Letters from an American Farmer | Page 5

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