And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited all the seacoast . . .
This, from the good doctor with such suave complacency, is a little disenchanting. Almost too good to bc true.
But there you are! The barbed wire fence. ‘Extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth.’ Oh, Benjamin Franklin! He even ‘ used venery’ as a cultivator of seed.
Cultivate the earth, ye gods! The Indians did that, as much as they needed. And they left off there. Who built Chicago? Who cultivated the earth until it spawned Pittsburgh, Pa?
The moral issue! Just look at it! Cultivation included. If it’s a mere choice of Kultur or cultivation, I give it up.
Which brings us right back to our question, what’s wrong with Benjamin, that we can’t stand him? Or else, what’s wrong with us, that we kind fault with such a paragon?
Man is a moral animal. All right. I am a moral animal. And I’m going to remain such. I’m not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. ‘This is good, that is bad. Turn the little handle and let the good tap flow,’ saith Benjamin, and all America with him. ‘But first of all extirpate those savages who are always turning on the bad tap.’
I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine. I don’t work with a little set of handles or levers. The Temperance- silence-order- resolution-frugality-industry-sincerity - justice- moderation-cleanliness-tranquillity-chastity-humility keyboard is not going to get me going. I’m really not just an automatic piano with a moral Benjamin getting tunes out of me.
Here’s my creed, against Benjamin’s. This is what I believe:
‘That I am I.’
‘ That my soul is a dark forest.’
‘That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.’
‘Thatgods, strange gods, come f orth f rom the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.’
‘ That I must have the courage to let them come and go.’
‘ That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.’
There is my creed. He who runs may read. He who prefers to crawl, or to go by gasoline, can call it rot.
Then for a ‘list’. It is rather fun to play at Benjamin.
1. TEMPERANCE
Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don’t sit down without one of the gods.
2. SILENCE
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.
3. ORDER
Know that you are responsible to the gods inside you and to the men in whom the gods are manifest. Recognize your superiors and your inferiors, according to the gods. This is the root of all order.
4. RESOLUTION
Resolve to abide by your own deepest promptings, and to sacrifice the smaller thing to the greater. Kill when you must, and be killed the same: the must coming from the gods inside you, or from the men in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost.
5. FRUGALITY
Demand nothing; accept what you see fit. Don’t waste your pride or squander your emotion.
6. INDUSTRY
Lose no time with ideals; serve the Holy Ghost; never serve mankind.
7. SINCERITY
To be sincere is to remember that I am I, and that the other man is not me.
8. JUSTICE
The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.
9. MODERATION
Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.
10. CLEANLINESS
Don’t be too clean. It impoverishes the blood.
11. TRANQUILITY
The soul has many motions, many gods come and go. Try and find your deepest issue, in every confusion, and abide by that. Obey the man in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost; command when your honour comes to command.
12. CHASTITY
Never ‘use’ venery at all. Follow your passional impulse, if it be answered in the other being; but never have any motive in mind, neither offspring nor health nor even pleasure, nor even service. Only know that ‘venery’ is of the great gods. An offering-up of yourself to the very great gods, the dark ones, and nothing else.
13. HUMILITY
See all men and women according to the Holy Ghost that is within them. Never yield before the barren.
There’s my list. I have been trying dimly to realize it for a long time, and only America and old Benjamin have at last goaded me into trying to formulate it. ,
And now I, at least, know why I can’t stand Benjamin. He tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom. For how can any man be free, without an illimitable background? And Benjamin tries to shove me into a barbed wire paddock and make me grow potatoes or Chicagoes.
And how can I be free, without gods that come and go? But Benjamin won’t let anything exist except my useful fellow men, and I’m sick of them; as for his Godhead, his Providence, He is Head of nothing except a vast heavenly store that keeps every imaginable line of goods, from victrolas to cat-o’-nine tails.
And how can any man be free without a soul of his own, that he believes in and won’t sell at any price? But Benjamin doesn’t let me have a soul of my own. He says I am nothing but a servant of mankind - galley-slave I call it - and if I don’t get my wages here below - that is, if Mr Pierpont Morgan or Mr Nosey Hebrew or the grand United States Government, the great US, US or SOMEOFUS, manages to scoop in my bit, along with their lump - why, never mind, I shall get my wages HEREAFTER.
Oh Benjaminl Oh Binjum! You do NOT suck me in any longer.
And why, oh why should the snuff-coloured little trap have wanted to take us all in? Why did he do it?
Out of sheer human cussedness, in the first place. We do all like to get things inside a barbed wire corral. Especially our fellow men. We love to round them up inside the barbed wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make ‘em work. ‘ Work,you free jewel, WORK!’ shouts the liberator, cracking his whip. Benjamin, I will not work. I do not choose to be a free democrat. I am absolutely a servant of my own Holy Ghost.
Sheer cussedness! But there was as well the salt of a subtler purpose. Benjamin was just in his eyeholes - to use an English vulgarism, meaning he was just delighted - when he was at Paris judiciously milking money out of the French monarchy for the overthrow of all monarchy. If you want to ride your horse to somewhere you must put a bit in his mouth. And Benjamin wanted to ride his horse so that it would upset the whole apple-cart of the old masters. He wanted the whole European apple-cart upset. So he had to put a strong bit in the mouth of his ass.
‘Henceforth be masterless.’
That is, he had to break-in the human ass completely, so that much more might be broken, in the long run. For the moment it was the British Government that had to have a hole knocked in it. The first real hole it ever had: the breach of the Amurican rebellion.
Benjamin, in his sagacity, knew that the breaking of the old world was a long process. In the depths of his own underconsciousness he hated England, he hated Europe, he hated the whole corpus of the European being. He wanted to be American. But you can’t change your nature and mode of consciousness like changing your shoes. It is a gradual shedding. Years must go by, and centuries must elapse before you have finished. Like a son escaping from the domination of his parents. The escape is not just one rupture. It is a long and half-secret process.
So with the American. He was a European when he first went over the Atlantic. He is in the main a recreant European still. From Benjamin Franklin to Woodrow Wilson may be a long stride, but it is a stride along the same road. T
here is no new road. The same old road, become dreary and futile. Theoretic and materialistic.
Why then did Benjamin set up this dummy of a perfect citizen as a pattern to America ? Of course, he did it in perfect good faith, as far as he knew. He thought it simply was the true ideal. But what we think we do is not very important. We never really know what we are doing. Either we are materialistic instruments, like Benjamin, or we move in the gesture of creation, from our deepest self, usually unconscious. We are only the actors, we are never wholly the authors of our own deeds or works. IT is the author, the unknown inside us or outside us. The best we can do is to try to hold ourselves in unison with the deeps which are inside us. And the worst we can do is to try to have things our own way, when we run counter to IT, and in the long run get our knuckles rapped for our presumption.
So Benjamin contriving money out of the Court of France. He was contriving the first steps of the overthrow of all Europe, France included. You can never have a new thing without breaking an old. Europe happens to be the old thing. America, unless the people in America assert themselves too much in opposition to the inner gods, should be the new thing. The new thing is the death of the old. But you can’t cut the throat of an epoch. You’ve got to steal the life from it through several centuries.
And Benjamin worked for this both directly and indirectly. Directly, at the Court of France, making a small but very dangerous hole in the side of England, through which hole Europe has by now almost bled to death. And indirectly in Philadelphia, setting up this unlovely, snuff-coloured little ideal, or automaton, of a pattern American. The pattern American, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat, has done more to ruin the old Europe than any Russian nihilist. He has done it by slow attrition, like a son who has stayed at home and obeyed his parents, all the while silently hating their authority, and silently, in his soul, destroying not only their authority but their whole existence. For the American spiritually stayed at home in Europe. The spiritual home of America was, and still is, Europe. This is the galling bondage, in spite of several billions of heaped-up gold. Your heaps of gold are only so many muck-heaps, America, and will remain so till you become a reality to yourselves.
All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. Absolutely got down by her own barbed wire of shalt-nots, and shut up fast in her own ‘productive’ machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages. It is just a farce.
Now is your chance, Europe. Now let Hell loose and get your own back, and paddle your own canoe on a new sea, while clever America lies on her muck-heaps of gold, strangled in her own barbed wire of shalt-not ideals and shalt-not moralisms. While she goes out to work like millions of squirrels in millions of cages. Production!
Let Hell loose, and get your own back, Europe!
CHAPTER 3
Hector St John de Crevecoeur
CREVECUEUR was born in France, at Caen, in the year 1735. As a boy he was sent over to England and received part of his education there. He went to Canada as a young man, served for a time with Montcalm in the war against the English, and later passed over into the United States, to become an exuberant American. He married a New England girl, and settled on the frontier. During the period of his ‘cultivating the earth’ he wrote the Letters from an American Farmer, which enjoyed great vogue in their day, in England especially, among the new reformers like Godwin and Tom Paine.
But Crevecoeur was not a mere cultivator of the earth. That was his best stunt, shall we say. He himself was more concerned with a perfect society and his own manipulation thereof, than with growing carrots. Behold him, then, trotting off import- antly and idealistically to France, leaving his farm in the wilds to be burnt by the Indians, and his wife to shift as best she might. This was during the American War of Independence, when the Noble Red Man took to behaving like his own old self. On his return to America, the American Farmer entered into public affairs and into commerce. Again tripping to France, he enjoyed himself as a litt‚rateur Child-of-Nature-sweet-and- pure, was a friend of old Benjamin Franklin in Paris, and quite a favourite with Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Madame d’Houdetot, that literary soul.
Hazlitt, Godwin, Shelley, Coleridge, the English romanticists, were, of course, thrilled by the Letters from an American Farmer. A new world, a world of the Noble Savage and Pristine Nature and Paradisal Simplicity and all that gorgeousness that flows out of the unsullied fount of the ink-bottle. Lucky Coleridge, who got no farther than Bristol. Some of us have gone all the way.
I think this wild and noble America is the thing that I have pined for most ever since I read Fenimore Cooper, as a boy. Now I’ve got it.
Franklin is the real prartical prototype of the American. Crevecoeur is the emotional. To the European, the American is first and foremost a dollar-fiend. We tend to forget the emotional heritage of Hector St John de Crevecoeur. We tend to disbelieve, for example, in Woodrow Wilson’s wrung heart and wet hanky. Yet surely these are real enough. Aren’t they?
It wasn’t to be expected that the dry little snuff-coloured Doctor should have it all his own way. The new Americans might use venery for health or offspring, and their time for cultivating potatoes and Chicagoes, but they had got some sap in their veins after all. They had got to get a bit of luscious emotion somewhere.
NATURE.
I wish I could write it larger than that.
NATURE.
Benjamin overlooked NATURE. But the French Crevecoeur spotted it long before Thoreau and Emerson worked it up. Absolutely the safest thing to get your emotional reactions over is NATURE.
Crevecoeur’s Letters are written in a spirit of touching simplicity, almost better than Chateaubriand. You’d think neither of them would ever know how many beans make five. This American Farmer tells of the joys of creating a home in the wilderness, and of cultivating the virgin soil. Poor virgin, prostituted from the very start.
The Farmer had an Amiable Spouse and an Infant Son, his progeny. He took the Infant Son - who enjoys no other name than this -
What is thy name ?
I have no name.
I am the Infant Son -
to the fields with him, and seated the same I. S. on the shafts of the plough whilst he, the American Farmer, ploughed the potato patch. He also, the A. F., helped his Neighbours, whom no doubt he loved as himself, to build a barn, and they laboured together in the Innocent Simplicity of one of Nature’s Communities. Meanwhile the Amiable Spouse, who likewise in Blakean simplicity has No Name, cooked the dough-nuts or the pie, though these are not mentioned. No doubt she was a deep-breasted daughter of America, though she may equally well have been a flat-bosomed Methodist. She would have been an Amiable Spouse in either case, and the American Farmer asked no more. I don’t know whether her name was Lizzie or Ahoolibah, and probably Crevecoeur didn’t. Spouse was enough for him. ‘Spouse, hand me the carving knife.’
The Infant Son developed into Healthy Offspring as more appeared: no doubt Crevecoeur had used venery as directed. And so these Children of Nature toiled in the Wilds at Simple Toil with a little Honest Sweat now and then. You have the complete picture, dear reader. The American Farmer made his own Family Picture, and it is still on view. Of course the Amiable Spouse put on her best apron to be Im Bild, for all the world to see and admire.
I used to admire my head off: before I tiptoed into the Wilds and saw the shacks of the Homesteaders. Particularly the Amiable Spouse, poor thing. No wonder she never sang the song of Simple Toil in the Innocent Wilds. Poor haggard drudge, like a ghost wailing in the wilderness, nine times out of ten.
Hector St John, you have lied to me. You lied even more scurrilously to yourself. Hector St John, you are an emotional liar.
Jean Jacques, Bernardin de St Pierre, Chateaubriand, exquisite Fran‡ois Le Vaillant, you lying little lot, with your Nature-Sweet-and-Pure! Marie Antoinette got her head off for p
laying dairy-maid, and nobody even dusted the seats of your pants, till now, for all the lies you put over us.
But Crevecoeur was an artist as well as a liar, otherwise we would not have bothered with him. He wanted to put NATURE in his pocket, as Benjamin put the Human Being. Between them, they wanted the whole scheme of things in their pockets, and the things themselves as well. Once you’ve got the scheme of things in your pocket, you can do as you like with it, even make money out of it, if you can’t find in your heart to destroy it, as was your first intention. So H. St J. de C. tried to put Nature-Sweet-and-Pure in his pocket. But nature wasn’t having any, she poked her head out and baa-ed.
This Nature-sweet-and-pure business is only another effort at intellectualizing. Just an attempt to make all nature succumb to a few laws of the human mind. The sweet-and-pure sort of laws. Nature seemed to be behaving quite nicely, for a while. She has left off.
That’s why you get the purest intellectuals in a Garden Suburb or a Brook Farm experiment. You bet, Robinson Crusoe was a high-brow of high-brows.
You can idealize or intellectualize. Or, on the contrary, you can let the dark soul in you see for itself. An artist usually intellectualizes on top, and his dark under-consciousness goes on contradicting him beneath. This is almost laughably the case with most American artists. Crevecoeur is the first example. He is something of an artist, Franklin isn’t anything.
Crevecoeur the idealist puts over us a lot of stuff about nature and the noble savage and the innocence of toil, etc., etc. Blarney! But Crevecoeur the artist gives us glimpses of actual nature, not writ large.
Curious that his vision sees only the lowest forms of natural life. Insects, snakes and birds he glimpses in their own mystery, their own pristine being. And straightway gives the lie to Innocent Nature.
‘I am astonished to see,’ he writes quite early in the Letters, ‘that nothing exists but what has its enemy, one species pursue and live upon the other: unfortunately our king-birds are the destroyers of those industrious insects [the bees]; but on the other hand, these birds preserve our fields from the depredation of crows, which they pursue on the wing with great vigilance and astonishing dexterity.’
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 948