[135] This influence and this fear
alike bear witness to the energy of the principles at work here.
We have said that the details of New England history were essentially dry
and unpoetic. Everything is near, authentic, and petty. There is no mist
of distance to soften outlines, no mirage of tradition to give characters
and events an imaginative loom. So much downright work was perhaps never
wrought on the earth's surface in the same space of time as during the
first forty years after the settlement. But mere work is unpicturesque,
and void of sentiment. Irving instinctively divined and admirably
illustrated in his "Knickerbocker" the humorous element which lies in
this nearness of view, this clear, prosaic daylight of modernness, and
this poverty of stage properties, which makes the actors and the deeds
they were concerned in seem ludicrously small when contrasted with the
semi-mythic grandeur in which we have clothed them, as we look backward
from the crowned result, and fancy a cause as majestic as our conception
of the effect. There was, indeed, one poetic side to the existence
otherwise so narrow and practical; and to have conceived this, however
partially, is the one original and American thing in Cooper. This diviner
glimpse illumines the lives of our Daniel Boones, the man of civilization
and old-world ideas confronted with our forest solitudes,--confronted,
too, for the first time, with his real self, and so led gradually to
disentangle the original substance of his manhood from the artificial
results of culture.
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