Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind

VI: The Virtues of Nature: The Image in Drama and Poetry

HE INDIAN over whom Americans finally triumphed was he whom they put in their plays, poems, and stories. New-rich in their discovery of the possibility of a national culture, they were certain that they could find the Indian's place in the literature into which that culture was to flower.1 He was part of their past, they knew; and in his nature and his fate lay a clue to the meaning of their future. Yet if they would treat him imaginatively , they faced a problem for the solution of which their national experience and understanding could not wholly prepare them. For in the overpowering English literary tradition to which, even in their sanguinary cultural nationalism, they made obeisance, the Indian had been generally conceived as a noble savage, above and beyond the vices of civilized men, doomed to die in a kind of absolute, untouchable goodness; and American experience and understanding had been directed towards destroying just such a conception and replacing it with the conception of a savage in whom nobility was one with ignobility. Certainly, as doomed noble savage the Indian could be pitied; and American literary 1 The significance of Indian materials for a national literature is discussed in William Ellery Sedgwick, "The Materials for an American Literature: A Critical Problem of the Early Nineteenth Century," Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, XVII (1935), 14162 ; John C. McCloskey, "The Campaign of Periodicals after the War of 1812 for a National American Literature," PMLA, L (1935), 262-73; and William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 18101835 (Philadelphia, 1936), pp. 143-44. 169 T VI The Virtues of Nature: The Image in Drama and Poetry men, sensitive to the feeling of their readers, cultivated such pity. But he also had to be properly censured, and his nobility to be denied or so qualified as to be shown not really to be nobility; and American literary men, insofar as they were to be American, could not avoid such censure, denial, and qualification. The specifically literary idea of the pitifully noble savage had to be accommodated to that larger idea of savagism which made possible not only pity but censure. In a country searching for culture, the literary idea was strong and long-lived, and Americans respected it. In a country feeling its independent destiny, the need for accommodation was equally strong, and Americans bent to it. The literary history of the Indian in America is one in which the idea of savagism first compromised the idea of the noble savage and then absorbed and reconstituted it. What came into being in this reconstitution was the savage whom Americans had been seeking from the first, and he served them as they willed. 1 In 1766, in London, Robert Rogers, English soldier and frontier scout, published his Ponteach; or the Savages of America. This was an Indian tragedy which he could not get acted in spite of the success of the authoritative discourse on the Indian which he had published the year before in his Concise Account of America. In the Account there is one of those omnium gatherum disquisitions which, as we have seen, were published as an aftermath of the French and Indian War and the frontier disturbances which immediately followed it. It is like them, emphasizing what its author has personally seen, shaping the details into a picture, at once excited and nostalgic, of a simple, heroic, dangerous, Spartan kind of people who are being destroyed by white civilization. There is, in short, that sense of the facts of savage life which was more and more informing colonial thinking about the Indian. In the tragedy, however, literary convention completely dominates the sense of fact. Rogers intends to emphasize, as he had in the Concise Account, the nefariousness and evildoing of English traders and to show how the English themselves have brought on 170 SAVAGISM AND CIVILIZATION Pontiac's Conspiracy. But he can do so only in terms of whites crudely ignobled and Indians as crudely ennobled. To make his plot work out, to show the Indians as simple savages victimized by superior and scheming whites, Rogers would have had to psychologize along the lines of his Concise Account. Yet his literary commitment would let him psychologize only along the lines of an Indian Queen. The intended high seriousness of the play depends in great measure on its subplot, the tragic love...