Crèvecœur's observation.
The horse, however, says Hector, is the friend of man, and man is the
friend of the horse. But then we leave the horse no choice. And I don't
see much _friend_, exactly, in my sly old Indian pony, though he is
quite a decent old bird.
Man, too, says Hector, is the friend of man. Whereupon the Indians burnt
his farm; so he refrains from mentioning it in the _Letters_, for fear
of invalidating his premises.
Some great hornets have fixed their nest on the ceiling of the
living-room of the American Farmer, and these tiger-striped animals fly
round the heads of the Healthy Offspring and the Amiable Spouse, to the
gratification of the American Farmer. He liked their buzz and their
tiger waspishness. Also, on the utilitarian plane, they kept the house
free of flies. So Hector says. Therefore Benjamin would have approved.
But of the feelings of the Amiable S., on this matter, we are not told,
and after all, it was she who had to make the jam.
Another anecdote. Swallows built their nest on the verandah of the
American Farm. Wrens took a fancy to the nest of the swallows. They
pugnaciously (I like the word pugnaciously, it is so American) attacked
the harbingers of spring, and drove them away from their nice adobe
nest. The swallows returned upon opportunity. But the wrens, coming
home, violently drove them forth again. Which continued until the gentle
swallows patiently set about to build another nest, while the wrens sat
in triumph, in the usurped home. The American Farmer watched this
contest with delight, and no doubt loudly applauded those little rascals
of wrens. For in the Land of the Free, the greatest delight of every man
is in getting the better of the other man.
Crèvecœur says he shot a kingbird that had been devouring his bees. He
opened the craw and took out a vast number of bees, which little
democrats, after they had lain a minute or two stunned, in the sun
roused, revived, preened their wings and walked off debonair, like Jonah
up the seashore; or like true Yanks escaped from the craw of the
kingbird of Europe.
I don't care whether it's true or not. I like the picture, and see in it
a parable of the American resurrection.
The humming-bird.
"Its bill is as long and as sharp as a coarse sewing needle; like the
Bee, Nature has taught it to find out in the calyx of flowers and
blossoms those mellifluous particles that can serve it for sufficient
food; and yet it seems to leave them untouched, undeprived of anything
that the eye can possibly distinguish. Where it feeds it appears as if
immovable, though continually on the wing: and sometimes, from what
motives I know not, it will tear and lacerate flowers into a hundred
pieces; for, strange to tell, they are the most irascible of the
feathered tribe. Where do passions find room in so diminutive a body?
They often fight with the fury of lions, until one of the combatants
falls a sacrifice and dies. When fatigued, it has often perched within a
few feet of me, and on such favourable opportunities I have surveyed it
with the most minute attention. Its little eyes appear like diamonds,
reflecting light on every side; most elegantly finished in all parts, it
is a miniature work of our Great Parent, who seems to have formed it
smallest, and at the same time most beautiful, of the winged species."
A regular little Tartar, too. Lions no bigger than ink spots! I have
read about humming-birds elsewhere, in Bates and W. H. Hudson, for
example. But it is left to the American Farmer to show me the real
little raging lion. Birds are evidently no angels in America, or to the
true American. He sees how they start and flash their wings like little
devils, and stab each other with egoistic sharp bills. But he sees also
the reserved, tender shyness of the wild creature, upon occasion. Quails
in winter, for instance.
"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."
This is beautiful, and blood-knowledge. Crèvecœur knows the touch of
birds' feet, as if they had stood with their vibrating, sharp,
cold-cleaving balance, naked-footed on his naked hand. It is a
beautiful, barbaric tenderness of the blood. He doesn't after all turn
them into "little sisters of the air," like St. Francis, or start
preaching to them. He knows them as strange, shy, hot-blooded
concentrations of bird-presence.
The _Letter_, about snakes and humming-birds is a fine essay, in its
primal, dark veracity. The description of the fight between two snakes,
a great water-snake and a large black serpent, follows the description
of the humming-bird: "Strange was this to behold; two great snakes
strongly adhering to the ground, mutually fastened together by means of
the writhings which lashed them to each other, and stretched at their
full length, they pulled but pulled in vain; and in the moments of
greatest exertions that part of their bodies which was entwined seemed
extremely small, while the rest appeared inflated, and now and then
convulsed with strong undulations, rapidly following each other. Their
eyes seemed on fire, and ready to start out of their heads; at one time
the conflict seemed decided; the water-snake bent itself into two great
folds, and by that operation rendered the other more than commonly
outstretched. The next minute the new struggles of the black one gained
an unexpected superiority; it acquired two great folds likewise, which
necessarily extended the body of its adversary in proportion as it had
contracted its own."
This fight, which Crèvecœur describes to a finish, he calls a sight
"uncommon and beautiful." He forgets the sweet-and-pureness of Nature,
and is for the time a sheer ophiolater, and his chapter is as handsome a
piece of ophiolatry, perhaps, as that coiled Aztec rattlesnake carved in
stone.
And yet the real Crèvecœur is, in the issue, neither farmer, nor child
of Nature, nor ophiolater. He goes back to France, and figures in the
literary salons, and is a friend of Rousseau's Madame d'Houdetot. Also
he is a good business man, and arranges a line of shipping between
France and America. It all ends in materialism, really. But the
_Letters_ tell us nothing about this.
We are left to imagine him retiring in grief to dwell with his Red
Brothers under the wigwams. For the War of Independence has broken out,
and the Indians are armed by the adversaries; they do dreadful work on
the frontiers. While Crèvecœur is away in France his farm is
destroyed, his family rendered homeless. So that the last letter laments
bitterly over the war, and man's folly and inhumanity to man.
But Crèvecœur ends his lament on a note of resolution. With his
amiable spouse, and his healthy offspring, now rising in stature, he
will leave the civilized coasts, where man is sophisticated and
therefore inclined to be vile, and he will go to live with the Children
of Nature, the Red Men, under the wigwam. No doubt, in actual life,
Crèvecœur made some distinction between the Indian, who drank rum à
la Franklin, and who burnt homesteads and massacred families, and those
Indians, the noble Children of Nature, who peopled his own
pre-determined fancy. Whatever he did in actual life, in his innermost
self he would not give up this self-made world, where the natural man
was an object of undefiled brotherliness. Touchingly and vividly he
describes his tented home near the Indian village, how he breaks the
aboriginal earth to produce a little maize, while his wife weaves within
the wigwam. And his imaginary efforts to save his tender offspring from
the brutishness of unchristian darkness are touching and puzzling, for
how can Nature, so sweet and pure under the greenwood tree, how can it
have any contaminating effect?
But it is all a swindle. Crèvecœur was off to France in high-heeled
shoes and embroidered waist-coat, to pose as a literary man, and to
prosper in the world. We, however, must perforce follow him into the
backwoods, where the simple natural life shall be perfected, near the
tented village of the Bed Man.
He wanted, of course, to imagine the dark, savage way of life, to get it
all off pat in his head. He wanted to know as the Indians and savages
know, darkly, and in terms of otherness. He was simply crazy, as the
Americans say, for this. Crazy enough! For at the same time he was
absolutely determined that Nature is sweet and pure, that all men are
brothers, and equal, and that they love one another like so many cooing
doves. He was determined to have life according to his own prescription.
Therefore, he wisely kept away from any too close contact with Nature,
and took refuge in commerce and the material world. But yet, he was
determined to know the savage way of life, to his own _mind's_
satisfaction. So he just faked us the last _Letters._ A sort of
wish-fulfillment.
For the animals and savages are isolate, each one in its own pristine
self. The animal lifts its head, sniffs, and knows within the dark,
passionate belly. It knows at once, in dark mindlessness. And at once it
flees in immediate recoil; or it crouches predatory, in the mysterious
storm of exultant anticipation of seizing a victim; or it lowers its
head in blank indifference again; or it advances in the insatiable wild
curiosity, insatiable passion to approach that which is unspeakably
strange and incalculable; or it draws near in the slow trust of wild,
sensual love.
Crèvecœur wanted this kind of knowledge. But comfortably, in his head,
along with his other ideas and ideals. He didn't go too near the wigwam.
Because he must have suspected that the moment he saw as the savages
saw, all his fraternity and equality would go up in smoke, and his ideal
world of pure sweet goodness along with it. And still worse than this,
he would have to give up his own will, which insists that the world is
so, because it would be nicest if it were so. Therefore he trotted back
to France in high-heeled shoes, and imagined America in Paris.
He wanted his ideal state. At the same time he wanted to know the other
state, the dark, savage mind. He wanted both.
Can't be done, Hector. The one is the death of the other.
Best turn to commerce, where you may get things your own way.
He hates the dark, pre-mental life, really. He hates the true sensual
mystery. But he wants to "know." To KNOW. Oh, insatiable American
curiosity!
He's a liar.
But if he won't risk knowing in flesh and blood, he'll risk all the
imagination you like.
It is amusing to see him staying away and calculating the dangers of the
step which he takes so luxuriously, in his fancy alone. He tickles his
palate with a taste of true wildness, as men are so fond nowadays of
tickling their palates with a taste of imaginary wickedness--just
self-provoked.
"I must tell you," he says, "that there is something in the proximity of
the woods which is very singular. It is with men as it is with the
plants and animals that live in the forests; they are entirely different
from those that live in the plains. I will candidly tell you all my
thoughts, but you are not to expect that I shall advance any reasons. By
living in or near the woods, their actions are regulated by the wildness
of the neighbourhood. The deer often come to eat their grain, the wolves
destroy their sheep, the bears kill their hogs, the foxes catch their
poultry. This surrounding hostility immediately puts the gun into their
hands; they watch these animals, they kill some; and thus by defending
their property they soon become professed hunters; this is the progress;
once hunters, farewell to the plough. The chase renders them ferocious,
gloomy, unsociable; a hunter wants no neighbours, he rather hates them,
because he dreads the competition... Eating of wild meat, whatever you
may think, tends to alter their temper..."
Crèvecœur, of course, had never intended to return as a hunter to the
bosom of Nature, only as a husbandman. The hunter is a killer. The
husbandman, on the other hand, brings about the birth and increase. But
even the husbandman strains in dark mastery over the unwilling earth and
beast; he struggles to win forth substance, he must master the soil and
the strong cattle, he must have the heavy blood-knowledge, and the slow,
but deep, mastery. There is no equality or selfless humility. The
toiling blood swamps the idea, inevitably. For this reason the most
idealist nations invent most machines. America simply teems with
mechanical inventions, because nobody in America ever wants to _do_
anything. They are idealists. Let a machine do the doing.
Again, Crèvecœur dwells on "the apprehension lest my younger children
should be caught by that singular charm, so dangerous to their tender
years"--meaning the charm of savage life. So he goes on: "By what power
does it come to pass that children who have been adopted when young
among these people (the Indians) can never be prevailed upon to re-adopt
European manners? Many an anxious parent have I seen last war who, at
the return of peace, went to the Indian villages where they knew their
children to have been carried in captivity, when to their inexpressible
sorrow they found them so perfectly Indianized that many knew them no
longer, and those whose more advanced ages permitted them to recollect
their fathers and mothers, absolutely refused to follow them, and ran to
their adopted parents to protect them against the effusions of love
their unhappy real parents lavished on them! Incredible as this may
appear, I have heard it asserted in a thousand instances, among persons
of credit.
"There must be something in their (the Indians') social bond singularly
captivating, and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us; for
thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one
of those aborigines having from choice become Europeans..."
Our cat and another, Hector.
I like the picture of thousands of obdurate off-spring, with faces
averted from their natural white father and mother, turning resolutely
to the Indians of their adoption.
I have seen some Indians whom you really couldn't tell from white men.
And I have never seen a white man who looked really like an Indian. So
Hector is again a liar.
But Crèvecœur wanted to be an intellectual savage, like a great many
more we have met. Sweet children of Nature. Savage and bloodthirsty
children of Nature.
White Americans do try hard to intellectualize themselves. Especially
white women Americans. And the latest stunt is this "savage" stunt
again.
White savages, with motor-cars, telephones, incomes and ideals! Savages
fast inside the machine; yet savage enough, ye gods!
IV. FENIMORE COOPER'S WHITE NOVELS
Benjamin franklin had a specious little equation in providential
mathematics:
Rum + Savage = 0
Awfully nice! You might add up the universe to nought, if you kept on.
Rum plus Savage may equal a dead savage. But is a dead savage nought?
Can you make a land virgin by killing off its aborigines?
The Aztec is gone, and the Incas. The Red Indian, the Esquimo, the
Patagonian are reduced to negligible numbers.
_Où sont les neiges d'antan?_
My dear, wherever they are, they will come down again next winter, sure
as houses.
Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At
least I presume not. But his ghost will.
The Red Man died hating the white man. What remnant of him lives, lives
hating the white man. Go near the Indians, and you just feel it. As far
as we are concerned, the Red Man is subtly and unremittingly diabolic.
Even when he doesn't know it. He is dispossessed in life, and
unforgiving. He doesn't believe in us and our civilization, and so is
our mystic enemy, for we push him off the face of the earth.
Belief is a mysterious thing. It is the only healer of the soul's
wounds. There is no belief in the world.
The Red Man is dead, disbelieving in us. He is dead and unappeased. Do
not imagine him happy in his Happy Hunting Ground. No. Only those that
die in belief die happy. Those that are pushed out of life in chagrin
come back unappeased, for revenge.
A curious thing about the Spirit of Place is the fact that no place
exerts its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is
dead or absorbed. So America. While the Red Indian existed in fairly
large numbers the new colonials were in a great measure immune from the
daimon, or demon of America. The moment the last nuclei of Red life
break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the
full force of the demon of the continent. At present the demon of the
place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians act within the
unconscious or under-conscious soul of the white American, causing the
great American grouch, the Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness in the
Yankee soul, the inner malaise which amounts almost to madness,
sometimes. The Mexican is macabre and disintegrated in his own way. Up
till now, the unexpressed spirit of America has worked covertly in the
American, the white American soul. But within the present generation the
surviving Red Indians are due to merge in the great white swamp. Then
the Daimon of America will work overtly, and we shall see real changes.
There has been all the time, in the white American soul, a dual feeling
about the Indian. First was Franklin's feeling, that a wise Providence
no doubt intended the extirpation of these savages. Then came
Crèvecœur's contradictory feeling about the noble Red Man and the
innocent life of the wigwam. Now we hate to subscribe to Benjamin's
belief in a Providence that wisely extirpates the Indian to make room
for "cultivators of the soil." In Crèvecœur we meet a sentimental
desire for the glorification of the savages. Absolutely sentimental.
Hector pops over to Paris to enthuse about the wigwam.
The desire to extirpate the Indian. And the contradictory desire to
glorify him. Both are rampant still, to-day.
The bulk of the white people who live in contact with the Indian to-day
would like to see this Red brother exterminated; not only for the sake
of grabbing his land, but because of the silent, invisible, but deadly
hostility between the spirit of the two races. The minority of whites
intellectualize the Red Man and laud him to the skies. But this minority
of whites is mostly a high-brow minority with a big grouch against its
own whiteness. So there you are.
I doubt if there is possible any real reconciliation, in the flesh,
between the white and the red. For instance, a Red Indian girl who is
servant in the white man's home, if she is treated with natural
consideration will probably serve well, even happily. She is happy with
the new power over the white woman's kitchen. The white world makes her
feel prouder, so long as she is free to go back to her own people at the
given times. But she is happy because she is playing at being a white
woman. There are other Indian women who would never serve the white
people, and who would rather die than have a white man for a lover.
In either case, there is no reconciliation. There is no mystic
conjunction between the spirit of the two races. The Indian girl who
happily serves white people leaves out her own race-consideration, for
the time being.
Supposing a white man goes out hunting in the mountains with an Indian.
The two will probably get on like brothers. But let the same white man
go alone with two Indians, and there will start a most subtle
persecution of the unsuspecting white. If they, the Indians, discover
that he has a natural fear of steep places, then over every precipice in
the country will the trail lead. And so on. Malice! That is the basic
feeling in the Indian heart, towards the white. It may even be purely
unconscious.
Supposing an Indian loves a white woman, and lives with her. He will
probably be very proud of it, for he will be a big man among his own
people, especially if the white mistress has money. He will never get
over the feeling of pride at dining in a white dining-room and smoking
in a white drawing-room. But at the same time he will subtly jeer at his
white mistress, try to destroy her white pride. He will submit to her,
if he is forced to, with a kind of false, unwilling childishness, and
even love her with the same childlike gentleness, sometimes beautiful.
But at the bottom of his heart he is gibing, gibing, gibing at her. Not
only is it the sex resistance, but the race resistance as well.
There seems to be no reconciliation in the flesh.
That leaves us only expiation, and then reconciliation in the soul. Some
strange atonement: expiation and oneing.
Fenimore Cooper has probably done more than any writer to present the
Red Man to the white man. But Cooper's presentment is indeed a
wish-fulfilment. That is why Fenimore is such a success, still.
Modern critics begrudge Cooper his success. I think I resent it a little
myself. This popular wish-fulfilment stuff makes it so hard for the real
thing to come through, later.
Cooper was a rich American of good family. His father founded
Cooperstown, by Lake Champlain. And Fenimore was a gentleman of culture.
No denying it.
It is amazing how cultured these Americans of the first half of the
eighteenth century were. Most intensely so. Austin Dobson and Andrew
Lang are flea-bites in comparison. Volumes of very _raffiné_ light
verse and finely-drawn familiar literature will prove it to anyone who
cares to commit himself to these elderly books. The English and French
writers of the same period were clumsy and hoydenish, judged by the same
standards.
Truly, European decadence was anticipated in America; and American
influence passed over to Europe, was assimilated there, and then
returned to this land of innocence as something purplish in its
modernity and a little wicked. So absurd things are.
Cooper quotes a Frenchman, who says, "_L'Amérique est pourrie avant
d'être mûre._" And there is a great deal in it. America was not taught
by France--by Baudelaire, for example. Baudelaire learned his lesson
from America.
Cooper's novels fall into two classes: his white novels, such as
_Homeward Bound, Eve Effingham, The Spy, The Pilot_, and then the
_Leatherstocking Series._ Let us look at the white novels first.
The Effinghams are three extremely refined, genteel Americans who are
"Homeward Bound" from England to the States. Their party consists of
father, daughter, and uncle, and faithful nurse. The daughter has just
finished her education in Europe. She has, indeed, skimmed the cream off
Europe. England, France, Italy, and Germany have nothing more to teach
her. She is bright and charming, admirable creature; a real modern
heroine; intrepid, calm, and self-collected, yet admirably impulsive,
always in perfectly good taste; clever and assured in her speech, like a
man, but withal charmingly deferential and modest before the stronger
sex. It is the perfection of the ideal female. We have learned to
shudder at her, but Cooper still admired.
On board is the other type of American, the parvenu, the demagogue, who
has "done" Europe and put it in his breeches pocket, in a month. Oh,
Septimus Dodge, if a European had drawn you, that European would never
have been forgiven by America. But an American drew you, so Americans
wisely ignore you.
Septimus is the American self-made man. God had no hand in his make-up.
He made himself. He has been to Europe, no doubt seen everything,
including the Venus de Milo. "What, is that the Venus de Milo?" And he
turns his back on the lady. He's seen her. He's got her. She's a fish he
has hooked, and he's off to America with her, leaving the scum of a
statue standing in the Louvre.
That is one American wav of Vandalism. The original Vandals would have
given the complacent dame a knock with a battle-axe, and ended her. The
insatiable American looks at her. "Is that the Venus de Milo?--come on!"
And the Venus de Milo stands there like a naked slave in a market-place,
whom someone has spat on. Spat on!