[In the following essay, Larson argues that Crèvecoeur applied the conventions of the European sentimental novel to the uniquely American experiences of colonialism and revolution, with uneven and often unsatisfying results.]

After spending decades trying to identify wholly original, indigenous characteristics of American literature, critics finally seem willing to acknowledge the impact of English and European literary movements upon our literature. With the abandonment of literary isolationism, eighteenth-century American writing, which is clearly dependent upon British models, has gained respectability and received critical attention. Commentators have identified the major elements which link later eighteenth-century American literature to the wide-ranging movement of sensibility and sentiment, and they are beginning to fill in the details of the pattern. Terence Martin has traced the influence of the ideas of the Scottish Common Sense philosophers upon American education and fiction.¹ Herbert Ross Brown has examined the impact of British writers upon the American novel and American periodical fiction.² Leon Howard has shown that Americans possessed a taste for the poetry of sentiment,³ and Martin Roth has demonstrated the influence of sentimental writers, such as Laurence Sterne, upon American playwrights and essayists.⁴ Roy Harvey Pearce has even suggested that eighteenth-century American diarists recorded their feelings in language patterned after that of sentimental novelists.⁵

The efforts of scholars and critics have firmly placed later eighteenth-century American literature in its proper perspective as one strain in the movement of sensibility and sentiment. A need still remains, however, to reconcile the interpretation of American literature which stresses its connections to England and Europe with the alternative vision which, emphasizing native roots, sees our literature as the product of uniquely American conditions, such as New England Puritanism, democracy, and the frontier. American literature is best viewed as neither wholly foreign and derivative nor entirely original and native. Rather, especially in its formative years, American literature is distinguished by the dynamic interplay between received ideas, attitudes, and artistic techniques and the facts of new social and economic conditions. Many of the tensions of American literature, as of America itself, spring from the attempt to convert into reality the dreams of European writers.

The literary efforts of Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur, the “American farmer,” stand as one of the most interesting and influential examples in eighteenth-century American literature of the adaptation of received forms and ideas to new experience. As a member of a French noble family educated in England, Crèvecoeur was familiar with the literary conventions of his age. However, in 1759 Crèvecoeur shed his identity and, after exploring the northern colonies, he settled in 1769 in New York state where he spent eleven years as an American farmer.⁶ Crèvecoeur's first work, the Letters of an American Farmer published in England in 1782 and translated and expanded in French in 1784 and 1787, established his reputation as a leading interpreter of America for his contemporaries. The Letters remain a minor American classic. However, the criticism devoted to Crèvecoeur's work has failed to come to terms with the nature of his achievement. He has been hailed as an original genius, a primitive Thoreau, dismissed as a fourth-rate sentimentalist, characterized as a realistic observer of life, and typed as an early romanticist.⁷ More recently Crèvecoeur's work has been interpreted as prefiguring the symbolic ambiguity of later American writers.⁸

The critical confusion over Crèvecoeur's work springs from two sources. First, the letters published in Letters from an American Farmer were selected from a mass of manuscripts which Crèvecoeur apparently wrote during his years as an American farmer. Consequently, despite Crèvecoeur's efforts to impose some kind of shape upon the work, it remains inconsistent. More important, in selecting the letters for this book, Crèvecoeur excluded a number of contemporaneous sketches which displayed his pro-loyalist sympathies. Although these sketches have been available since 1925, they have received only cursory attention from most critics. This situation is unfortunate, because in the Revolutionary War sketches excluded from the original English edition of the Letters, Crèvecoeur explicitly delineates the aesthetic principles which control not only his rendering of the American Revolution but also his portrait of the American farmer. The Revolutionary War sketches reveal that most of the apparent inconsistencies in Crèvecoeur's work spring from his aesthetics. Crèvecoeur subscribes to the essential principles of the movement of sensibility and sentiment. The tensions and ambiguities of his work stem from his use of this aesthetic to interpret new experiences through conventional forms in order to make them meaningful to contemporary readers.

Crèvecoeur portrays the life of a “typical” American farmer as such a man appears when filtered through the aesthetics of sensibility and current speculations on the innate goodness of humanity and America as the future seat of a new, nobler civilization.⁹ He first presents the farmer as essentially a man of sensibility who has found in America an environment which allows him to achieve an harmonious, almost ideal existence;¹⁰ in the Revolutionary War sketches he then achieves pathos by stripping the farmer of everything which made his happiness. The first two letters of the Letters from an American Farmer create a fictional author and describe the world in which he lives. The persona who writes the Letters, one Farmer James, is essentially a man of sensibility. The correspondent to whom he addresses his letters characterizes James as the “farmer of feelings,” and James' character fits this description.¹¹ Like the heroes of sentimental novels, James is benevolent, sympathetic, and generous. He overflows with domestic tenderness:

When I contemplate my wife, by my fireside, while she either spins, darns, or suckles our child, I cannot describe the various emotions of love, of gratitude, of conscious pride which thrill in my heart, and often overflow in involuntary tears. I feel the necessity, the sweet pleasure of acting my part, the part of an husband and father, with an attention and propriety which may entitle me to my good fortune. It is true that these pleasing images vanish with the smoke of my pipe, but though they disappear from my mind, the impression they have made on my heart is indelible.¹²

James displays the tender heart and warm emotions appropriate to a man of sensibility contemplating his wife and family. Although his emotions are centered on his family, James' affection also embraces new immigrants to America and even the brute creatures on his farm. He is essentially a man of feeling.

Several characteristics mark James as a uniquely American version of this figure. His feelings spring directly from his nature and environment. Reading plays no part in his development. James' mind is characterized by his minister as a “Tabula rasa, where strong and spontaneous impressions are delineated with facility.”¹³ An uneducated farmer, James represents the fulfillment of man's innate potential for virtue, and, as Thomas Philbrick suggests, for Crèvecoeur the true promise of America is that it provides a society in which man may be able for the first time to live up to his promise.¹⁴ In the new world almost complete felicity appears to be possible. Appropriately, James insists that no man is happier or freer than he. He lists the evils which he has escaped by being born an American—a tyrannous nobility, a greedy church, oppressive laws, unjust taxes, and tithes. An independent farmer, protected by a benevolent government and mild laws, James glories in his situation. He has achieved an earthly happiness of which the European peasant can only dream.

The key to James' good fortune is his status as an American freeholder. His felicity springs from his closeness to mother earth. A working rather than a gentleman farmer, James drinks virtue and contentment from the soil itself. He concretizes their relationship in a powerful scene:

Often when I plow my low ground, I place my little boy in a chair which screws to the beam of the plow—its motion and that of the horse please him, he is perfectly happy and begins to chat. … I relieve his mother of some trouble while I have him with me, the odoriferous furrow exhilarates his spirits, and seems to do him a great deal of good, for he looks more blooming since I have adopted that practice; can more pleasure, more dignity, be added to that primary occupation? The father thus plowing with his child is inferior only to the emperor of China plowing as an example of his kingdom.¹⁵

The first two letters create a vision of the American farmer, literally cradled in the bosom of nature, growing as naturally from the earth as the crops he cultivates. Such felicity is possible because in these letters American nature appears to be almost wholly benevolent. James' farm animals obey him as instinctively as the animals did Adam before the fall. Even James' hornets are so tame that they catch flies from the eyelids of his children without stinging them. The harmony in the natural realm echoes the domestic and social tranquility which enfold James and his family.

Crèvecoeur's Letters are an attempt to build an adequate myth for America. Both the content of the myth and its mode of presentation are significant. At the center of Crèvecoeur's vision is not a legendary political leader, or semi-divine warrior, but an idealized portrait of the American farmer—the common man—self-sufficient, independent, devoted to his farm and his family, harmoniously intertwined with the natural world. Crèvecoeur insists that this farmer is something new in the world, and he appears to offer hope that man can be reborn. Yet as portrayed by Crèvecoeur, Farmer James is anything but an original figure. His love of the natural world smacks of Shaftesbury and Rousseau. The emphasis on the land as the source of virtue echoes sentimental poems as well as contemporary economic theory. James' warm-hearted good nature and hyperbolic language spring directly from the sentimental novel, as do the emotional vignettes which illustrate them. Farmer James is a conventional figure who has finally found his proper place in the world. He represents what Crèvecoeur hopes America will become, and in creating him Crèvecoeur adapts a received model to a partly real, partly ideal vision of his own American experience.

Later letters describing the degeneration consequent upon the facts of slavery and the frontier modify this vision of felicity. However, for Crèvecoeur it is the Revolution which thoroughly destroys the possibility of achieving an eighteenth-century Utopia in America. The Revolution takes away everything for which the American farmer has striven—peace, security, family and farm. It transforms dream into nightmare. Forcing Crèvecoeur to confront the intrusion of violent reality into his ideal vision, the Revolution provides a crucial test of the adequacy of his sentimental aesthetics.

In his interpretation of the significance of the Revolution, Crèvecoeur follows the principles established in the early Letters. Although Crèvecoeur's works reflect his Tory sympathies, they do not focus on the political issues involved in the conflict. Instead his Revolutionary sketches emphasize the human and social effects of the war. He depicts families divided, harmonious communities torn into jarring factions, and the products of years of labor destroyed in hours. Believing that civil turmoil is the worst form of oppression, Crèvecoeur dramatizes the transformation of virtuous men into vicious zealots and the rise of power of self-interested, self-proclaimed patriots. As his portrait of the idyllic existence of the American farmer centered on the benevolent, cheerful emotions fostered by social and domestic tranquillity, so Crèvecoeur's picture of the Revolution stresses the human suffering of individual families trapped in a violently disordered society.

Crèvecoeur's decision to emphasize the suffering of individuals is based only in part upon his personal experience, sensibility, and ethics. Undoubtedly his own sufferings as a loyalist influenced his writing as did his florification of the American farmer. Having placed the common farmer at the center of his vision of America, Crèvecoeur naturally must reveal the effects of the war upon ordinary citizens. However, in his choice of material and techniques for portraying the Revolution, Crèvecoeur is finally guided by artistic rather than ethical or personal principles. In one of his Revolutionary War sketches, “The American Belisarius,” he explicitly sets out the aesthetic which controls these works:

Scenes of sorrow and affliction are equally moving to the bowels of humanity. Find them where you will, there is a strange but peculiar sort of pleasure in contemplating them; it is a mournful feast for some particular souls.

A pile of ruins is always striking, but when the object of contemplation is too extensive, our divided and wearied faculties received impressions proportionally feeble; we possess but a certain quantity of tears and compassion. But when the scale is diminished, when we descend from the destruction of an extensive government or nation to that of several individuals, to that of a once opulent, happy, virtuous family, there we pause, for it is more analogous to our own situation. We can better comprehend the woes, the distress of a father, mother, and children immersed in the deepest calamities our imagination can conceive, than if we had observed the overthrow of kings and great rulers.¹⁶

In this passage Crèvecoeur reveals both his rationale for dealing with calamities such as those provoked by the Revolution and his artistic approach to the subject. Following the principles of contemporary philosophers and the practice of sentimental novelists, he notes that suffering can produce aesthetic pleasure: it can be a “mournful feast for some particular souls.” Interestingly, Crèvecoeur offers a rather advanced version of the aesthetic of suffering. Rather than arguing that the pleasure received in viewing distress arises from the observer's desire to relieve its victim, Crèvecoeur ascribes it to an emphatic response to the suffering itself. When suffering is properly distanced, vicarious participation in it can become a source of pleasure. Crèvecoeur then lays down guidelines for creating true pathos. He argues that if it is to affect the reader, the distress must not be too diffuse or it will weary the mind's faculties. He believes that in order to assist the reader in identifying with the sufferers, the writer should focus upon specific individuals and families, preferably humble ones, and he suggests that the effect will be more intense if the writer displays his protagonist's transformation from happiness to the “deepest calamities.” These speculations reveal a startling familiarity, for a supposedly casually educated writer, with current psychological and aesthetic speculations of the role of pathos in literature. Whatever the ultimate source of these ideas, they firmly establish Crèvecoeur as a conscious practitioner of the literature of sensibility, and they set up the aesthetic principles he employs in interpreting the American Revolution.

The final letter in Letters from an American Farmer, “Distresses of a Frontier Man,” embodies Crèvecoeur's most effective application of his aesthetic theory. In this letter Crèvecoeur focuses on the effect of the Revolutionary War on Farmer James and his family. Crèvecoeur's presentation of James' plight is carefully designed to evoke the reader's sympathy. He focuses on the distress of one ordinary family, that of Farmer James. He explicitly contrasts their present misery with their former happiness in order to increase the pathos of their situation. James is characterized as a man guided by sentiment and feeling. Torn between his loyalty to his king and his attachment to his rebellious neighbors, James finds himself unable to judge objectively the rights and wrongs of the conflict. He simply suffers empathetically with the war's victims and fears for the future of his family. In order to bring the situation home to the reader, Crèvecoeur details James' mental state. Expecting destruction from fire and sword, James and his family exist in a condition of constant anxiety, bordering on hysteria. They neither eat nor sleep in peace. James describes his family situation in an emotion laden scene:

We never sit down either to dinner or supper, but the least noise immediately spreads a general alarm and prevents us from enjoying the comfort of our meals. The very appetite proceeding from labour and peace of mind is gone; we eat just enough to keep us alive: our sleep is disturbed by the most frightful dreams; sometimes I start awake, as if the great hour of danger was come: at other times the howling of our dogs seems to announce the arrival of the enemy: we leap out of bed and run to arms; my poor wife with panting bosom and silent tears, takes leave of me, as if we were to see each other no more; she snatches the youngest children from their beds, who, suddenly awakened, increase by their innocent questions the horror of the dreadful moment. She tries to hide them in the cellar, as if our cellar was inaccessible to the fire. I place all my servants at the windows, and myself at the door, where I am determined to perish. Fear industriously increases every sound; we all listen; each communicates to the other his ideas and conjectures. We remain thus sometimes for whole hours, our hearts and our minds racked by the most anxious suspense: what a dreadful situation, a thousand times worse than that of a soldier engaged in the midst of a most severe conflict.¹⁷

The details of this vignette reveal its inspiration in the sentimental novel. Crèvecoeur unites stock sentimental rhetoric with specific, picturesque details in order to portray the scene visually. The mention of the children's “innocent questions” and the wife's “panting bosom and silent tears” are obviously designed to evoke pathos. In the sentence beginning “Fear industriously increases every sound,” Crèvecoeur shifts from his usual formal sentence structure to a more flexible style in order to mirror the family's suspense. And to make the pathos of the scene explicit, in the last sentence the narrator breaks out in a direct, emotional comment on the situation. Crèvecoeur employs every stock sentimental device in his attempt to portray the effects of the American Revolution.

Although the “Distresses of a Frontier Man” is unsubtle and over-strained, it does convey the pathos of James' situation. The reader sympathizes with James' plight because he has vicariously shared James' earlier happiness. Also, the hyperbolic language seems appropriate because it reflects James' anticipation of disaster. It mirrors James' psychological state, expressing the fears of a man unstrung by his active imagination and strong sensibility. Despite the excesses, Crèvecoeur does effectively use his sentimental artistry to capture the shock of a dream transformed into a nightmare. Appropriately, Crèvecoeur provides an escape, for the American farmer decides to move his family beyond the frontier, James hopes to regain in the society of friendly Indians the felicity which the Revolution has destroyed. Thus the Letters of an American Farmer concludes with a new optimistic vision.

Crèvecoeur's portraits of families who actually experienced the evils which James anticipates are less successful. In several sketches excluded from the original version of the Letters, Crèvecoeur recounts the sufferings of families destroyed by revolutionary violence.¹⁸ These sketches flesh out Crèvecoeur's picture of the Revolution and they further develop the aesthetic principles and techniques Crèvecoeur uses in rendering human woe. As artistic works, however, they are seriously flawed.

“The Wyoming Massacre” illustrates Crèvecoeur's application of the principle that true pathos can be created only by focusing attention on the calamities suffered by individuals. In this sketch Crèvecoeur treats devastation on the grand scale. He recounts the destruction of an entire community which has provoked the anger of the British and Indians on its frontier. Because he is dealing with a “massacre,” Crèvecoeur must begin by painting his portrait with broad strokes. He describes in general terms the fear, confusion, and suffering of the settlers of the Wyoming Valley during the attack. However, in order to engage his readers' sympathies he regularly narrows his field of vision to focus upon the woes of individuals. The following passage describing the retreat following the battle exemplifies his technique:

For a considerable time the roads through the settled country were full of these unhappy fugitives, each company slowly returning towards the countries from which they had formerly emigrated. Some others, still more unfortunate than others, were wholly left alone with their children, obliged to carry through that long and fatiguing march the infants of their breasts, now no longer replenished as before with an exuberant milk. Some of them were reduced to the cruel necessity of loading the ablest of them with the little food they were permitted to carry. Many of these young victims were seen bare-headed, bare-footed, shedding tears at every step, oppressed with fatigues too great for their tender age to bear, afflicted with every species of misery, with hunger, with bleeding feet, every now and then surrounding their mother as exhausted as themselves. “Mammy, where are we going? Where is father? Why don't we go home?” “Poor innocents, don't you know that the King's Indians have killed him and have burnt all we had? Perhaps your uncle Simon will give us some bread.”¹⁹

In this scene, Crèvecoeur first scans the general devastation. He then narrows his focus to the mothers and children, the most pitiful members of the train, and details their sufferings. Finally he pauses on one family and recounts the naive questions of the children to their afflicted mother in order to wrench a final drop of pathos from the situation. Even in a sketch of a large-scale disaster, Crèvecoeur manipulates the point of view in accordance with the principle that the deepest pathos arises from empathy with individuals.

The painterly emphasis in this scene is a conscious, consistent element in Crèvecoeur's works.²⁰ Crèvecoeur often compares writing to painting, and he presents his Revolutionary War victims in carefully composed visual portraits. In most of the sketches Crèvecoeur recounts the events quickly, then pauses to describe the appearance of the sufferers at length, embellishing the description with touches of pathetic dialogue and emotional interjections by the narrator. The form of the sketches moves away from narrative and plot to emphasize pictoral scenes and the emotions they evoke. Crèvecoeur's presentation of incomplete visual and emotional fragments reflects his view of art as the expression of sensibility rather than a told story. In form as well as content, Crèvecoeur imitates the practice of such novelists as Mackenzie and Sterne.²¹

Other sketches reveal Crèvecoeur's careful, almost slavish, application of the aesthetic principles outlined in “The American Belisarius.” In the aforementioned piece, he stresses the virtue and early happiness of its protagonist in order to deepen the pathos of his fall from felicity. Mr. S. K., the American Belisarius, is the most generous of men. After wresting a farm from the wilderness through unaided industry, he becomes the head of a thriving community. So benevolent is Mr. S. K. that he refuses to sell his wheat, preferring to give it to the poor, and he raises his two brothers-in-law to positions of affluence. However, during the Revolution these same brothers-in-law, leaders of the popular cause, scheme to destroy Mr. S. K.'s reputation and acquire his estates. Attainted as a loyalist, Mr. S. K. loses his son and his estates during the conflict. He ends his life in penury, living in one room of the mansion he once owned with a wife who has been driven mad by their misfortunes. Mr. S. K. and his misfortunes are designed to embody Crèvecoeur's dictum that the fall of the most virtuous individuals arouses the most empathy in the breasts of its observers.

Perhaps the gravest fault of the war sketches stems from Crèvecoeur's literal application of the principle that the deeper the calamities he portrays the more profound will be the reader's sympathy. The sketches overflow with misfortunes, and Crèvecoeur piles disaster after disaster upon his victims. In one sketch, “The History of Mrs. B.: An Epitome of all the Misfortunes which can possibly Overtake a New Settler, as Related by Herself,” he carries this tendency to its logical conclusion. As the title suggests, this work recounts all of the disasters which can overtake an unlucky frontierswoman. Mrs. B. suffers through the imprisonment of her husband, a six day trek on foot with her children through the snows of winter, the division of her family during the Revolution, the death of her husband and son-in-law in the Wyoming Massacre, a retreat from the Wyoming valley impeded by a broken thigh, the death from small pox during the retreat of a son and grandson, poverty in her old age, and various minor calamities.²² This melange of misery inevitably produces bathos rather than pathos. In slightly lesser degree, all of the sketches suffer similarly from Crèvecoeur's love of extreme situations and his taste for cliché and hyperbolic diction.

The results of Crèvecoeur's endeavor to interpret the American Revolution through the aesthetics of sensibility are very uneven. Crèvecoeur's works do bring into the foreground the much neglected ordinary citizens of the time. His aesthetic provides him with a rationale for focusing upon the experiences of the American farmer. It offers the tools for creating a vision of ideal, harmonious felicity and for portraying the Revolution as a nightmarish destruction of that dream. Sentimental aesthetics, with their emphasis on individual sensibility and experience, also provide a justification for minimizing the importance of political issues in favor of an emphasis upon the human effects of the war—the suffering which civil turmoil causes for those caught up in it. As seen by a man of sensibility, the American Revolution becomes a war like any other war. Crèvecoeur's vision corrects the sanitized, bloodless versions of the conflict which form the stuff of popular legend, and it serves as a useful counter to abstract economic and political studies.

However, for a writer as fond of extremes as Crèvecoeur, the sentimental tradition also encourages extravagant emotional flights. For an uncertain stylist such as Crèvecoeur, the language of sensibility can be a trap, for its stock diction readily becomes absurd in the hands of an imitative writer. Only a master of the genre could succeed in using the aesthetics of sensibility to create a wholly satisfactory portrait of the American experience. Crèvecoeur is not such a master. Too often his letters and sketches substitute borrowed rhetoric and stilted posturing for felt emotion. Yet Crèvecoeur's works remain interesting despite their flaws. They do embody, albeit in imperfect form, a human myth of America, and they stand as important examples of the complex interplay of received aesthetic theory and original experience in eighteenth-century American literature.

Notes

1. Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction, Indiana University Humanities Series, No. 48 (Bloomington, 1961).

2. Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America (Durham, 1940); “Elements of Sensibility in the Massachusetts Magazine,” AL [American Literature] 1 (Nov. 1929): 286-96; “Richardson and Sterne in the Massachusetts Magazine,” NEQ [New England Quarterly] 5 (1932): 65-82.

3. Leon Howard, “The American Revolt Against Pope,” SP [Studies in Philology] 44 (1952): 48-65.

4. Martin Roth, “Laurence Sterne in America,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 74 (1970): 428-36.

5. Roy Harvey Pearce, “Sterne and Sensibility in American Diaries,” MLN [Modern Language Notes] 59 (1944), 403-7.

6. Thomas Philbrick, “Crèvecoeur as New Yorker,” EAL [Early American Literature] 11 (Spring, 1976): 22-3. The motives behind Crèvecoeur's decision to adopt a new identity and break his ties with France remain a matter of controversy. Most biographers believe Crèvecoeur was disgraced in the battle of Quebec. See Julia Post Mitchell, St. Jean de Crèvecoeur (New York, 1916); Howard C. Rice, Le Cultivateur Americain: Etude sur L'Oeuvre de Saint John Crèvecoeur (Paris, 1932); and Thomas Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur (New York, 1970.)

7. For examples of the controversy see Stanley T. Williams, “Crèvecoeur and His Times,” intro. to Sketches of Eighteenth Century America: More “Letters from an American Farmer,” eds. Henri Bourdin, Ralph H. Gabriel and Stanley T. Williams (New Haven, 1925), pp. 25-29; Norman A. Plotkin, “Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur: Critic or Panagyrist,” FHS [French Historical Studies] 3 (Spring 1964): 390-404; Percy G. Adams, “Crèvecoeur—Realist or Romanticist,” The French American Review 3 (July-Sept. 1949): 115-135; Jack Babuscio, “Crèvecoeur in Charles-Town: The Negro in the Cage,” JHS [Journal of Historical Studies] (Winter 1969-70): 283-6.

8. See for examples James C. Mohr, “Calculated Disillusionment: Crèvecoeur's Letters Reconsidered,” SAQ [South Atlantic Quarterly] 69 (Summer 1970): 354-63; Thomas Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur; and Elayne Antler Rapping, “Theory and Experience in Crèvecoeur's America,” AQ [American Quarterly] 19 (Winter 1967): 707-718.

9. The sources of Crèvecoeur's ideas have been explored. As Philbrick suggests, Crèvecoeur was obviously familiar with most of the conventional ideas of the enlightenment, but it remains a matter of debate whether his knowledge springs from reading the originals or derivative compilations. See Philbrick, pp. 44-46.

10. I discuss this issue in broad terms in my article, “The Expansive Sensibility of Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur,” Exploration 2 (Dec. 1974): 36-51.

11. Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (Gloucester, Mass., 1768), reprint 1782 ed., p. 29.

12. Crèvecoeur, Letters, pp. 29-30.

13. Crèvecoeur, Letters, p. 21.

14. Philbrick, p. 51.

15. Crèvecoeur, Letters, p. 31.

16. Crèvecoeur, “The American Belisarius,” Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America: More “Letters from an American Farmer,” eds. Henri L. Bourdin, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Stanley T. Williams (New Haven, 1925), p. 228.

17. Crèvecoeur, Letters, pp. 205-6.

18. These Sketches appear to be contemporaneous with the later Letters. It is not clear why they were excluded from the original Letters from an American Farmer. Altered versions of some of them appeared in the later French translation and expansion, Letters d'un Cultivateur Americain (1784, 1787), but they were published in English only in the twentieth century and then in fragmentary form.

19. Crèvecoeur, Sketches, p. 205.

20. Significantly the one sketch cast in dramatic rather than narrative form is entitled “Landscapes.”

21. Leo Braudy, in “Sentimental Novels,” Novel 1 (Fall 1973): 5-13, has argued that it is the form rather than the content which truly defines the sentimental novel. He writes, “Structure in the sentimental novel strives to imitate feeling rather than intellect and to embody direct experience rather than aesthetic premeditation.” Although I think he undervalues the importance of the content of sentimental novels and overemphasizes the “artlessness and sincerity” of their effect, Braudy is certainly persuasive in demonstrating the ways in which the form of the sentimental novel reflects its emphasis on the primacy of individual experience. Interestingly Crèvecoeur, interpreting historical experience, conforms in part to this tendency. Philbrick discusses from a somewhat different perspective Crèvecoeur's relationship to the sentimental novel. See Philbrick, p. 92.

22. Crèvecoeur, Sketches, pp. 207-220.