Against this, one is forced to admire the stark, enduring figure of Deerslayer. He is neither spiritual nor sensual. He is a moralizer, but he always tries to moralize from actual experience, not from theory. He says: "Hurt nothing unless you're forced to." Yet he gets his deepest thrill of gratification, perhaps, when he puts a bullet through the heart of a beautiful buck, as it stoops to drink at the lake. Or when he brings the invisible bird fluttering down in death, out of the high blue. "Hurt nothing unless you're forced to." And yet he lives by death, by killing the wild things of the air and earth. It's not good enough. But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic,' and a killer. It has never yet melted. Of course the soul often breaks down into disintegration, and you have lurid sin and Judith, imbecile innocence lusting, in Hetty, and bluster, bragging, and self-conscious strength, in Harry. But there are the disintegration products. What true myth concerns itself with is not the disintegration product. True myth concerns itself centrally with the onward adventure of the integral soul. And this, for America, is Deerslayer. A man who turns his back on white society. A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white. This is the very intrinsic-most American. He is at the core of all the other flux and fluff. And when _this_ man breaks from his static isolation, and makes a new move, then look out, something will be happening. VI. EDGAR ALLAN POE Poe has no truck with Indians or Nature. He makes no bones about Red Brothers and Wigwams. He is absolutely concerned with the disintegration-processes of his own psyche. As we have said, the rhythm of American art-activity is dual. 1. A disintegrating and sloughing of the old consciousness. 2. The forming of a new consciousness underneath. Fenimore Cooper has the two vibrations going on together. Poe has only one, only the disintegrative vibration. This makes him almost more a scientist than an artist. Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe's "morbid" tales need have been written. They need to be written because old things need to die and disintegrate, because the old white psyche has to be gradually broken down before anything else can come to pass. Man must be stripped even of himself. And it is a painful, sometimes a ghastly process.