RONSARD paints us a picture of Mary Stuart, about to depart for Scotland after François II’s death:
De tel habit vous estiez accoustrée,
Partant hélas! de la belle contrée
(Dont aviez eu le sceptre dans la main)
Lorsque pensive et baignant vostre sein
Du beau crystal de vos larmes roulées,
Triste, marchiez par les longue allées
Du grand jardin de ce royal chasteau
Qui prend son nom de la source d’une eau.[3]
Did I resemble the widowed Mary Stuart strolling in Fontainebleau as I strolled on the savannah, after being widowed by my Floridians? What is certain, in any case, is that my mind, if not my person, was enveloped by “a long veil, fine and flowing,” as Ronsard, that old poet of the new school, goes on to say.
The devil having carried off the Muskogee ladies, I learned from the guide that a “Burntwood,” who was in love with one of the two women, had been jealous of me and that he had conspired with a Seminole, who was the other woman’s brother, to deprive me of “Atala” and “Céluta.” The guides bluntly called them “painted women,” which wounded my vanity. I felt still more humiliated when I learned that the “Burntwood,” my favored rival, was a measly mosquito, ugly and dark, and with all the other characteristics of those insects that, according to the definitions of the Great Lama’s entomologists, are creatures who wear their flesh on the inside and their bones on the outside. The solitudes looked empty to me after my misadventure. I turned a cold shoulder to my sylph when she generously rushed to console her faithless lover, like Julie when she forgave Saint-Preux his Parisian Floridians.[4] I hastened to leave the wilderness, where I have since revived the drowsy companions of my night. I do not know if I have given them back the life that they gave me; but at least I made a virgin of one and a chaste wife of the other, by way of expiation.
We crossed over the Blue Mountains again and returned to the European clearings near Chillicothi. I was no wiser about the principal object of my journey to America; but I was escorted by a world of poetry:
Like a young bee working in the dew,
My muse returned with honey, too.
Along the bank of a stream, I caught sight of an American house with a farm on one wing and a mill on the other. I went in, seeking food and shelter, and I was well received.
My hostess led me up a ladder into a room over the mill wheel. My little window, festooned with ivy and cobaea flowering with iris bells, overlooked the stream that flowed, narrow and solitary, between two thick borders of willow, elm, sassafras, tamarind, and Carolina poplar. The mossy mill wheel turned in their shade, letting fall long ribbons of water. Perch and trout leapt in the swirling foam, wagtails flew from one bank to the other, and a kind of kingfisher hovered above the current on bright blue wings.
I thought how happy I would have been here with the melancholy Muskogee girl, supposing she were faithful; how I would sit at her feet lost in dreams with my head against her knees, listening to the noise of the falling water, the revolutions of the wheel, the rolling of the millstone, the sifting and bolting of the flour, the even beat of the mill-clapper, breathing in the fresh scent of the water and the efflorescence of the pearl barley.
Night fell. I climbed down to the farmhouse parlor. It was lit only by the corn straw and the bean shells blazing in the fireplace. The miller’s rifles, laid horizontally in the gun-rack, glinted in the firelight glow. I sat down on a stool at the corner of the wide hearth beside a squirrel, who amused himself by jumping back and forth between the neck of an enormous dog and the shelf of a spinning wheel. A little cat took possession of my knee to watch this game. The miller’s wife hung a large cooking pot over the fire, and the flames embraced its black base like a crown of radiant gold. While the potatoes for my supper boiled under my supervision, I passed the time reading, by the light of the fire, an English newspaper that had fallen to the floor at my feet. I saw, printed in large letters, these words: FLIGHT OF THE KING. It was the story of Louis XVI’s attempted escape and the doomed monarch’s arrest in Varennes. The paper also recounted the progress of the emigration and the gathering of military officers under the flag of the French princes.
My mind instantly underwent a complete conversion. Rinaldo saw his weakness in the Mirror of Honor in Armida’s gardens.[5] I am no hero out of Tasso, but the same mirror showed me my image in the depths of an American orchard. The clash of arms and the tumult of the world resounded in my ears beneath the thatched roof of a mill, hidden in the darkness of a foreign wood: I said to myself, “Return to France,” and I abruptly put an end to my travels.
Thus, what seemed to me a duty overthrew my original plans, and brought about the first of those vicissitudes with which my career has been scored. The Bourbons needed a Breton cadet to return from overseas and offer them his obscure devotion no more than they would need his services later, when he emerged from his obscurity. If I had lit my pipe with the newspaper that changed my life, and gone on with my travels, no one would have noticed my absence; my life then was as anonymous and slight as the smoke from my calumet. A simple dispute between myself and my conscience cast me onto the world’s stage. I might have done whatever I wished, seeing that I was the sole witness to the struggle; but of all witnesses, this is the one before whom I am most ashamed to blush.
Why do the solitudes of Erie and Ontario present themselves to my mind today with a charm that my memory does not find even in the brilliant spectacle of the Bosphorus? It is because, at the time of my travels in the United States, I was full of illusions. The troubles in France began at the same moment that I began my journey, and nothing was decided, neither in myself nor in my country. Those days are sweet to me, because they recall the innocent feelings inspired by my family and the pleasures of youth.
Fifteen years later, after my voyage to the Levant, I found the Republic, swollen with rubble and tears, disploding like a deluge into despotism. I no longer soothed myself with chimeras; my memories, which had begun to take their material from society and passions, had lost their innocence. Disappointed in my pilgrimages to the West and to the East, I had failed to discover the passage to the Pole, I had failed to win glory on the banks of Niagara, where I had gone to seek it, and I had left it undisturbed on the ruins of Athens.
Setting out to be an explorer in America, returning to be a soldier in Europe, I saw neither of these careers through to the end. An evil spirit tore the baton and the sword from me, and put a pen in my hand. Another fifteen years have passed since I contemplated the night sky above Sparta, remembering the many countries that had already witnessed me sleeping in peace or with trouble in mind: among the woods of Germany, on the moors of England, in the fields of Italy, on the open ocean, in the Canadian forests, I had already looked up at the same stars that I saw shining above the homeland of Helen and Menelaus. But why bother complaining to the stars, those motionless witnesses to my vagabond destinies? One day their gaze shall no longer weary itself pursuing me. For the moment, indifferent to my fate, I will not ask these astral bodies to shield it with a gentler influence, or to restore me whatever it is that a traveler leaves of himself in the places he visits.
•
If I were to see the United States again, I would no longer recognize it. Where I left forests, I would find cultivated fields; where I cleared a path through a thicket, I would ride on a highway. In Natchez, where Céluta’s hut once stood, there is now a town of five thousand inhabitants. Chactas might today be a representative to Congress. Not long ago I received a pamphlet printed by the Cherokees, which was addressed to me, on behalf of the tribe, as “a defender of the freedom of the press.”
In the land of the Muskogees, the Seminoles, and the Chickasaws, there is a city called Athens, another called Marathon, as well as a Carthage, a Memphis, a Sparta, and a Florence. There is a District of Columbia and a county of Marengo. The glory of every nation leaves a name in the same wilderness where I met Father Aubry and the obscure Atala. Kentucky has its Versailles, and a territory called Bourbon has Paris for its capital.
All the exiles, all the oppressed who have found sanctuary in America, have carried the memory of their homelands with them:
. . . Falsi Simoentis ad undam
Libabat cineri Andromache.[6]
The United States offer in their bosom, under the protection of liberty, an emblem and a memory of the most celebrated places of antiquity and modern Europe. Hadrian, in his garden in the Roman countryside, had the monuments of his empire reproduced.
Thirty-three highways leave Washington today, as in former times the roads of Rome radiated from the Capital. These highways describe, in their ramifications, the circumference of the United States, tracing a circuit of 25,747 miles. On most of these roads, post offices have been built. One hires a stagecoach bound for the Ohio or Niagara as in my day one hired a guide or an Indian interpreter. Modes of transportation have doubled. Lakes and rivers are everywhere, linked together by canals. One can travel beside terrestrial paths in rowboats or sailboats, barges or steamers. Fuel is inexhaustible, for immense forests cover coal mines that rise to the earth’s surface.
The population of the United States has increased decade by decade, between the years 1790 and 1820, at the rate of thirty-five individuals per one hundred. One may assume then that by 1830 there will be twelve million eight hundred and seventy-five thousand souls. If these numbers continue to double every twenty-five years, there will be twenty-five million in 1855, and, twenty-five years later, in 1880, there will be more than fifty million.
This human sap makes every part of the wilderness flower. The lakes of Canada, once devoid of sails, today resemble dockyards: frigates, corvettes, cutters, and barques cross paths with Indian pirogues and canoes, like the big ships and galleys mingling with the pinks, rowboats, and caiques in the waters of Constantinople.
The Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Ohio no longer flow in solitude: three-masters ascend them, and more than two hundred steamboats invigorate their shores.
This immense inland navigation, which by itself would ensure the prosperity of the United States, has never stopped them from making more distant expeditions. Their ships sail on every sea, engage in every kind of enterprise, and transport the starred flag from the land of the setting sun to the land of the dawn that has never known anything but servitude.
To complete this staggering picture, one must imagine the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans lighted up at night, filled with horses and carriages, adorned with cafés, museums, libraries, dance halls, and theaters, offering all the pleasures of luxury.
At the same time, it is no use looking in the United States for that which sets man apart from other created beings—that which is the certificate of his immortality and the ornament of his days: literature is unknown in the new republic, although a great many establishments may have called for it. The American has replaced intellectual activity with practical activity. But do not impute his mediocrity in the arts to the American’s inferiority, for he has not yet turned his attention to their making. Cast by various causes on a desert soil, he has so far cared only for agriculture and commerce. Before being able to think, one must survive; before planting trees, one must fell them in order to plow. The earliest colonists, their minds steeped in religious dissension, brought, it is true, a passion for argument even into the bosom of the forests; but first they had to conquer the wilderness with hatchets on their shoulders. When they rested from their labors, their only pulpit was the elm tree that they themselves had squared. The Americans have not passed through the successive ages of other nations. They have left behind their childhood and youth in Europe, and the naive prattling of the cradle is unknown to them; they have enjoyed the comforts of the hearth only through regret for a homeland that they have never seen: they mourn its eternal absence and its rumored charms.
There is no such thing on the new continent as classical literature, romantic literature, or Indian literature: Americans have no model for the classical, no Middle Ages for the romantic, and, as for the Indian, Americans despise the savages and regard the forest with horror, as though it were a prison to which they had once been condemned.
For these reasons, literature as a thing apart, literature properly defined, does not exist in America. There is applied literature that serves various social causes, and there is a literature of workers, merchants, sailors, and farmers. Americans have hardly succeeded in anything except engineering and science, and that is because the sciences have their material side: Franklin and Fulton have harnessed lightning and steam to the benefit of mankind. It fell to America to supply the world with discoveries that will make it impossible for any continent to evade the navigator’s search.
Poetry and imagination, the share of a very small number of idlers, are regarded in the United States as puerilities of childhood and old age. But then, Americans have not had a childhood; they have not yet experienced old age.
From this it follows that the men engaged in serious studies have necessarily taken part in the affairs of their country, in order to become acquainted with them, and that these same men necessarily found themselves taking part in their Revolution. But one sad thing must be noted: the rapid degeneration of talent, from the first men to involve themselves in the American troubles down to the men of recent times. Yet these men have something in common nevertheless. The old Presidents of the American Republic had characters defined by their piety, simplicity, honor, and calm: qualities of which one finds no trace in the bloody fracas of our Republic or our Empire. The solitude by which Americans were surrounded acted upon their nature, and they achieved their liberty in silence.
General Washington’s farewell address to the people of the United States might have been spoken by one of the gravest characters of antiquity:
“How far in the discharge of my official duties,” says the General, “I have been guided by the principles which have been delineated, the public records and other evidences of my conduct must witness to you and to the world. To myself, the assurance of my own conscience is, that I have at least believed myself to be guided by them. Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service, with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.”
Jefferson, in his house at Monticello, after the death of one of his two children, writes:
“The loss which I have experienced is great indeed. Others may lose of their abundance, but I, of my want, have lost even the half of all I had. My evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life. Perhaps I may be destined to see even this last cord of parental affection broken!”
Philosophy, which is so rarely touching, is here touching in the highest degree. And this is not the idle sorrow of a man who has played no part in life: Jefferson died July 4, 1826, at the age of eight-four, in the fifty-fourth year of his country’s independence. His remains lie covered by a stone engraved with a simple epitaph: THOMAS JEFFERSON, author of the Declaration of Independence.
Pericles and Demosthenes once delivered a eulogy for those young Greeks that fell defending a people that disappeared soon after them; so Brackenridge, in 1817, celebrated the death of those young Americans whose blood gave birth to a people.
There exists a national gallery of portraits of distinguished Americans, in four octavo volumes, and, what is even more remarkable, a biographical compendium that records the lives of more than one hundred Indian chiefs. Logan, Chief of the Cayuga, delivered these words to Lord Dunmore: “Colonel Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not even sparing my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it. I have killed many. I have fully glutted my vengeance. For I rejoice at the beams of peace; but do not harbor a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? No one!”
Without loving nature, Americans have applied themselves to the study of natural history. Townsend set out from Philadelphia to walk across the regions separating the Atlantic from the Pacific, jotting down numerous observations in his journal. Thomas Say, an explorer of the Floridas and the Rocky Mountains, has published a work on American entomology. Alexander Wilson, who started as a weaver before he became an author, has painted some rather accomplished pictures.
As regards literature properly defined, although there is not much of it, a few novelists and poets bear mention. A Quaker’s son, Charles Brockden Brown, is the author of Wieland, which has been the source and model for many novels of the new school. Unlike his countrymen, “I prefer,” Brown says, “roaming in the forests to threshing corn.” Wieland, his novel’s hero, is a Puritan whom Heaven has ordered to kill his wife. “I have brought thee hither,” he says to her, “to fulfill a divine command. I am appointed thy destroyer, and destroy thee I must.” Brown’s narrative continues:
Saying this I seized her wrists. She shrieked aloud, and endeavored to free herself from my grasp . . .
“Wieland. . . . Am I not thy wife? And wouldst thou kill me?
Thou wilt not; and yet . . . Spare me—spare—help, help—”
Till her breath was stopped she shrieked for help—for mercy.
Wieland strangles his wife and experiences unspeakable delights beside her expired corpse. The horror of our modern inventions is here far surpassed. Brown’s imagination was formed by reading Caleb Williams, and in Wieland he imitates a scene from Othello.
At the present time, the American novelists James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving are forced to take refuge in Europe, where they find materials and readers. In America, the language of the great writers of England has been “creolized,” “provincialized,” “barbarized,” without having gained any energy from the new country’s virgin nature. It has even been found necessary to compile catalogues of American expressions.
As for American poets, their language is pleasant enough; but they rise only a little above the level of mediocrity. Bryant’s “The Evening Wind,” Longfellow’s “Sunrise on the Hills,” Sigourney’s “Native Scenery,” and a few other poems are worth our attention. Fitz-Greene Halleck has sung of the dying Botsaris, and George Hill has wandered among the ruins of Greece. “O Athens!” he writes, “you, the lonely queen dethroned! O Parthenon, king of temples, you have seen your fellow monuments abandoned to time’s deprivations, despoiled of their priests and their gods.”[7]
It pleases me, I who have traveled to the shores of Hellas and Atlantis, to hear the independent voice of a land unknown to antiquity mourning the lost liberty of the Old World.