Taste or Art?

Though expressed differently in tone and format, Ralph Waldo Emerson's book Nature and his address "The American Scholar" share with James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans a reverence for the beauty and power of the natural world. However, where Cooper harkens back to the unbridled harshness of the formative days of the United States for his inspiration, Emerson sees (and wishes for others to see) plenty to marvel at in the settings provided by his own age, postulating that one need not worship the potentiality for danger in the wild to observe it and, more importantly, learn from it. As he so pithily puts it, "the sun shines to-day also" (214). Look around and be happy, he says, for there is much to take in. Cooper's prolonged, attentive descriptions attest to this character of nature, though after reading these two of Emerson's works, one is forced to ask how Emerson might classify Cooper's text. In Nature, Emerson says that a "love of beauty is Taste" while a "creation of beauty is Art" (222). In a later chapter on "Idealism," he formulates a linked thought in a similar fashion, stating, "the sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts" (233). The Last of the Mohicans drunkenly walks the line between these two classifications, alternately veering between Cooper's distinct ideas on American identity and his simplistic acceptance of beauty or old, untested intellect at face value.