Letters from an American Farmer | Page 7

the years of the French Revolution, the ex-farmer lived a life of retirement, and, if never of conspicuous danger, of embarrassment enough, and of humiliation. We need not discuss those years spent at Paris; or the visits paid, after the close of the Revolution, to his son-in-law and daughter, for his daughter Frances-America was married to a French Secretary of Legation, who became a Count of the Empire. Now he was in Paris or the suburbs; now in London, or Munich. Five years of the Farmer's later life were spent at the Bavarian capital; Maximilian entertained him there, and told him that he had read his book with the keenest pleasure and great profit too. He busied himself in preparing his three-volume Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie (sic) et dans l'Etat de New York, and in adding to his paper on potato culture,[Footnote: Traite de la Culture des Pommes de Terre, 1782.] a second on the false acacia; but his best work was done and he knew it. Crevecoeur lived on until 1813, dying in the same year with Madame d'Houdetot, who was so much his elder. He paid a worthy tribute to that lady's character; perhaps we do her an injustice in knowing her only for the liaison with Jean-Jacques. He died on November 12, 1813: member of agricultural societies and of the Academy (section of moral and political science), and of Franklin's Philosophical Society at Philadelphia. A town in Vermont had been named St. Johnsbury in his honour; he had the freedom of more than one New England city. It is, none the less, as the author of Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782, and written, for the most part, years before that date, that we remember him--so far as we do remember.

IV
Much remains unsaid--much, even, of the essential. Some of the facts are still unknown; others may be looked for in the biography written by his great-grandson, Robert de Crevecoeur, and published at Paris some eighty years ago. There is hardly occasion to discuss here what Crevecoeur did, as consul at New York, to encourage the exchange of French manufactures and American exports; or to tell of his packet- line--the first established between New York and a French port; or to set down the story of his children; or to describe those last sad years, at home and abroad, after the close of his consular career. There is no room at all for the words of praise that were spoken of the Letters by Franklin and Washington, who recommended them to intending immigrants as a faithful, albeit "highly coloured" picture. We must let the writings of the American Farmer speak for themselves: they belong, after all, to literature.
It was a modest man--a modest life; a life filled, none the less, with romantic incident. All this throws into relief the beauty of its best fruits. Crevecoeur made no claim to artistry when he wrote his simple, heartfelt Letters; and yet his style, in spite of occasional defects and extra flourishes, seems to us worthy of his theme. These Letters from an American Farmer have been an inspiration to poets--and they "smell of the woods."
In a prose age, Crevecoeur lived a kind of pastoral poetry; in an age largely blind, he saw the beauties of nature, less through readings in the Nouvelle Heloise and Bernardin's Etudes than with his own keen eyes; he was a true idealist, besides, and as such kindles one's enthusiasm. The man's optimism, his grateful personality, his saneness, too--for here is a dreamer neither idle nor morbid--are qualities no less enduring, or endearing, than his fame as "poet-naturalist." The American Farmer might have used Cotton's Retirement for an epigraph on his title-page:--
"Farewell, thou busy world, and may We never meet again, Here I can eat and sleep and pray. ..."
but for the fact that he found time to turn the clods, withal, and eyes to watch the earth blackening behind the plough. "Our necessities," wrote Poe, who contended, in a half-hearted way, that the Americans of his generation were as poetical a people as any other, "have been mistaken for our propensities. Having been forced to make railroads, it has been deemed impossible that we should make verse." But here was Saint-John de Crevecoeur writing, in the eighteenth century, his idyllic Letters, while, if he did not build railways, he interested himself in the experiments of Fitch and Rumsey and Parmentier, and organised a packet-line between New York and Lorient, in Brittany. This Crevecoeur should from the first have appealed to the imagination--especially to the American imagination- -combining as he did the faculty of the ideal and the achievement of the actual. It is not too late for him to appeal to-day; in spite of all his quaintness, Crevecoeur is a contemporary of