ABSTRACT
The power of a critic like Lawrence comes precisely from the will to indulge both his prejudices and his sympathetic obsessions. As illustration, one of the most enriched endowments of criticism in literary history was manifested in D. H. Lawrence's chapters on Fenimore Cooper. To read these is to see Cooper magnified and transcending his faults. One cannot dispute the sense of a created myth in Cooper's fiction, apt and complete for American experience. By virtue of Lawrence's own revolutionary naturalism he was predictably sensitive to this "myth of America," as he called it. The old skin of European civilization was dramatically cast off, and here, enviably, was the great chance for a new birth of life, drawing only from life sources. America was an unresolved battle between nature and culture, and salvation was far off. The drama was best proposed, in Cooper, as the war between the red man and the white man, a war without appeasement or mercy.
