Letters from an American Farmer | Page 7

Through the influence of
Madame d'Houdetot and her friends, he retained the appointment
through the stormy years that followed, though in the end he was
obliged to make way for a successor more in sympathy with the violent
republicanism of the age. Throughout 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