Books: Letters from an American Farmer
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Hector St. John de Crevecoeur >> Letters from an American Farmer
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17 INTRODUCTION
Hazlitt wrote that of the three notable writers whom the eighteenth
century had produced, in the North American colonies, one was "the
author (whoever he was) of the American Farmer's Letters."
Crevecoeur was that unknown author; and Hazlitt said further of him
that he rendered, in his own vividly characteristic manner, "not
only the objects, but the feelings, of a new country." Great is the
essayist's relish for passages descriptive of "a battle between two
snakes," of "the dazzling, almost invisible flutter of the humming-
bird's wing," of the manners of "the Nantucket people, their frank
simplicity, and festive rejoicings after the perils and hardships of
the whale-fishing." "The power to sympathise with nature, without
thinking of ourselves or others, if it is not a definition of
genius, comes very near to it," writes Hazlitt of our author. And
his references to Crevecoeur are closed with the remark: "We have
said enough of this ILLUSTRIOUS OBSCURE; for it is the rule of
criticism to praise none but the over-praised, and to offer fresh
incense to the idol of the day."
Others, at least, have followed that "rule of criticism," and the
American Farmer has long enjoyed undisturbed seclusion. Only once
since the eighteenth century has there been a new edition of his
Letters, that were first published at London in 1782, and reissued,
with a few corrections, in the next year. The original American
edition of this book about America was that published at
Philadelphia in 1793, and there was no reprint till 1904, [Footnote:
References may be found to American editions of 1794 and 1798, but
no copies of such editions are preserved in any library to which the
editor has had access.] when careless editing did all it could to
destroy the value of the work, the name of whose very author was
misstated. Yet the facts which we have concerning him are few enough
to merit truthful presentation.
I
Except by naturalisation, the author of Letters from an American
Farmer was not an American; and he was no ordinary farmer. Yet why
quarrel with him for the naming of his book, or for his signing it
"J. Hector Saint-John," when the "Hector" of his title-pages and
American biographers was only a prenom de faintaisie? We owe some
concessions to the author of so charming a book, to the eighteenth-
century Thoreau. His life is certainly more interesting than the
real Thoreau's--and would be, even if it did not present many
contradictions. Our records of that life are in the highest degree
inexact; he himself is wanting in accuracy as to the date of more
than one event. The records, however, agree that Crevecoeur belonged
to the petite noblesse of Normandy. The date of his birth was
January 31, 1735, the place was Caen, and his full name (his great-
grandson and biographer vouches for it) was Michel-Guillaume-Jean de
Crevecoeur. The boy was well enough brought up, but without more
than the attention that his birth gave him the right to expect; he
divided the years of his boyhood between Caen, where his father's
town-house stood, and the College du Mont, where the Jesuits gave
him his education. A letter dated 1785 and addressed to his children
tells us all that we know of his school-days; though it is said,
too, that he distinguished himself in mathematics. "If you only
knew," the reminiscent father of a family exclaims in this letter,
"in what shabby lodging, in what a dark and chilly closet, I was
mewed up at your age; with what severity I was treated; how I was
fed and dressed!" Already his powers of observation, that were so to
distinguish him, were quickened by his old-world milieu.
"From my earliest youth," he wrote in 1803, "I had a passion for
taking in all the antiques that I met with: moth-eaten furniture,
tapestries, family portraits, Gothic manuscripts (that I had learned
how to decipher), had for me an indefinable charm. A little later
on, I loved to walk in the solitude of cemeteries; to examine the
tombs and to trace out their mossy epitaphs. I knew most of the
churches of the canton, the date of their foundation, and what they
contained of interest in the way of pictures and sculptures."
The boy's gift of accurate and keen observation was to be tested
soon by a very different class of objects: there were to be no
crumbling saints and canvases of Bed-Chamber Grooms for him to study
in the forests of America; no reminders of the greatness of his
country's past, and the honour of his family.
From school, the future woodsman passed over into England. A distant
relative was living near Salisbury; for one reason or another the
boy was sent thither to finish his schooling. From England, with
what motives we know not, he set out for the New World, where he was
to spend his busiest and happiest days. In the Bibliotheca Americana
Nova Rich makes the statement that Crevecoeur was but sixteen when
he made the plunge, and others have followed Rich in this error. The
lad's age was really not less than nineteen or twenty. According to
the family legend, his ship touched at Lisbon on the way out; one
cannot decide whether this was just before or immediately after the
great earthquake. Then to New France, where he joined Montcalm.
Entering the service as cadet, he advanced to the rank of
lieutenant; was mentioned in the Gazette; shared in the French
successes; drew maps of the forests and block-houses that found
their way to the king's cabinet; served with Montcalm in the attack
upon Fort William Henry. With that the record is broken off: we can
less definitely associate his name with the humiliation of the
French in America than with their brief triumphs. Yet it is quite
certain, says Robert de Crevecoeur, his descendant, that he did not
return to France with the rag-tag of the defeated army. Quebec fell
before Wolfe's attack in September 1759; at some time in the course
of the year 1760 we may suppose the young officer to have entered
the British colonies; to have adopted his family name of "Saint
John" (Saint-Jean), and to have gradually worked his way south,
probably by the Hudson. The reader of the Letters hardly supposes
him to have enjoyed his frontier life; nor is there any means of
knowing how much of that life it was his fortune to lead. In time,
he found himself as far south as Pennsylvania. He visited
Shippensburg and Lancaster and Carlisle; perhaps he resided at or
near one of these towns. Many years later, when his son Louis
purchased a farm of two hundred acres from Chancellor Livingstone,
at Navesink, near the Blue Mountains, Crevecoeur the elder was still
remembered; and it may have been at this epoch that he visited the
place. During the term of his military service under Montcalm,
Crevecoeur saw something of the Great Lakes and the outlying
country; prior to his experience as a cultivator, and, indeed, after
he had settled down as such, he "travelled like Plato," even visited
Bermuda, by his own account. Not until 1764, however, have we any
positive evidence of his whereabouts; it was in April of that year
that he took out naturalisation papers at New York. Some months
later, he installed himself on the farm variously called Greycourt
and Pine-Hill, in the same state; he drained a great marsh there,
and seems to have practised agriculture upon a generous scale. The
certificate of the marriage of Crevecoeur to Mehitable Tippet, of
Yonkers is dated September 20, 1769; and of this union three
children were the issue. And more than children: for with the
marriage ceremony once performed by the worthy Tetard, a clergyman
of New York, formerly settled over a French Reformed Church at
Charleston, South Carolina, Crevecoeur is more definitely than ever
the "American Farmer"; he has thrown in his lot with that new
country; his children are to be called after their parent's adopted
name, Saint-John; the responsibilities of the adventurer are
multiplied; his life in America has become a matter more easy to
trace and richer, perhaps, in meaning.
II
One of the historians of American literature has written that these
Letters furnish "a greater number of delightful pages than any other
book written in America during the eighteenth century, save only
Franklin's Autobiography." A safe compliment, this; and yet does not
the very emptiness of American annals during the eighteenth century
make for our cherishing all that they offer of the vivid and the
significant? Professor Moses Coit Tyler long ago suggested what was
the literary influence of the American Farmer, whose "idealised
treatment of rural life in America wrought quite traceable effects
upon the imaginations of Campbell, Byron, Southey, Coleridge, and
furnished not a few materials for such captivating and airy schemes
of literary colonisation in America as that of 'Pantisocracy.'"
Hazlitt praised the book to his friends and, as we have seen,
commended it to readers of the Edinburgh Review. Lamb mentions it in
one of his letters--which is already some distinction. Yet when was
a book more completely lost to popular view--even among the books
that have deserved oblivion? The Letters were published, all the
same, at Belfast and Dublin and Philadelphia, as well as at London;
they were recast in French by the author, translated into German and
Dutch by pirating penny-a-liners, and given a "sequel" by a
publisher at Paris. [Footnote: Ouvrage pour servir de suite aux
Lettres d'un cultivateur Americain, Paris, 1785. The work so offered
seems to have been a translation of John Filson's History of
Kentucky (Wilmington, Del., 1784).]
The American Fanner made his first public appearance eleven years
before Chateaubriand found a publisher for his Essai sur les
Revolutions, wherein the great innovator first used the American
materials that he worked over more effectively in his travels,
tales, and memoirs. In Saint-John de Crevecoeur, we have a
contemporary--a correspondent, even--of Franklin; but if our author
shared many of poor Richard's interests, one may travel far without
finding a more complete antithesis to that common-sense philosopher.
Crevecoeur expresses mild wonderment that, while so many travellers
visit Italy and "the town of Pompey under ground," few come to the
new continent, where may be studied, not what is found in books, but
"the humble rudiments and embryos of society spreading everywhere,
the recent foundations of our towns, and the settlements of so many
rural districts." In the course of his sixteen or seventeen years'
experience as an American farmer he himself studied all these
matters; and he gives us a charming picture of them. Though his book
has very little obvious system, its author describes for us frontier
and farm; the ways of the Nantucket fishermen and their intrepid
wives; life in the Middle Colonies; the refinements and atrocities
of Charleston. Crevecoeur's account of the South (that he knew but
superficially and--who knows?--more, it may be, by Tetard's
anecdotes than through personal knowledge) is the least satisfactory
part of his performance. One feels it to be the most "literary"
portion of a book whose beauty is naivete. But whether we accept or
reject the story of the negro malefactor hung in a cage from a tree,
and pecked at by crows, it is certain that the traveller justly
regarded slavery as the one conspicuous blot on the new country's
shield. Crevecoeur was not an active abolitionist, like that other
naturalised Frenchman, Benezet of Philadelphia; he had his own
slaves to work his northern farms; he was, however, a man of humane
feelings--one who "had his doubts." [Footnote: In his Voyage dans la
Haute Pensylvanie (sic) et dans l'Etat de New York (Paris, 1801)
slavery is severely attacked by Crevecoeur. His descendant, Robert
de Crevecoeur, refers to him as "a friend of Wilberforce."] And his
narrative description of life in the American colonies in the years
immediately preceding the Revolution is one that social historians
cannot ignore.
Though our Farmer emphasises his plainness, and promises the readers
of his Letters only a matter-of-fact account of his pursuits, he has
his full share of eighteenth-century "sensibility." Since he is,
however, at many removes from the sophistications of London and
Paris, he is moved, not by the fond behaviour of a lap-dog, or the
"little arrangements" carters make with the bridles of their
faithful asses (that they have driven to death, belike), but by such
matters as he finds at home. "When I contemplate my wife, by my
fire-side, while she either spins, knits, darns, or suckles our
child, I cannot describe the various emotions of love, of gratitude,
or conscious pride which thrill in my heart, and often overflow in
voluntary tears ..." He is like that old classmate's of
Fitzgerald's, buried deep "in one of the most out-of-the-way
villages in all England," for if he goes abroad, "it is always
involuntary. I never return home without feeling some pleasant
emotion, which I often suppress as useless and foolish." He has his
reveries; but they are pure and generous; their subject is the
future of his children. In midwinter, instead of trapping and
"murthering" the quail, "often in the angles of the fences where the
motion of the wind prevents the snow from settling, I carry them
both chaff and grain: the one to feed them, the other to prevent
their tender feet from freezing fast to the earth as I have
frequently observed them to do." His love of birds is marked: this
in those provinces of which a German traveller wrote: "In the thrush
kind America is poor; there is only the red-breasted robin. ...
There are no sparrows. Very few birds nest in the woods; a solemn
stillness prevails through them, interrupted only by the screaming
of the crows." It is good, after such a passage as this has been
quoted, to set down what Crevecoeur says of the bird kingdom. "In
the spring," he writes, "I generally rise from bed about that
indistinct interval which, properly speaking, is neither night nor
day:" for then it is that he enjoys "the universal vocal choir." He
continues--more and more lyrically: "Who can listen unmoved, to the
sweet love-tales of our robins, told from tree to tree? Or to the
shrill cat birds? The sublime accents of the thrush from on high,
always retard my steps, that I may listen to the delicious music."
And the Farmer is no less interested in "the astonishing art which
all birds display in the construction of their nests, ill provided
as we may suppose them with proper tools; their neatness, their
convenience." At some time during his American residence he gathered
the materials for an unpublished study of ants; and his bees proved
an unfailing source of entertainment. "Their government, their
industry, their quarrels, their passions, always present me with
something new," he writes; adding that he is most often to be found,
in hours of rest, under the locust tree where his beehive stands.
"By their movements," says he, "I can predict the weather, and can
tell the day of their swarming." When other men go hunting game, he
goes bee-hunting. Such are the matters he tells of in his Letters.
One difference from the stereotyped "sensibility" of the old world
one may discover in the openness of Crevecoeur's heart; and that is
the completeness of his interest in all the humbler sorts of natural
phenomena. Nature is, for him, no mere bundle of poetic stage-
properties, soiled by much handling, but something fresh and
inviting and full of interest to a man alive. He takes more pleasure
in hunting bees than in expeditions with his dogs and gun; the king-
birds destroy his bees--but, he adds, they drive the crows away.
Ordinarily he could not persuade himself to shoot them. On one
occasion, however, he fired at a more than commonly impertinent
specimen, "and immediately opened his maw, from which I took 171
bees; I laid them all on a blanket in the sun, and to my great
surprise fifty-four returned to life, licked themselves clean, and
joyfully went back to the hive, where they probably informed their
companions of such an adventure and escape, as I believe had never
happened before to American bees." Must one regard this as a fable?
It is by no means as remarkable a yarn as one may find told by other
naturalists of the same century. There is, for example, that undated
letter of John Bartram's, in which he makes inquiries of his brother
William concerning "Ye Wonderful Flower;" [Footnote: see "A
Botanical Marvel," in The Nation (New York), August 5, 1909.] there
is, too, Kalm's report of Bartram's bear: "When a bear catches a
cow, he kills her in the following manner: he bites a hole into the
hide and blows with all his power into it, till the animal swells
excessively and dies; for the air expands greatly between the flesh
and the hide." After these fine fancies, where is the improbability
of Crevecoeur's modest adaptation of the Jonah-allegory that he
applies to the king-bird and his bees? The episode suggests, for
that matter, a chapter in Mitchell's My Farm at Edgewood. Mitchell,
a later American farmer, describes the same king-birds, the same
bees; has, too, the same supremely gentle spirit. "I have not the
heart to shoot at the king-birds; nor do I enter very actively into
the battle of the bees. ... I give them fair play, good lodging,
limitless flowers, willows bending (as Virgil advises) into the
quiet water of a near pool; I have even read up the stories of a
poor blind Huber, who so dearly loved the bees, and the poem of
Giovanni Rucellai, for their benefit." Can the reader state, without
stopping to consider, which author it was that wrote thus--Mitchell
or Crevecoeur? Certainly it is the essential modernity of the
earlier writer's style that most impresses one, after the charm of
his pictures. His was the age of William Livingston--later Governor
of the State of New Jersey; and in the very year when a London
publisher was bringing out the first edition of the Farmer's
Letters, Livingston, described on his title-page as a "young
gentleman educated at Yale College," brought out his Philosophic
Solitude at Trenton, in his native state. It is worth quoting
Philosophic Solitude for the sake of the comparison to be drawn
between Crevecoeur's prose and contemporary American verse:-
"Let ardent heroes seek renown in arms,
Pant after fame, and rush to war's alarms ...
Mine be the pleasures of a RURAL life."
The thought is, after all, the same as that which we have found less
directly phrased in Crevecoeur. But let us quote the lines that
follow the exordium--now we should find the poet unconstrained and
fancy-free:--
"Me to sequestred scenes, ye muses, guide,
Where nature wantons in her virgin-pride;
To mossy banks edg'd round with op'ning flow'rs,
Elysian fields, and amaranthin bow'rs. ...
Welcome, ye shades! all hail, ye vernal blooms!
Ye bow'ry thickets, and prophetic glooms!
Ye forests hail! ye solitary woods. ..."
and the "solitary woods" (rhyming with "floods") are a good place to
leave the "young gentleman educated at Yale College." Livingston
was, plainly enough, a poet of his time and place. He had a fine eye
for Nature--seen through library windows. He echoed Goldsmith and a
whole line of British poets--echoed them atrociously.
That one finds no "echoes" in Crevecoeur is one of our reasons for
praising his spontaneity and vigour. He did not import nightingales
into his America, as some of the poets did. He blazed away, rather,
toward our present day appreciation of surrounding nature--which was
not banal then. Crevecoeur's honest and unconventionalised love of
his rural environment is great enough to bridge the difference
between the eighteenth and the twentieth century. It is as easy for
us to pass a happy evening with him as it was for Thomas Campbell,
figuring to himself a realisation of Cowley's dreams and of
Rousseau's poetic seclusion; "till at last," in Southey's words,
"comes an ill-looking Indian with a tomahawk, and scalps me--a most
melancholy proof that society is very bad." It is the freshness, the
youthfulness, of these Letters, after their century and more of
dust-gathering, that is least likely to escape us. And this "Farmer
in Pennsylvania" is almost as unmistakably of kin with good Gilbert
White of Selborne as he is the American Thoreau's eighteenth-century
forerunner.
III
It is time, indeed, that we made the discovery that Crevecoeur was a
modern. He was, too, a dweller in the young republic--even before it
WAS a republic. Twice a year he had "the pleasure of catching
pigeons, whose numbers are sometimes so astonishing as to obscure
the sun in their flight." There is, then, no poetic licence about
Longfellow's description, in Evangeline, of how--
"A pestilence fell on the city Presaged by wondrous signs, and
mostly by flocks of wild pigeons, Darkening the sun in their flight,
with naught in their craws but an acorn."
Longfellow could have cited as his authority for this flight of
pigeons Mathew Carey's Record of the Malignant Fever lately
Prevalent, published at Philadelphia, which, to be sure, discusses a
different epidemic, but tells us that "amongst the country people,
large quantities of wild pigeons in the spring are regarded as
certain indications of an unhealthy summer. Whether or not this
prognostic has ever been verified, I cannot tell. But it is very
certain that during the last spring the numbers of these birds
brought to market were immense. Never, perhaps, were there so many
before."
Carey wrote in 1793, the year, as has been noted, of the first
American reprint of the Letters, that had first been published at
London. Carey was himself Crevecoeur's American publisher; and he
may well have thought as he wrote the lines quoted of Crevecoeur's
earlier pigeons "obscuring the sun in their flight." Crevecoeur had
by this time returned to France, and was never more to ply the
avocations of the American farmer. In the interval, much had
happened to this victim of both the revolutions. Though the Letters
are distinguished by an idyllic temper, over them is thrown the
shadow of impending civil war. The Farmer was a man of peace, for
all his experience under Montcalm in Canada (and even there his part
was rather an engineer's than a combatant's); he long hoped,
therefore, that peaceful counsels would prevail, and that England
and the colonies would somehow come to an understanding without
hostilities. Then, after the Americans had boldly broken with the
home government, he lent them all his sympathy but not his arms. He
had his family to watch over; likewise his two farms, one in Orange
County, New York, one in New Jersey. As it was, the Indians in the
royal service burned his New Jersey estate; and after his first
return to France (he was called thither by his father, we are told,
though we know nothing of the motives of this recall) he entered
upon a new phase of his career. "After his first return to France,"
I have said, as if that had been an entirely simple matter. One
cannot here describe all its alleged difficulties; his arrest at New
York as a suspected spy (though after having secured a pass from the
American commander. General MacDougal, he had secured a second pass
from General Clinton, and permission to embark for France); his
detention in the provost's prison in New York; the final embarkation
with his oldest son--this on September 1, 1780; the shipwreck which
he described as occurring off the Irish coast; his residence for
some months in Great Britain, and during a part of that time in
London, where he sold the manuscript of the Letters for thirty
guineas. One would like to know Crevecoeur's emotions on finally
reaching France and joining his father and relatives at Caen. One
would like to describe his romantic succour of five American seamen,
who had escaped from an English prison and crossed the Channel in a
sloop to Normandy. A cousin of one of these seamen, a Captain
Fellowes of Boston, was later to befriend Crevecoeur's daughter and
younger son in the new country; that was after the Loyalists and
their Indian allies had destroyed the Farmer's house at Pine Hill,
after his wife had fled to Westchester with her two children, and
had died there soon after, leaving them unprotected. But all this
must, in nautical phrase, "go by the board," including the novel
founded upon the episode. Nor can we linger over Crevecoeur's entry
into polite society, both in the Norman capital and at Paris. Fancy
the returned prodigal--if one may so describe him--in the salon of
Madame d'Houdetot, Rousseau's former mistress! He was fairly
launched, this American Farmer, in the society of the lettres.
"Twice a week," he wrote, some years after, "I went with M. de
Turgot to see the Duchesse de Beauvilliers, his sister; and another
twice-a-week I went with him to the Comte de Buffon's. ... It was at
the table of M. de Buffon, it was in his salon, during long winter
evenings, that I was awakened once more to the graces, the beauties,
the timid purity of our tongue, which, during my long sojourn in
North America, had become foreign to me, and of which I had almost
lost command--though not the memory."
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