Thomas Jefferson, the Apostle of Americanism

by Gilbert Chinard

What is true of France is even more true of Italy. At Milan the cathedral is not even mentioned, but "the salon of the Casa Belgiosa is superior to anything I have ever seen." And he adds immediately, "The mixture called Scaiola, of which they make their walls and floors, is so like the finest marble as to be scarcely distinguishable from it." Pages are given to the fabrication of Parmesan cheese. Once, however, in walking along the shore from Louano to Alberga, he could not resist the enchantment of the landscape. There he noted the remarkable coloration of the Mediterranean and was puzzled by it, but he also added, let it be marked to his credit:

If any person wished to retire from his acquaintances, to live absolutely unknown, and yet in the midst of physical enjoyments, it should be in some of the little villages of this coast, where air, water and earth concur to offer what each has most precious. Here are nightingales, beccaficas, ortolans, pheasants, partridges, quails, a superb climate, and the power of changing it from summer to winter at any moment, by ascending the mountains. The earth furnishes wine, oil, figs, oranges, and every production of the garden, in every season. The sea yields lobsters, crabs, oysters, thunny, sardines, anchovies etc. Ortolans sell at this time at thirty sous, equal to one shilling sterling, the dozen.

A queer mixture of suppressed artistic emotions and avowed culinary preoccupations. Shades of Rousseau and Wordsworth, to mention the nightingale and the ortolans in one breath! But one thing at least we must be thankful for is his lack of pretence and conventional admiration. It is, after all, refreshing to find a traveler who does not copy from his guidebook and does not fall into raptures and worked-up ecstasies. He came back through "Luc, Brignolles, Avignon, Vaucluse", simply noting that "there are fine trout in the stream of Vaucluse and the valley abounds particularly with nightingales." He saw Nîmes, Montpellier, Frontignan, where he discussed the manufacture and price of wine; he passed through Carcassonne and was much interested in the canal and "the carp caught there", but did not mention the walls; he stayed several days at Bordeaux, measured the remains of a Roman amphitheater and made a thorough study of the wines; "Chateau Margau, La Tour de Ségur, Hautbrion, Chateau de la Fite, Pontac, Sauternes, Barsac." He visited Nantes, Rennes, Angers, Tours, and ascertained the truth of the allegations of the famous "growth of shells unconnected with animal bodies" mentioned by Voltaire and discussed in the "Notes on Virginia." He saw Chanteloup and heard a nightingale there, but was far more interested in "an ingenious contrivance to hide the projecting steps of a stair-case."

The same utilitarian preoccupation reappears most conspicuously in his "Memorandums on a Tour from Paris to Amsterdam, Strasburg, and back to Paris" (March, 1788). At Amsterdam he studied the Dutch wheelbarrow, the canal to raise ships over the Pampus, joists of houses, the aviary of Mr. Ameshoff near Harlem; he made a sketch of the Hope's House "of a capricious appearance yet a pleasant one"—an architectural atrocity if ever there was one. At Düsseldorf "the gallery of paintings is sublime", but equally interesting is the hog of this country (Westphalia) "of which the celebrated ham is made which sells at eight and a half pence sterling the pound." If he saw the cathedral at Cologne he forbore to mention it, but at Coblenz he had his first taste of the Moselle wine. It would be cruel to reproduce his description of the "clever ruin at Hanau, with the hermitage in which is a good figure of a hermit in plaster, colored to the life, with a table and a book before him, in the attitude of contemplation."

And yet, when the worst is told, one may wonder whether there would not be some unfairness in judging Jefferson merely from these memoranda. There he noted information for which he foresaw some further use, interesting knowledge which could be utilized at Monticello or for the benefit of his fellow countrymen. How to plant and prune the vines and the olive trees; how to make cheese and oil; how to introduce the "St. Foin", new vegetables, new crops such as rice, new industries such as the silkworm and mulberry tree; how to build a house; all this required exactness and precision and could scarcely be trusted to memory. Pleasant impressions of travel, on the contrary, could always be evoked through the imagination and would lose very little of their charm and value with time. Furthermore to put down these impressions in black and white would have required a certain process of analysis entirely foreign to Puritan consciousness, and a Puritan Jefferson had remained in his speech and manners far more than he himself believed. There was in these purely æsthetic pleasures something really too personal to be indulged in, at least in writing. Once, however, he did away with all the restraint imposed upon him by education and the "habits of his country"; it is in the well-known letter written from Nîmes to Madame de Tessé. Parts of it at least, in all fairness to Jefferson, have to be quoted here as a contrast to the dryness and objectiveness of the notes on travel....

Here I am, Madam, gazing whole hours at the Maison Quarrée, like a lover at his mistress.... This is the second time I have been in love since I left Paris. The first was with a Diana at the Château de Laye-Epinaye in Beaujolais, a delicious morsel of sculpture, by M. A. Slodtz. This, you will say, was in rule, to fall in love with a female beauty; but with a house, it is out of all precedent. No, Madam, it is not without a precedent in my own history. While in Paris, I was violently smitten with the Hôtel de Salm, and used to go to the Tuileries almost daily to look at it. The loueuse des chaises—inattentive to my passion—never had the complaisance to place a chair there, so that sitting on the parapet, and twisting my neck around to see the object of my admiration, I generally left with a torti-colli.

From Lyons to Nismes I have been nourished with the remains of Roman grandeur. They have always brought you to my mind, because I know your affection for whatever is Roman and noble. At Vienna I thought of you. But I am glad you were not here; for you would have seen me more angry than, I hope, you will ever see me. The Praetorian palace, as it is called—comparable, for its fine proportions, to the Maison Quarrée—defaced by the barbarians who have converted it to its present purpose, its beautiful fluted Corinthian columns cut out, in parts, to make space for Gothic windows, and hewed down, in the residue, to the plane of the buildings, was enough, you must admit, to disturb my composure. At Orange too, I thought of you. I was sure you had seen with pleasure the sublime triumphal arch of Marius at the entrance of the city. I went then to the Arenae. Would you believe, Madam, that in this eighteenth century, in France, under the reign of Louis XVI, they are at this moment pulling down the circular wall of this superb remain, to pave a road? And that too, from a hill which is itself en entire mass of stone, just as fit, and more accessible.[114]

This is indeed a charming letter; but why did he not write more often in this vein? Why did he send to Martha moralizing and edifying letters when he was traveling in Southern France and Italy? His latent puritanism, as already shown, may partly account for this reticence, but this came from a deeper feeling. He had already protested in his "Notes on Virginia" against the claim made by Europe to intellectual supremacy. He realized, however, how powerful was the attraction of the great centers of European culture on young America, and was afraid that the introduction of foreign arts, foreign literature, foreign customs, and "mode" might corrupt the very springs of American life. This blind admiration of everything European constituted one of the greatest dangers if America wished to develop on her own soil a civilization of her own. Friends in Virginia had to be convinced that an American youth, brought up on a strictly American diet, would in nowise be inferior to most Europeans. If one insisted upon sending a young man to Europe, the chances were that he would learn nothing essential, that on the contrary he would lose many of his native qualities and at any rate his native innocence and purity of mind. This appears most conspicuously in a letter written to J. B. Bannister, Junior, who had manifested the intention of sending his son to Europe. There Jefferson proceeded to denounce the features of European civilization as vehemently as any Puritan preacher and with the same frankness of expression. To enumerate the disadvantages of sending a youth to Europe "would require a volume", so he had to select a few. England is shortly disposed of: "If he goes to England, he learns drinking, horse racing, and boxing," for those are the peculiarities of English education. If he goes to the continent he will acquire a fondness for luxury and dissipation, he will contract a partiality for aristocracy and monarchy; he will soon be led to consider "fidelity to the marriage bed as an ungentlemanly practice." He will become denationalized and recollecting "the voluptuary dress and arts of the European women, will pity and despise the chaste affections and simplicity of those of his own country." He will return to America "a foreigner", speaking and writing his own tongue "like a foreigner", and therefore unqualified to obtain those distinctions, which eloquence of the pen and tongue ensures in a free country. There can be only one conclusion after such a fierce denunciation of Europe:

It appears to me, then, that an American, coming to Europe for education, loses in his knowledge, in his morals, in his health, in his habits, and in his happiness. I had entertained only doubts on this head before I came to Europe: what I see and hear, since I came here proves more than I had expected. Cast your eye over America: who are the men of most learning, of most eloquence, most beloved by their countrymen and most trusted and promoted by them? They are those who have been educated among them, and whose manners, morals, and habits, are perfectly homogeneous with those of the country.[115]

Very bold indeed would have been the American father who, with such a frightful picture before his eyes, would have sent his son to Europe.