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.
