At the center of James Fenimore Cooper’s best fiction, the Leatherstocking series, lies the fundamental conflict between civilization and its discontents. Cooper is, as his critics have repeatedly emphasized, the romancer who captures most hauntingly the American westward movement that is at once a fact of our past and our most recurrent daydream. The issues involved in that movement are complex, but at its core, westward expansion threw into relief, in the words of Henry Nash Smith, "the antithesis between nature and civilization, between freedom and law."¹ Cooper explores these conflicts in a variety of ways, but one, I believe, has been all but overlooked in recent criticism: the use of laughter.

If Cooper’s attention to humor as a force in the shaping of civilized life has been ignored, there is perhaps the good reason for it that Cooper’s own humor is marginal at best. Mark Twain made the unforgettable case against Cooper’s comic inclinations when he proclaimed that Cooper’s humor was "pathetic"; his pathos, "funny."² Even after one has allowed for the exaggeration (Huck reminds us that Mr. Mark Twain stretches things), there is enough truth left to make discouraging any close examination of Cooper’s ponderous efforts to be amusing. Thus, with few exceptions, those critics who do consider Cooper’s humor almost always end up disparaging it. Jesse Bier speaks for most when he observes that Cooper’s attempts at humor, chiefly for "dramatic relief," are "highly derivative and painfully heavy-handed."³ If we look, not at Cooper’s humor in his own narrative, however, but at the humor he imparts to his characters, the spectacle is, I think, both less saddening and more instructive. In The Pioneers Cooper makes the kind of humor each of his characters possesses an expression of that person’s place on the sliding scale of humanity that ranges on the frontier from the near savage to the highly cultured. By looking at the kinds of humor Cooper bestows upon his characters, we can see the general utility of humor itself in the process of shifting from anarchic freedom to civilized constraint—the process, that is, of taming not just the wilderness but the wildness in human nature.

Of the five Leatherstocking novels The Pioneers is by far the most light-hearted. Cooper wrote it, he said, to "please himself," having already in his two earlier novels "done his full share in amusing the

world."⁴ Cooper’s personal pleasure was derived in part from the pervasive autobiographical foundation of his story (the scenes and characters were drawn from his childhood at Cooperstown) and in part from the play of his own humor with and through his characters. The Pioneers has been described as "primarily a frontier novel of manners,"⁵ and to this we need only add that Cooper’s point of view is comic. He depicts his primitive society by creating representative types, what he called time and again "characters in their classes,"⁶ many of which are simple caricatures. Cooper’s more important characters, those endowed with a reality transcending caricature (though in some cases still partaking of it), have distinct and differing humors. The notion of humor itself is of course rooted in the Medieval conception of the physiological and psychological nature of man (a conception that resulted in the Comedy of Humours), and Cooper’s characters are drawn in ways that reflect the origin of the term: a person’s humor in The Pioneers tends to be his or her character.

This is quite evident in the case of Billy Kirby, one of the most risible characters in The Pioneers, who serves as a foil to Leatherstocking. Kirby is a coarse, insensitive frontiersman with a redeeming instinct for fair dealing among friends, a kind of homespun code of equity. He is a type of the hard-living, quick-fighting, always boastful ring-tailed roarer of the backwoods.⁷ He claims to have chopped thousands of acres of woodland in "Varmount and York states" and plans "to live to finish the whull."⁸ He is, Cooper says, an example of "human life in its first stages of civilization" (p. 231). His humor is also rudimentary. Kirby laughs often and loudly: significantly, he always laughs uncontrollably at acts of violence that discomfort and embarrass someone else. He guffaws when Leatherstocking throws Hiram Doolittle down a hill into some bushes; he roars when Doolittle is shot in the rear; he gives vent "to peal after peal of laughter," "kicking the earth with delight," when Captain Hollister is knocked down hill by a gun-blow to the seat of his pants (p. 452). What amuses Kirby is the physical pain of others, in the face of which he celebrates in tumultuous laughter his own contrasting well being. Kirby’s laughter is a near-perfect example of Thomas Hobbes’s famous explanation of laughter as "nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others. . . ."⁹

A telling instance of Kirby’s own sense of humor occurs when the French tradesman Monsieur Le Quoi offers to buy Kirby’s maple sugar for "dix sous" (p. 228). Kirby, who of course does not understand

French, concludes that he is being made fun of and retaliates with what Cooper ironically terms his "wit" (p. 229). Assuming a deadpan "air of innocence," Kirby foists upon Monsieur Le Quoi a drink of scalding hot molasses, then revels in what he later describes as the Frenchman’s "legs" dancing faster than "drumsticks" on "the skin of a sheep" (p. 229). To his friends he insists, "it’s a knowing one, from the old countries, that thinks to get his jokes smoothly over a Yankee wood chopper" (p. 229). Kirby’s crude, misdirected humor is his way of defending himself against what he fails to comprehend. It is also pure aggression, the violence of the uncivilized man.

Squire Richard Jones, Judge Temple’s cousin who is eventually made sheriff, would at first seem to be the antithesis of Billy Kirby. Squire Jones fancies himself a gentleman and attempts to impress the local rustics with his refinement as well as his authority. But in reality he is anything but a true gentleman. He is boisterous, vapid, arrogant, foolish, and vain, wholly lacking in the gentlemanly courtesy that holds the feelings of others in regard. At times Jones is himself laughable because he is a dolt, understanding as little as Kirby. Mistaking, for instance, Leatherstocking’s purpose in the turkey shoot (he is hoping to win the game for old Major Effingham), Jones attributes Leatherstocking’s participation to strong appetite and goes about darkly hinting that the woodsman has what he terms "a very dangerous propensity for turkey" (p. 199). Jones’s own humor is most revealing. When Monsieur Le Quoi removes his hat in respectful welcome to Judge Temple and his daughter Elizabeth, Squire Jones admonishes him, "Cover thy poll, Gaul, cover thy poll . . . or the forest will pluck out the remnant of thy locks" (p. 37). And then he adds, in his typical comic vein, "Had the hairs on the head of Absalom been as scarce as on this crown of thine, he might have been living to this day" (p. 37). It is Jones’s humor to taunt others, simultaneously demeaning them and asserting his own superiority.

In his humor Jones tends to do verbally what Billy Kirby does directly through his practical joking: create discomfort for others to amuse and elevate himself. While Kirby’s tricks result in physical pain, Jones’s jokes generate psychological and emotional unease. Jones is more civilized than Kirby only in that his violence and aggression are almost exclusively verbal. He jeers at Monsieur Le Quoi, at Major Hartman, at Oliver Edwards, at Leatherstocking, and at Judge Temple. In fact only Elizabeth, as a lady, is exempt from his derision, and he does not hesitate to quarrel contentiously with her. When she correctly asserts, for instance, that the rough-clad newcomer

Oliver Edwards is a "gentleman," Jones at first challenges her, "Gentleman! Do you call such chaps gentlemen at school, Elizabeth?" (p. 104). Then immediately he turns his denial into a barbed dig at the Judge, who has just failed to kill a deer: "Well, well, to me he seemed anything but a gentleman. I must say, however, for the lad, that he draws a good trigger, and has a true aim. He’s good at shooting a buck, ha! Marmaduke?" (p. 104). At another point, when the Judge laments a settler’s waste of wood on the frontier that would sell well in Philadelphia, Jones explodes in smug comic dismissal:

"And how the devil . . . is the poor devil to get his logs to the Philadelphia market, pray? Put them in his pocket, ha! as you would a handful of chestnuts, or a bunch of chickerberries? I should like to see you walking up High-Street, with a pine log in each pocket!—Poh! poh!, cousin ’duke, there are trees enough for us all, and some to spare." (p. 102)

From the novel’s opening, when he recklessly upsets a sleigh, to its close, when he leads a chaotic raid against Leatherstocking and his friends, Squire Jones is without self-control. He adheres to the law, but as its chief officer he bends it to unruly purposes. His humor, always directed against others, is equally unrestrained. Of course humor itself is liberated and liberating. In Cooper’s novel, however, the measure of a person’s character is the capacity for self-governance—and this applies to one’s humor as well as one’s conduct. There is gain as Kirby’s violent practical joking gives way to Jones’s verbal aggression, but neither man, in Cooper’s scheme, is truly civilized. Jones’s humor is a substitute for direct violence, but it still reveals a fundamental wildness.

Significantly, the most overtly humorous character in Cooper’s novel is also the most refined—Elizabeth. Cooper’s fictive women have often been criticized as uninteresting stereotypes. Kay Seymour House has classified them as "the virgin and the virago," to the woman of gossamer temperament and the termagant. James Russell Lowell saw only one type in Cooper’s fiction:

And the women he draws from one model don’t vary,
All sappy as maples and flat as a prarie.¹¹

Elizabeth Temple combines the delicacy of the virgin type with the energy of the virago; she is anything but sappy and dull. Based in part upon Cooper’s own wife, Susan, and, despite his disclaimers, owing something to the person of his dead sister Hannah, Elizabeth is one of the most commanding figures in The Pioneers and one of the most powerful women in all of Cooper’s fiction.¹²

The novel opens with the return of Elizabeth from an Eastern school

to her home in Templeton. The action is doubly suggestive: on the one hand, it makes clear that true education and culture are not available in the wilderness, while at the same time it associates these attainments with Elizabeth, thereby making her a crucial force in the process of establishing civilization. Her humorous spirit is immediately apparent. When her father, having accidentally shot the stranger Oliver Edwards instead of the deer he aimed at, asks jocularly whether he is "compos mentis or not?—Fit to charge a grand jury, or what is just now of more pressing necessity, able to do the honours of a Christmas-eve, in the hall of Templeton?" Elizabeth replies, "More able to do either, my dear father . . . than to kill deer with a smoothbore" (p. 26). Her mild joshing bespeaks not only her gentleness but also her freedom. Eventually, of course, Elizabeth defies her father on behalf of Leatherstocking by helping the hunter to escape from jail, by giving him the Judge’s own boat, and finally by procuring for him some gunpowder. Her ability to sport with her father in jest anticipates her capacity to rebel against him in earnest. Her humor, evident in the very opening of the novel, is in its way as free as the humors of Kirby and Jones, but unlike theirs, Elizabeth’s humor is considerate of its object.

Elizabeth’s humor arises from her perception of the false, the pretentious, and the incongruous. Her laughter and her joking alike are critically intelligent, and they function, not to shield her weaknesses, as Kirby’s humor does, or to vaunt the self, as Jones’s does, but to improve others. Elizabeth’s humor tactfully exposes falsity, checks excess, sets balances, and establishes truths. Her humorous spirit is remarkably like the spirit of comedy itself, as George Meredith would later define it:

She it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dullness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer.

The expression of a civilized person, Elizabeth’s humor is also a civilizing force.

Elizabeth directs her humorous comments at her father, at her companion Louisa Grant, at her would-be suitor Oliver, and most of all at Squire Richard Jones. Louisa is gently mocked for her excessive self-effacement. To Louisa’s humble plaint that she is only "the child of a poor and unsettled clergyman," Elizabeth responds teasingly:

"Nay, Louisa, humility carries you too far. The daughter of a minister of the church can have no superiors. Neither I nor Mr. Edwards is quite your equal, unless . . . he is in secret a king." (p. 285)

Shakespeare is lurking behind Cooper’s novel (the epigraphs for each chapter draw heavily upon the Bard), and there is a touch of Rosalind about Elizabeth. Concealing her own affection, she sports with her lover, mocking in particular the blatantly bogus rumor that he is part

Indian:

"I shall believe him to be the child of Corn-stalk, or Corn-planter, or some other renowned chieftain; possibly of the Big Snake himself; and shall treat him as such, until he sees fit to shave his good-looking head, borrow some half-dozen pair of my best earrings, shoulder his rifle again, and disappear as suddenly as he made his entrance." (p. 215)

Elizabeth’s laughter is gentle and deflating. The prime target of her derision is the blustering Squire Jones. Cooper creates Jones as the alazon of classical comedy, against whom Elizabeth tilts as genteel eiron. When Jones—with wholly false modesty—disclaims any interest in being foremost, attributing, his vain drives to a mere love of "competition," Elizabeth observes,

"Oh! it’s all very clear . . . you would not care a fig for distinction, if there were no one in the world but yourself; but as there happens to be a great many others, why you must struggle with them all—in the way of competition." (p. 178)

Her mockery is so delicate it is lost on the Squire. Elizabeth repeatedly derides Jones’s grandiose schemes, which are always far-fetched and impractical. His "ingenuity," she observes, "will one day discover the philosopher’s stone" (p. 309). When he envisions applying more "science" to the manufacture of maple sugar to produce lumps "as big as a haycock," he expatiates on the subject in all seriousness until Elizabeth exposes the implausibility of his notion—and the extravagance of his style—by continuing the idea on the Squire’s own scale:

"And purchase the cargo of one of those ships that, they say, are going to China," cried Elizabeth; "turn your potash-kettles into teacups, the scows on the lakes into saucers; bake your cake in yonder lime-kiln, and invite the county to a tea-party. How wonderful are the projects of genius!" (pp. 221–22)

Elizabeth’s ironic assaults upon the Squire’s fickle headedness are similar to her rebukes to Louisa’s excessive feminine humility (Louisa does indeed fit Lowell’s description of Cooper’s women) and to her jibes at Oliver’s preposterous disguise as a vulgar woodsman of questionable origins. At the center of Elizabeth’s humor lies an insistence on common sense and truth. She is a civil realist. Commonsensicalness is of course a recurrent basis for American humor, but it is not an attribute often associated in American literature with the humor of

a woman.¹⁴ Interestingly, Cooper’s father, William Cooper, felt that common sense was the most important trait a settler of the wilderness could possess. In his manual, A Guide in the Wilderness, he warned prospective pioneers that no one could expect to prosper who did not have "a steady mind, a sober judgement, fortitude, perseverance, and above all, common sense. . . ."¹⁵ By William Cooper’s standards, Elizabeth is a promising pioneer.

While the whole of The Pioneers traces the transformation of frontier wilderness—and human wildness—through settlement, the conflict between primitive living in harmony with nature and civilized life in accord with societal law is most pointed in the clash between Leatherstocking and Judge Temple. Most critics have seen the two as irreconcilable opposites, but while the differences between them are real, there are also important similarities. Warren S. Walker has described The Pioneers as an "object lesson in the painful progress from noble savagery to noble civilization," and this is, he maintains, a "cultural journey" that Leatherstocking is "neither willing nor able to complete."¹⁶ Certainly Leatherstocking wants no part of the emerging settlement of Templeton, but in a fundamental way he himself has already completed the journey from noble savagery to noble civilization. What is awry in Walker’s observation, indeed in much of the criticism of Cooper’s fiction, is the sense of civilization itself. In his seminal reconsideration of the Leatherstocking tales, the starting point for many modern appraisals, Roy Harvey Pearce describes Cooper’s idea of civilization as "a devotion to higher cultural forms."¹⁷ In The American Democrat, however, Cooper himself defined civilization with some care and revealed a more inclusive conception of it:

Civilization means a condition of society that is the opposite of the savage, or barbarous state. In other languages this term is more strictly applied to the arts of life, than in the English, in which we are more apt to associate with it the moral condition of a country.¹⁸

For Cooper civilization always entailed both higher cultural forms and personal morality. Insofar as Judge Temple is making possible through his improvements a greater attention to ‘‘the arts of life," Leatherstocking does not partake of the Judge’s civilization; but insofar as the Judge is advancing the "moral condition" of the country, Leatherstocking is already a part of the nascent new order.

The Judge and Leatherstocking share more than a common civilized morality. Although they disagree over the law as the way to achieve the desired end, both men believe in conservation. The Judge’s interest

in preserving game for future generations is at one with Leatherstocking’s insistence upon killing only for use. Both men are, like Elizabeth, down-to-earth pragmatists. The romantic daydreaming of Squire Jones is anathema to judge and hunter alike. Finally, while neither man is much given to joking, both have a keen sense of the comic. Most importantly, for it takes us to the heart of Cooper’s own understanding of humor, the humors of Leatherstocking and the Judge derive from the same source and serve the same function.

In the novel’s opening scene Cooper describes Leatherstocking as shaken by a silent "inward laugh," a laugh that partakes of "exultation, mirth, and irony" (pp. 7, 15). This laugh recurs throughout the novel as a kind of Dickensian signature for Leatherstocking. The woodsman’s laughter emanates from his confident sense of superiority. Mingling exultation, mirth, and irony, his laughter is a combination of delight in his own skill, knowledge, and rectitude, together with a surprising gaiety rooted in temperament and a strong disdain for the incompetence of others. The most striking thing about his humor, though, one that Cooper insists upon throughout the novel, is its silence. Only once does Leatherstocking even make a joke aloud, and that is again in the first scene when he remarks to the Judge, who has missed his shot, "You burnt your powder, only to warm your nose this cold evening" (p. 7). Yet though he is silent in his humor, Leatherstocking is often laughing. He laughs at others, as Jones does without cause and as Elizabeth does to the end of correction, but his laughter is totally restrained. He laughs only to himself, neither flaunting his superiority nor voicing his contempt. His is a decorous laughter.

Like Leatherstocking, Judge Temple knows his own superiority and laughs out of it. His humor is even more evident in the novel than Leatherstocking’s, for Cooper repeatedly depicts him as smiling or chucking to himself. Even those critics who dislike what the Judge stands for have been forced to acknowledge his benevolence;¹⁹ his amused, tolerant presence is its chief sign. The Judge’s humor is similar to Leatherstocking’s in that it too is a compound of exultation, mirth, and irony. And most importantly, the Judge’s laughter, like Leatherstocking’s, is silent. Cooper tells us that he has a "covert humour" and that his "smile"—the equivalent of Leatherstocking’s ironic inward laughing—is "arch" (p. 164). Although the Judge’s sense of humor is frequently exercised by the failings of his domestic servants, his relatives, and his fellow townspeople, he, too, decorously refrains from openly expressing scorn through laughter. He, too, laughs only to himself. In their humors the Judge and Leatherstocking

are co-equals: both are superior, commonsensical, gentle men. In The Pioneers humor is seen as paradoxical in origin and function. With someone like Billy Kirby it is rooted in insecurity and serves not only as a defense but also as a means of direct aggression. The good-humored laughter of Leatherstocking and the Judge, on the other hand, finds its source in confident superiority and becomes a way of tolerating the ineffectual and the foolish. While humor is sometimes a civilizing force, transforming the violent impulses of a Squire Jones into verbal assaults, or even working in the laughter of Elizabeth to promote better character and more sensible action, humor is also impertinent, an imposition upon someone else. When not directed at the self, humor is always at the expense of others. Humor assumes a certain freedom. If Leatherstocking’s absolute reliance upon the authority of his own conscience is, as some critics insist, "anarchic"²⁰ (a forerunner of Hester Prynne’s commitment to the sanctity of the human heart), the Judge’s position as the creator and enforcer of the law is equally, if less obviously, free. Their common impulse to laugh is the sign of their imperial liberty; but unlike all the others, even Elizabeth, they control their laughter to the point of silence. Both men view the half-civilized, half-primitive people of Templeton with an amused contempt, fed by common sense and a superiority based on greater skill and truer morality. Yet neither expresses his disdain except through silent laughter. Even Elizabeth’s humor, tactful as it is, is less gentle in effect than their amused silence.

In The Pioneers the wildness of human nature expressed through laughter is progressively tamed, which, if we measure Kirby against Jones and Jones against Elizabeth, is all to the good and to the advancement of civilization. But it is most revealing that those characters who attain more perfect, civilized selves become in their humor not only less violent but also less overt. What this betrays, I suspect, is a profound fear of the freedom inherent in even highly civilized laughter. Cooper seems to recoil from the very liberty he grants his strongest characters. Be that as it may, The Pioneers suggests that for Cooper the best humor, the most civilized, is finally silent. It is no wonder, then, that he was himself never much of a humorist.

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO

NOTES

    ¹Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), p. 60.
     ²Mark Twain, "Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses," in The Writings of Mark Twain, Author’s National Edition, 25 vols. (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1907–18), XXII, 96.

87

    ³Jesse Bier. The Rise and Fall of American Humor (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968), pp. 361–62. But for an illuminating brief commentary on The Pioneers as a "farce of incompetence," see Edwin Fussell, Frontier. American Literature and the American West (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 32–39.
    ⁴James Fenimore Cooper, "Introduction," The Pioneers (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), p. xxxviii. This edition includes the third of the three introductions Cooper wrote for his novel.
     ⁵Arnid Shulenberger, Cooper’s Theory of Fiction (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1955), p. 76.
     ⁶"Introduction," The Pioneers, p. xxxiii.
     ⁷The seminal study of the type is Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931). A good recent commentary can be found in Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 92–151, passim.
    ⁸James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers, ed. Leon Howard (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1959), p. 230. This readily available reprint of the corrected first edition (the corrections were made for the 1825 printing) will be cited parenthetically in my text.
    ⁹Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, in The English Works, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: John Bohn, 1840), IV, 46.
    ¹⁰Kay Seymour House, Cooper’s Americans (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965), p. 18.
    ¹¹James Russell Lowell, "A Fable For Critics," in The Works of James Russell Lowell, 11 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1892), IX, 61. A thoughtful defense of Cooper’s women can be found in W. C. Brownell, American Prose Masters (1909; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 30–35.
    ¹²For Cooper’s probable models for Elizabeth, see House, Cooper’s Americans, p. 18 and Stephen Railton, Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 106–10.
    ¹³George Meredith, The Egoist, in The Works of George Meredith, Memorial Edition, 27 vols. (London: Constable and Co., 1909–12), XIII, 4. Meredith employs the feminine pronoun here in reference to Comedy because he has in mind the classical muse of Comedy, the goddess Thalia.
    ¹⁴It is revealing that in Walter Blair’s Horse Sense in American Humor: From Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1942) there is only one woman practitioner of the art of humorous common sense, "Samantha," pseudonym for Marietta Holley. Commonsensical women were, however, a convention of English comedy.
    ¹⁵William Cooper, A Guide in the Wilderness (1810; rpt. Rochester, New York: George P. Humphrey, 1897), p. 12.
    ¹⁶Warren S. Walker, James Fenimore Cooper: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1962), p. 33.
    ¹⁷Roy Harvey Pearce, "The Leatherstocking Tales Re-Examined," South Atlantic Quarterly, 46 (Oct. 1947), 525.
    ¹⁸James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat (1838; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 160. In an excellent commentary on The Pioneers and other novels in the Leatherstocking series, Donald C. Stineback, Shifting World: Social Change and Nostalgia (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 23–42, takes note of Cooper’s "determination to dramatize the progress of history in moral terms."
    ¹⁹See for instance, D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1951), pp. 55–66.
    ²⁰For a consideration of Leatherstocking’s anarchy, see Donald Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1961), pp. 129–47.