COOPER'S CHAINBEARER.
Tins fiction is the second novel of the series which is to paint the manners of the State of New York at three periods, and point a moral against Anti-Rentism. The form is still autobiographical; and many of the persons who figured in the first tale appear in this,—as Jason Newcome, the New Englander, General Littlepage and his wife, the hero and heroine of Satanstoe ; but, except Jason and the Negro Jaap, they are the sha- dows of the past, The hero is Mordannt Littlepage, son of the General : the principal occurrences take place soon after the close of the war of Independence; and are designed to exhibit the lawless proceedings of the squatters on a large scale. Young Littlepage proceeds to inspect the family estates in a lately-settled district ; falls in love with the Chain- bearer's daughter ; and, rather rashly visiting a squatter's saw-mill, in a remote place, is discovered, seized, and imprisoned, but finally released, after the posse has been raised. The love story of course has some con- nexion with this seizure; the heroine, admired by one of the younger squatters, being involved in the events that follow it : for the family of the Timpermans or Thousand-acres plays the part of the Red Indians in most of the frontier novels; the detention of young Littlepage, and finally of the Chainbearer and his daughter, being accompanied by rough mili- tary precautions, and ending in a sort of conflict. The literary character of 77te Chainbearer is very similar to that of its immediate predecessor, and to the average of Cooper's land novels. There is the same absence of what the ignorant call "highly worked up" situations ; but the same sustained, quiet interest, produced by an even, natural story, and characters that admit of force and contrast from the peculiar state of society in which they are placed. There are similar com- prehensive views of principles and knowledge of life; with truthful dia- logue, and well-written but somewhat slow narrative. There is also the author's personal weakness of a wish to display the accomplishments of Eu- rope and America—King and President, practical Republican, thorough gentleman, and elevated philosopher, all in one. The usual literary fault of stopping the narrative for a wise remark is more conspicuous in the present volumes, from their didactic purpose ; and, coupled with the former failing, give to many parts of the work too much the air of "absolute wisdom."
As a structure or a story, there is no novelty in The Chainbearer. There are still two ladies, and their two lovers, though the secondary persons are kept more in the background than usual ; there is a pre- ponderance of family scenes in the earlier parts, to exhibit manners and characters; while the interest created by plunging the principal persons into difficulties or dangers from the exposed state of the frontier is less varied in the present work. Its freshness arises from its delineation of charac- ter; which is masterly both in conception and execution. The traits of the principal persons are natural and appropriate to the peculiar circum- stances in which they are placed, and by which indeed they are produced ;
whilst they are generally displayed with truth and effect. The Chainbearer-- the descendant of a Dutch colonist, who acquires the nickname from having been designed for a land-surveyor, but drops to a chainbearer from "having no head for fig-ures"—is a nice conception. In any other than a colonial state of society, his simplicity and want of book knowledge would appear weakness ; his contented poverty and humble occupation, in a man born to a higher status, raise a pity approaching to contempt : but his Dutch descent, the homely character of every thing about him, his sterling honesty, courage, and goodness of heart, redeem his weaknesses and condition. His niece, the heroine, brought up by the Chainbearer and a half- brother in a school at New York till the war is over, and then joining her uncle in the back-woods, is a well-executed combination of accomplishment with the better parts of rusticity ; but is not so na- tural a delineation as the Chainbearer. The triumph of the whole, how- ever, is Thousand-acres and his family. The effects of a lawless, yet not in the estimation of society a criminal pursuit, in leaving the general idea of morality and even religion unshaken, while the effects of this lawless- ness in inflaming the passions, inducing violence and criminality in de- fence of the property illegally acquired, and thus leading to every species of wrong, are most ably marked. The local circumstances of an un- settled frontier and a long war, with its loose morality and dubious rights, are touched with equal clearness, if not with equal strength. The cha- racteristics of each person are as ably delineated. The rude dignity, from long habits of command, and a straightforward openness, with touches of friendliness where the rights or self-interests of the squatters are not in question, of Thousand-acres—the brutal mind and violent passions of his eldest son, Tobit, exasperated by having been imprisoned and whipped for the exercise of his vocation—the womanly nature and pious education of Prudence, the mother, showing through a stern disposition further hard- ened by her mode of life—the goodnature but clannish principles of Zephaniah—and the thoroughly wild-girl character of Lowiny, who is supposed to be impressed by the appearance of the hero—are all capital delineations, and fresh in substance.
The philosophy is not quite so good. Mr. Cooper has pushed his ab- stractions and legal rights rather too far to carry the entire sympathy of his readers with him. Old Thousand-acres does not, for such a man, seem so clearly wrong and criminal in the first instance as Mr. Cooper would make him out. Immense grants of land in remote places, which the nominal owner cannot or does not use, have something of a dog-in- the-manger or monopoly character about them, as well as something analo- gous to the forest and game laws. Many will feel that there is some- thing in the argument of old Thousand-acres, that if General Littlepage has a paper right in the trees, he the squatter has his labour right in the planks,—a principle, indeed, on which governments generally and liberal individuals mostly proceed ; whilst logic may allow some weight to the old man's argument to his wife, that as the titles came from the King, and his rule had been thrown over, the rights to land not occitpied should determine with the authority which granted them. Neither does the hero himself act altogether in a way becoming the represen- tative of universal right. He throws himself among these people with- out any absolute necessity; he attempts to conceal his identity by equi- vocating answers ; he is driven during his detention to something like the stratagems of war, which are proper enough in soldiers but not so well in the personification of "eternal justice " ; and though growing circumstances induce some incidents of romance, the demand of the squat- ters is resolvable into the value of their work. But while Mr. Cooper is thus strict on the hard principle of a vicious title ab initio forfeiting all additional value imparted, he is as lax in the larger justice of politics as the worst squatter or Anti-Renter of the State of New York.
"The reader of course will always recollect that this manuscript was written nearly if not quite v years ago. Even then a journey to Niagara was a serious undertaking. Now (1845) it can be made by steam, the entire distance from the town of New York, or between 450 and 500 miles, in less than thirty-six hours! This is one of the prodigies of a giant in his infancy, and should render foreign politicians cautious how they talk of regulating the boundaries of this republic for its citizens. If the past can be any pledge for the future in American history, they are now living who will see steam extended across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the stars and stripes tying at each end ! More than a thousand of the four thousand miles necessary to achieve such an object have been overcome; and that which remains to be done, comparing ends with means, is not one-half as great an effort as that which has been done. This may be a proper place to add, that nothing has so much strengthened the present Adminis- tration, in its annexation projects, as the threatened interference of European Go- vernments in the affairs of this continent. At some critical moment, when it is least wanted, America may pay them in kind."
This compendious principle is really lurking at the bottom of the Oregon dispute : but, putting that aside altogether, we should like to know whether Great Britain has not as good a sight to interfere respect- ing Canada, or France and Great Britain to interfere with Rosas respect- ing the commercial interests and personal safety of their subjects, as Mr. Cooper or any other landlord has to interfere with his tenants. The rights of landlords are not the only rights in this world; and if Mr. Littlepage had a right to his trees after they were made planks, surely England has a right to Canada and to the parts of Oregon she has occu- pied, and holds by tenure and prescription or both. There is something sounder in the following remarks ; which, though not so applicable to England are arguments in favour of a public prosecutor.
"After all, the strong native intellect of this barbarian had let him into one ot the greatest secrets connected with our social ills. Good laws, badly adininistered, are no better than an absence of all law, since they only encourage evil-doers by the protection they afford through the power conferred on improper agents. Those who have studied the defects of the American system, with a view to ascertain truth, say, that the want of a great moving power to set justice in motion lies at the root of its feeblcness. According to theory, the public virtue is to constitute this power; but public virtue is never one-half as active as private vice. Crime is only to be put down by the strong hand; and that hand must belong to the
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public n truth, not in name only: whereas, the individual wronged is fast getMg to be the only moving lamer, and in very many cases local parties are formed, and the rogue goes to the bar sustained by an authority that has quite as much praeti- cal control as the law itself. Juries and grand juries are no longer to be relied on; and the bench is slowly but steadily losing its influence. When the day shall come—as come it must if present tendencies continue—that verdicts are rendered directly in.the teeth of law and evidence, and jurors fancy themselves legislators, then may the just man fancy himself approaching truly evil timestand the patriot begin to despair. It will be the commencement of the rogue's paradise! Nothing is easier, I am willing to admit, than to over-govern men; but it ought not to be forgotten, that the political vice that comes next in the scale of facility is to govern them too little."
The following observation not only contains a political truth in regard to the American war, but one we may ponder over in relation to our other colonies at present.
"The American nation, as a whole, is now as completely emancipated from English political influence as if the latter never had an existence. The emanci- pation is too complete, indeed, the effect having brought with it a reaction that is on many points running into error in a contrary direction; the third of our manu- scripts having something to do with these excesses of opinion. But Mr. Mor- daunt Littlepage appears to have some near glimmerings of the principles which lay at the root of the American Revolution, though the principle itself does not appear to have been openly recognized anywhere at the time. The King of Eng- land was originally King of America, as he was King of Ireland and King of Scotland. It is true, there was no American flag, the system excluding the Colonies from any power on the ocean: then, each colony existed as independent of the others except through their common allegiance. The revolution of 1688 slowly brought Parliament into the ascendant; and by the time George the Third ascended the throne, that ascendancy had got to he almost undisputed. Now, America had no proper connexion with Parliament, which in that day represented England and %Vales only; and this was a state of things which made one country dependent on the other,—a subserviency of interests that clearly could last only so long as the party governed was too weak to take care of itself."
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