“Better be a farmer, son; the corn grows while you sleep!”
This remark, addressed to me in about my sixth year by my great-uncle, a farmer in central Indiana, lingered long in my memory. There was no disputing his philosophy; corn, intelligently planted and tended, undoubtedly grows at night as well as by day. But the choice of seed demands judgment, and the preparation of the soil and the subsequent care of the growing corn exact hard labor. My earliest impressions of farm life cannot be dissociated from the long, laborious days, the monotonous plodding behind the plough, the incidental “chores,” the constant apprehensions as to drought or flood. The country cousins I visited in Indiana and Illinois were all too busy to have much time for play. I used to sit on the fence or tramp beside the boys as they drove the plough, or watch the girls milk the cows or ply the churn, oppressed by an overmastering homesickness. And when the night shut down and the insect chorus floated into the quiet house the isolation was intensified.
My father and his forebears were born and bred to the soil; they scratched the earth all the way from North Carolina into Kentucky and on into Indiana and Illinois. I had just returned, last fall, from a visit to the grave of my grandfather in a country churchyard in central Illinois, round which the corn stood in solemn phalanx, when I received a note from my fifteen-year-old boy, in whom I had hopefully looked for atavistic tendencies. From his school in Connecticut he penned these depressing tidings:
“I have decided never to be a farmer. Yesterday the school was marched three miles to a farm where the boys picked beans all afternoon and then walked back. Much as I like beans and want to help Mr. Hoover conserve our resources, this was rubbing it in. I never want to see a bean again.”
I have heard a score of successful business and professional men say that they intended to “make farmers” of their boys, and a number of these acquaintances have succeeded in sending their sons through agricultural schools, but the great-grandchildren of the Middle Western pioneers are not easily persuaded that farming is an honorable calling.
It isn’t necessary for gentlemen who watch the tape for crop forecasts to be able to differentiate wheat from oats to appreciate the importance to the prosperous course of general business of a big yield in the grain-fields; but to the average urban citizen farming is something remote and uninteresting, carried on by men he never meets in regions that he only observes hastily from a speeding automobile or the window of a limited train. Great numbers of Middle Western city men indulge in farming as a pastime—and in a majority of cases it is, from the testimony of these absentee proprietors, a pleasant recreation but an expensive one. However, all city men who gratify a weakness for farming are not faddists; many such land-owners manage their plantations with intelligence and make them earn dividends. Mr. George Ade’s Indiana farm, Hazelden, is one of the State’s show-places. The playwright and humorist says that its best feature is a good nine-hole golf-course and a swimming-pool, but from his “home plant” of 400 acres he cultivates 2,000 acres of fertile Hoosier soil.
A few years ago a manufacturer of my acquaintance, whose family presents a clear urban line for a hundred years, purchased a farm on the edge of a river—more, I imagine, for the view it afforded of a pleasant valley than because of its fertility. An architect entered sympathetically into the business of making habitable a century-old log house, a transition effected without disturbing any of the timbers or the irregular lines of floors and ceilings. So much time was spent in these restorations and readjustments that the busy owner in despair fell upon a mail-order catalogue to complete his preparations for occupancy. A barn, tenant’s house, poultry-house, pump and windmill, fencing, and every vehicle and tool needed on the place, including a barometer and wind-gauge, he ordered by post. His joy in his acres was second only to his satisfaction in the ease with which he invoked all the apparatus necessary to his comfort. Every item arrived exactly as the catalogue promised; with the hired man’s assistance he fitted the houses together and built a tower for the windmill out of concrete made in a machine provided by the same establishment. His only complaint was that the catalogue didn’t offer memorial tablets, as he thought it incumbent upon him to publish in brass the merits of the obscure pioneer who had laboriously fashioned his cabin before the convenient method of post-card ordering had been discovered.
II
Imaginative literature has done little to invest the farm with glamour. The sailor and the warrior, the fisherman and the hunter are celebrated in song and story, but the farmer has inspired no ringing saga or iliad, and the lyric muse has only added to the general joyless impression of the husbandman’s life. Hesiod and Virgil wrote with knowledge of farming; Virgil’s instructions to the ploughman only need to be hitched to a tractor to bring them up to date, and he was an authority on weather signs. But Horace was no farmer; the Sabine farm is a joke. The best Gray could do for the farmer was to send him homeward plodding his weary way. Burns, at the plough, apostrophized the daisy, but only by indirection did he celebrate the joys of farm life. Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” sang a melancholy strain; “Snow-Bound” offers a genial picture, but it is of winter-clad fields. Carleton’s “Farm Ballads” sing of poverty and domestic infelicity. Riley made a philosopher and optimist of his Indiana farmer, but his characters are to be taken as individuals rather than as types. There is, I suppose, in every Middle Western county a quizzical, quaint countryman whose sayings are quoted among his neighbors, but the man with a hundred acres of land to till, wood to cut, and stock to feed is not greatly given to poetry or humor.
English novels of rural life are numerous but they are usually in a low key. I have a lingering memory of Hardy’s “Woodlanders” as a book of charm, and his tragic “Tess” is probably fiction’s highest venture in this field. “Lorna Doone” I remember chiefly because it established in me a distaste for mutton. George Eliot and George Meredith are other English novelists who have written of farm life, nor may I forget Mr. Eden Phillpotts. French fiction, of course, offers brilliant exceptions to the generalization that literature has neglected the farmer; but, in spite of the vast importance of the farm in American life, there is in our fiction no farm novel of distinction. Mr. Hamlin Garland, in “Main Traveled Roads” and in his autobiographical chronicle “A Son of the Middle Border,” has thrust his plough deep; but the truth as we know it to be disclosed in these instances is not heartening. The cowboy is the jolliest figure in our fiction, the farmer the dreariest. The shepherd and the herdsman have fared better in all literatures than the farmer, perhaps because their vocations are more leisurely and offer opportunities for contemplation denied the tiller of the soil. The Hebrew prophets and poets were mindful of the pictorial and illustrative values of herd and flock. It is written, “Our cattle also shall go with us,” and, journeying across the mountain States, where there is always a herd blurring the range, one thinks inevitably of man’s long migration in quest of the Promised Land.