Americans were immune to such problems. As the Canadian Claude Bissell has pointed out in a lecture called "Main Traditions in English-Canadian Literature," William Cullen Bryant once had to write thus to a fellow American poet : " Ί saw some lines by you to the Skylark. Did you ever see such a bird? Let me counsel you to draw your own images, in describing Nature, from what you observe around you . . . The skylark is an English bird . . ."' The Bryant critical tradition was almost entirely missing in Canada, however. 56. Charles Sangster, The Saint Lawrence and the Saguenay (New York, 1856), title poem, st. 6, 7. 57. Ibid., st. 79. See also John P. Matthews, "The Canadian Experience," in Commonwealth Literature, ed. John Press (London, 1965). 58. Sangster, "The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, st. 81. 59. Sangster, The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, pp. 147-148. 60. Northrop Frye in Carl F. KLinck, ed., Literary History of Canada: Canada's Literature in English (Toronto, 1965), p. 830. 61. Alan Heimert, "Puritanism, the Wilderness and the

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Frontier," New England Quarterly (September 1953), pp. 377ff. (quotation p. 382). 62. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. [1782]); see esp. Letter XII, "Distresses of a Frontier Man." 63. Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Cambridge, Mass., 1864) pp. 85-86. 64. Ibid., p. 94. 65. Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail (Boston, 1907), p. 208. 66. Ibid., p. 334. 67. John James Audubon, Delineations of American Scenery and Character, ed. F. H. Herrick (New York, 1926). See esp. these chapters : "The Lost One," "Florida Keys," and "The American Sun Perch." 68. Henry David Thoreau, Waiden (New York, 1960), p. 121. 69. Traill, Backwoods, p. 267. 70. Matthews, "The Canadian Experience," in Commonwealth Literature, ed. John Press (London, 1965), pp. 21-22. 71. Ibid., p. 22. 72. Northrop Frye in Klinck, Literary History of Canada, p. 843. Frye's comment about Darwinism suggests another fruitful way of looking at the difference between the Canadian and American attitudes (and also suggests the possible role of coincidence) : In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the concept of Nature that was the most influential was the Enlightenment one. And although the Abbé Raynal was sure that American Nature was "degenerative," there were others, like Condorcet, who saw America as the great laboratory for testing what man would do given the chance to start over again in a natural environment. And in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, when America was developing a pride of nationhood and a strong self-identity, it was Romanticism that swept the country. But in the years before the Confederation of the Canadian

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Provinces in 1867 (which caused a moderate spurt of "Canadianism") people no longer believed in either the Enlightenment's or the Romantic's noble savage. As Frye suggests, the Nature that prevailed was Darwin's, and a country might justifiably be less joyful about grounding its identity on boundless wild nature than it would have been forty or fifty years earlier. 73. Quoted in Van Zandt, Catskill Mountain House, p. 192. 74. Miller, Nature's Nation, p. 203. 75. Quoted in Miller, Nature's Nation, p. 201. 76. See "The Romantic Dilemma" and "The Romance and the Novel" in Nature's Nation. 77. Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 37.