E-text prepared by Al Haines
INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN LETTERS
by
HENRY A. BEERS
New York
Chautauqua Press
C. L. S. C. Department, 150 Fifth Avenue
1891
The required books of the C. L. S. C. are recommended by a Council of
Six. It must, however, be understood that recommendation does not
involve an approval by the Council, or by any member of it, of every
principle or doctrine contained in the book recommended.
PREFACE.
This volume is intended as a companion to the historical sketch of
English literature, entitled _From Chaucer to Tennyson_, published last
year for the Chautauqua Circle. In writing it I have followed the same
plan, aiming to present the subject in a sort of continuous essay
rather than in the form of a "primer" or elementary manual. I have not
undertaken to describe, or even to mention, every American author or
book of importance, but only those which seemed to me of most
significance. Nevertheless I believe that the sketch contains enough
detail to make it of some use as a guide-book to our literature.
Though meant to be mainly a history of American _belles-lettres_, it
makes some mention of historical and political writings, but hardly any
of philosophical, scientific, and technical works.
A chronological rather than a topical order has been followed, although
the fact that our best literature is of recent growth has made it
impossible to adhere as closely to a chronological plan as in the
English sketch. In the reading courses appended to the different
chapters I have named a few of the most important authorities in
American literary history, such as Duyckinck, Tyler, Stedman, and
Richardson. My thanks are due to the authors and publishers who have
kindly allowed me the use of copyrighted matter for the appendix,
especially to Mr. Park Godwin and Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. for the
passages from Bryant; to Messrs. A. O. Armstrong & Son for the
selections from Poe; to the Rev. E. E. Hale and Messrs. Roberts
Brothers for the extract from _The Man Without a Country_; to Walt
Whitman for his two poems; and to Mr. Clemens and the American
Publishing Co. for the passage from _The Jumping Frog_.
HENRY A. BEERS.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE COLONIAL PERIOD, 1607-1765
CHAPTER II.
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD, 1765-1815
CHAPTER III.
THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION, 1815-1837
CHAPTER IV.
THE CONCORD WRITERS, 1837-1861
CHAPTER V.
THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS, 1837-1861
CHAPTER VI.
LITERATURE IN THE CITIES, 1837-1861
CHAPTER VII.
LITERATURE SINCE 1861
APPENDIX.
INITIAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN LETTERS.
CHAPTER I.
THE COLONIAL PERIOD.
1607-1765.
The writings of our colonial era have a much greater importance as
history than as literature. It would be unfair to judge of the
intellectual vigor of the English colonists in America by the books
that they wrote; those "stern men with empires in their brains" had
more pressing work to do than the making of books. The first settlers,
indeed, were brought face to face with strange and exciting
conditions--the sea, the wilderness, the Indians, the flora and fauna
of a new world--things which seem stimulating to the imagination, and
incidents and experiences which might have lent themselves easily to
poetry or romance. Of all these they wrote back to England reports
which were faithful and sometimes vivid, but which, upon the whole,
hardly rise into the region of literature. "New England," said
Hawthorne, "was then in a state incomparably more picturesque than at
present." But to a contemporary that old New England of the
seventeenth century doubtless seemed any thing but picturesque, filled
with grim, hard, work-day realities. The planters both of Virginia and
Massachusetts were decimated by sickness and starvation, constantly
threatened by Indian Wars, and troubled by quarrels among themselves
and fears of disturbance from England. The wrangles between the royal
governors and the House of Burgesses in the Old Dominion, and the
theological squabbles in New England, which fill our colonial records,
are petty and wearisome to read of. At least, they would be so did we
not bear in mind to what imperial destinies those conflicts were slowly
educating the little communities which had hardly yet secured a
foothold on the edge of the raw continent.
Even a century and a half after the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements,
when the American plantations had grown strong and flourishing, and
commerce was building up large towns, and there were wealth and
generous living and fine society, the "good old colony days when we
lived under the king," had yielded little in the way of literature that
is of any permanent interest. There would seem to be something in the
relation of a colony to the mother-country which dooms the thought and
art of the former to a helpless provincialism. Canada and Australia
are great provinces, wealthier and more populous than the thirteen
colonies at the time of their separation from England. They have
cities whose inhabitants number hundreds of thousands, well-equipped
universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public buildings, all the
outward appliances of an advanced civilization; and yet what have
Canada and Australia contributed to British literature?
American literature had no infancy. That engaging _naïveté_ and that
heroic rudeness which give a charm to the early popular tales and songs
of Europe find, of course, no counterpart on our soil. Instead of
emerging from the twilight of the past the first American writings were
produced under the garish noon of a modern and learned age.
Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark of a colonial
literature. The poets, in particular, instead of finding a challenge
to their imagination in the new life about them, are apt to go on
imitating the cast-off literary fashions of the mother-country.
America was settled by Englishmen who were contemporary with the
greatest names in English literature. Jamestown was planted in 1607,
nine years before Shakespeare's death, and the hero of that enterprise,
Captain John Smith, may not improbably have been a personal
acquaintance of the great dramatist. "They have acted my fatal
tragedies on the stage," wrote Smith. Many circumstances in _The
Tempest_ were doubtless suggested by the wreck of the _Sea Venture_ on
"the still vext Bermoothes," as described by William Strachey in his
_True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates_,
written at Jamestown, and published at London in 1610. Shakespeare's
contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the _Polyolbion_, addressed
a spirited valedictory ode to the three shiploads of "brave, heroic
minds" who sailed from London in 1606 to colonize Virginia, an ode
which ended with the prophecy of a future American literature:
"And as there plenty grows
Of laurel every-where--
Apollo's sacred tree--
You it may see
A poet's brows
To crown, that may sing there."
Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the author of the _Civil Wars_,
had also prophesied in a similar strain:
"And who in time knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores . . .
What worlds in the yet unformed Occident
May come refined with accents that are ours?"
It needed but a slight movement in the balances of fate, and Walter
Raleigh might have been reckoned among the poets of America. He was
one of the original promoters of the Virginia colony, and he made
voyages in person to Newfoundland and Guiana. And more unlikely things
have happened than that when John Milton left Cambridge in 1632 he
should have been tempted to follow Winthrop and the colonists of
Massachusetts Bay, who had sailed two years before. Sir Henry Vane,
the younger, who was afterward Milton's friend--
"Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old"--
came over in 1635, and was for a short time governor of Massachusetts.
These are idle speculations, and yet, when we reflect that Oliver
Cromwell was on the point of embarking for America when he was
prevented by the king's officers, we may, for the nonce, "let our frail
thoughts dally with false surmise," and fancy by how narrow a chance
_Paradise Lost_ missed being written in Boston. But, as a rule, the
members of the literary guild are not quick to emigrate. They like the
feeling of an old and rich civilization about them, a state of society
which America has only begun to reach during the present century.
Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were the "two great distributing
centers of the English race." The men who colonized the country
between the Capes of Virginia were not drawn, to any large extent, from
the literary or bookish classes in the old country. Many of the first
settlers were gentlemen--too many, Captain Smith thought, for the good
of the plantation. Some among these were men of worth and spirit, "of
good means and great parentage." Such was, for example, George Percy,
a younger brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was one of the
original adventurers, and the author of _A Discourse of the Plantation
of the Southern Colony of Virginia_, which contains a graphic narrative
of the fever and famine summer of 1607 at Jamestown. But many of these
gentlemen were idlers, "unruly gallants, packed thither by their
friends to escape ill destinies," dissipated younger sons, soldiers of
fortune, who came over after the gold which was supposed to abound in
the new country, and who spent their time in playing bowls and drinking
at the tavern as soon as there was any tavern. With these was a
sprinkling of mechanics and farmers, indented servants, and the
on-scourings of the London streets, fruit of press-gangs and jail
deliveries, sent over to "work in the plantations."
Nor were the conditions of life afterward in Virginia very favorable to
literary growth. The planters lived isolated on great estates which
had water-fronts on the rivers that flow into the Chesapeake. There
the tobacco, the chief staple of the country, was loaded directly upon
the trading vessels that tied up to the long, narrow wharves of the
plantations. Surrounded by his slaves, and visited occasionally by a
distant neighbor, the Virginia country gentleman lived a free and
careless life. He was fond of fox-hunting, horse-racing, and
cock-fighting. There were no large towns, and the planters met each
other mainly on occasion of a county court or the assembling of the
Burgesses. The court-house was the nucleus of social and political
life in Virginia as the town-meeting was in New England. In such a
state of society schools were necessarily few, and popular education
did not exist. Sir William Berkeley, who was the royal governor of the
colony from 1641 to 1677, said, in 1670, "I thank God there are no free
schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred
years." In the matter of printing this pious wish was well-nigh
realized. The first press set up in the colony, about 1681, was soon
suppressed, and found no successor until the year 1729. From that date
until some ten years before the Revolution one printing-press answered
the needs of Virginia, and this was under official control. The
earliest newspaper in the colony was the _Virginia Gazette_,
established in 1736.
In the absence of schools the higher education naturally languished.
Some of the planters were taught at home by tutors, and others went to
England and entered the universities. But these were few in number,
and there was no college in the colony until more than half a century
after the foundation of Harvard in the younger province of
Massachusetts. The college of William and Mary was established at
Williamsburg chiefly by the exertions of the Rev. James Blair, a Scotch
divine, who was sent by the Bishop of London as "commissary" to the
Church in Virginia. The college received its charter in 1693, and held
its first commencement in 1700. It is perhaps significant of the
difference between the Puritans of New England and the so-called
"Cavaliers" of Virginia, that while the former founded and supported
Harvard College in 1636, and Yale in 1701, of their own motion and at
their own expense, William and Mary received its endowment from the
crown, being provided for in part by a deed of lands and in part by a
tax of a penny a pound on all tobacco exported from the colony. In
return for this royal grant the college was to present yearly to the
king two copies of Latin verse. It is reported of the young Virginian
gentlemen who resorted to the new college that they brought their
plantation manners with them, and were accustomed to "keep race-horses
at the college, and bet at the billiard or other gaming-tables."
William and Mary College did a good work for the colony, and educated
some of the great Virginians of the Revolutionary era, but it has never
been a large or flourishing institution, and has held no such relation
to the intellectual development of its section as Harvard and Yale have
held in the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Even after the
foundation of the University of Virginia, in which Jefferson took a
conspicuous part, Southern youths were commonly sent to the North for
their education, and at the time of the outbreak of the civil war there
was a large contingent of Southern students in several Northern
colleges, notably in Princeton and Yale.
Naturally, the first books written in America were descriptions of the
country and narratives of the vicissitudes of the infant settlements,
which were sent home to be printed for the information of the English
public and the encouragement of further immigration. Among books of
this kind produced in Virginia the earliest and most noteworthy were
the writings of that famous soldier of fortune, Captain John Smith.
The first of these was his _True Relation_, namely, "of such
occurrences and accidents of note as hath happened in Virginia since
the first planting of that colony," printed at London in 1608. Among
Smith's other books the most important is perhaps his _General History
of Virginia_ (London, 1624), a compilation of various narratives by
different hands, but passing under his name. Smith was a man of a
restless and daring spirit, full of resource, impatient of
contradiction, and of a somewhat vainglorious nature, with an appetite
for the marvelous and a disposition to draw the longbow. He had seen
service in many parts of the world, and his wonderful adventures lost
nothing in the telling. It was alleged against him that the evidence
of his prowess rested almost entirely on his own testimony. His
truthfulness in essentials has not, perhaps, been successfully
impugned, but his narratives have suffered by the embellishments with
which he has colored them; and, in particular, the charming story of
Pocahontas saving his life at the risk of her own--the one romance of
early Virginian history--has passed into the realm of legend.
Captain Smith's writings have small literary value apart from the
interest of the events which they describe and the diverting but
forcible personality which they unconsciously display. They are the
rough-hewn records of a busy man of action, whose sword was mightier
than his pen. As Smith returned to England after two years in
Virginia, and did not permanently cast in his lot with the settlement
of which he had been for a time the leading spirit, he can hardly be
claimed as an American author. No more can Mr. George Sandys, who came
to Virginia in the train of Governor Wyat, in 1621, and completed his
excellent metrical translation of Ovid on the banks of the James, in
the midst of the Indian massacre of 1622, "limned" as he writes "by
that imperfect light which was snatched from the hours of night and
repose, having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the
muses." Sandys went back to England for good probably as early as
1625, and can, therefore, no more be reckoned as the first American
poet, on the strength of his paraphrase of the _Metamorphoses_, than he
can be reckoned the earliest Yankee inventor because he "introduced the
first water-mill into America."
The literature of colonial Virginia, and of the southern colonies which
took their point of departure from Virginia, is almost wholly of this
historical and descriptive kind. A great part of it is concerned with
the internal affairs of the province, such as "Bacon's Rebellion," in
1676, one of the most striking episodes in our ante-revolutionary
annals, and of which there exist a number of narratives, some of them
anonymous, and only rescued from a manuscript condition a hundred years
after the event. Another part is concerned with the explorations of
new territory. Such were the "Westover Manuscripts," left by Colonel
William Byrd, who was appointed in 1729 one of the commissioners to fix
the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina, and gave an account
of the survey in his _History of the Dividing Line_, which was printed
only in 1841. Colonel Byrd is one of the most brilliant figures of
colonial Virginia, and a type of the Old Virginia gentleman. He had
been sent to England for his education, where he was admitted to the
bar of the Middle Temple, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and
formed an intimate friendship with Charles Boyle, the Earl of Orrery.
He held many offices in the government of the colony, and founded the
cities of Richmond and Petersburg. His estates were large, and at
Westover--where he had one of the finest private libraries in
America--he exercised a baronial hospitality, blending the usual
profusion of plantation life with the elegance of a traveled scholar
and "picked man of countries." Colonel Byrd was rather an amateur in
literature. His _History of the Dividing Line_ is written with a
jocularity which rises occasionally into real humor, and which gives to
the painful journey through the wilderness the air of a holiday
expedition. Similar in tone were his diaries of _A Progress to the
Mines_ and _A Journey to the Land of Eden_ in North Carolina.
The first formal historian of Virginia was Robert Beverly, "a native
and inhabitant of the place," whose _History of Virginia_ was printed
at London in 1705. Beverly was a rich planter and large slave-owner,
who, being in London in 1703, was shown by his bookseller the
manuscript of a forthcoming work, Oldmixon's _British Empire in
America_. Beverly was set upon writing his history by the inaccuracies
in this, and likewise because the province "has been so misrepresented
to the common people of England as to make them believe that the
servants in Virginia are made to draw in cart and plow, and that the
country turns all people black"--an impression which lingers still in
parts of Europe. The most original portions of the book are those in
which the author puts down his personal observations of the plants and
animals of the New World, and particularly the account of the Indians,
to which his third book is devoted, and which is accompanied by
valuable plates. Beverly's knowledge of these matters was evidently at
first hand, and his descriptions here are very fresh and interesting.
The more strictly historical part of his work is not free from
prejudice and inaccuracy. A more critical, detailed, and impartial,
but much less readable, work was William Stith's _History of the First
Discovery and Settlement of Virginia_, 1747, which brought the subject
down only to the year 1624. Stith was a clergyman, and at one time a
professor in William and Mary College.
The Virginians were stanch royalists and churchmen. The Church of
England was established by law, and non-conformity was persecuted in
various ways. Three missionaries were sent to the colony in 1642 by
the Puritans of New England, two from Braintree, Massachusetts, and one
from New Haven. They were not suffered to preach, but many resorted to
them in private houses, until, being finally driven out by fines and
imprisonments, they took refuge in Catholic Maryland. The Virginia
clergy were not, as a body, very much of a force in education or
literature. Many of them, by reason of the scattering and dispersed
condition of their parishes, lived as domestic chaplains with the
wealthier planters, and partook of their illiteracy and their passion
for gaming and hunting. Few of them inherited the zeal of Alexander
Whitaker, the "Apostle of Virginia," who came over in 1611 to preach to
the colonists and convert the Indians, and who published in furtherance
of those ends _Good News from Virginia_, in 1613, three years before
his death by drowning in the James River.
The conditions were much more favorable for the production of a
literature in New England than in the southern colonies. The free and
genial existence of the "Old Dominion" had no counterpart among the
settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must have
been rather unpleasant people to live with for persons of a different
way of thinking. But their intensity of character, their respect for
learning, and the heroic mood which sustained them through the
hardships and dangers of their great enterprise are amply reflected in
their own writings. If these are not so much literature as the raw
materials of literature, they have at least been fortunate in finding
interpreters among their descendants, and no modern Virginian has done
for the memory of the Jamestown planters what Hawthorne, Whittier,
Longfellow, and others have done in casting the glamour of poetry and
romance over the lives of the founders of New England.
Cotton Mather, in his _Magnalia_, quotes the following passage from one
of those election sermons, delivered before the General Court of
Massachusetts, which formed for many years the great annual
intellectual event of the colony:
"The question was often put unto our predecessors, _What went ye out
into the wilderness to see_? And the answer to it is not only too
excellent but too notorious to be dissembled. . . . We came hither
because we would have our posterity settled under the pure and full
dispensations of the Gospel, defended by rulers that should be of
ourselves." The New England colonies were, in fact, theocracies.
Their leaders were clergymen, or laymen whose zeal for the faith was no
whit inferior to that of the ministers themselves. Church and State
were one. The freeman's oath was only administered to church members,
and there was no place in the social system for unbelievers or
dissenters. The pilgrim fathers regarded their transplantation to the
New World as an exile, and nothing is more touching in their written
records than the repeated expressions of love and longing toward the
old home which they had left, and even toward that Church of England
from which they had sorrowfully separated themselves. It was not in
any light or adventurous spirit that they faced the perils of the sea
and the wilderness. "This howling wilderness," "these ends of the
earth," "these goings down of the sun," are some of the epithets which
they constantly applied to the land of their exile. Nevertheless they
had come to stay, and, unlike Smith and Percy and Sandys, the early
historians and writers of New England cast in their lots permanently
with the new settlements. A few, indeed, went back after 1640--Mather
says some ten or twelve of the ministers of the first "classis" or
immigration were among them--when the victory of the Puritanic party in
Parliament opened a career for them in England, and made their presence
there seem in some cases a duty. The celebrated Hugh Peters, for
example, who was afterward Oliver Cromwell's chaplain, and was beheaded
after the Restoration, went back in 1641, and in 1647 Nathaniel Ward,
the minister of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and author of a quaint book
against toleration, entitled _The Simple Cobbler of Agawam_; written in
America and published shortly after its author's arrival in England.
The civil war, too, put a stop to further emigration from England until
after the Restoration in 1660.
The mass of the Puritan immigration consisted of men of the middle
class, artisans and husbandmen, the most useful members of a new
colony. But their leaders were clergymen educated at the universities,
and especially at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the great Puritan
college; their civil magistrates were also in great part gentlemen of
education and substance, like the elder Winthrop, who was learned in
law, and Theophilus Eaton, first governor of New Haven, who was a
London merchant of good estate. It is computed that there were in New
England during the first generation as many university graduates as in
any community of equal population in the old country. Almost the first
care of the settlers was to establish schools. Every town of fifty
families was required by law to maintain a common school, and every
town of a hundred families a grammar or Latin school. In 1636, only
sixteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock,
Harvard College was founded at Newtown, whose name was thereupon
changed to Cambridge, the General Court held at Boston on September 8,
1630, having already advanced 400 pounds "by way of essay towards the
building of something to begin a college." "An university," says
Mather, "which hath been to these plantations, for the good literature
there cultivated, _sal Gentium_, . . . and a river without the streams
whereof these regions would have been mere unwatered places for the
devil." By 1701 Harvard had put forth a vigorous offshoot, Yale
College at New Haven, the settlers of New Haven and Connecticut
plantations having increased sufficiently to need a college at their
own doors. A printing-press was set up at Cambridge in 1639, which was
under the oversight of the university authorities, and afterward of
licensers appointed by the civil power. The press was no more free in
Massachusetts than in Virginia, and that "liberty of unlicensed
printing" for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his
_Areopagitica_, in 1644, was unknown in Puritan New England until some
twenty years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. "The
Freeman's Oath" and an almanac were issued from the Cambridge press in
1639, and in 1640 the first English book printed in America, a
collection of the psalms in meter, made by various ministers, and known
as the _Bay Psalm Book_. The poetry of this version was worse, if
possible, than that of Sternhold and Hopkins's famous rendering; but it
is noteworthy that one of the principal translators was that devoted
"Apostle to the Indians," the Rev. John Eliot, who, in 1661-63,
translated the Bible into the Algonquin tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled
a life-time for the conversion of those "salvages," "tawnies,"
"devil-worshipers," for whom our early writers have usually nothing but
bad words. They have been destroyed instead of converted; but his (so
entitled) _Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone
Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament_--the first Bible printed in
America--remains a monument of missionary zeal and a work of great
value to students of the Indian languages.
A modern writer has said that, to one looking back on the history of
old New England, it seems as though the sun shone but dimly there, and
the landscape was always dark and wintry. Such is the impression which
one carries away from the perusal of books like Bradford's and
Winthrop's Journals, or Mather's _Wonders of the Invisible World_--an
impression of gloom, of flight and cold, of mysterious fears besieging
the infant settlements scattered in a narrow fringe "between the
groaning forest and the shore." The Indian terror hung over New
England for more than half a century, or until the issue of King
Philip's War, in 1670, relieved the colonists of any danger of a
general massacre. Added to this were the perplexities caused by the
earnest resolve of the settlers to keep their New-England Eden free
from the intrusion of the serpent in the shape of heretical sects in
religion. The Puritanism of Massachusetts was an orthodox and
conservative Puritanism. The later and more grotesque out-crops of the
movement in the old England found no toleration in the new. But these
refugees for conscience' sake were compelled in turn to persecute
Antinomians, Separatists, Familists, Libertines, Anti-pedobaptists, and
later, Quakers, and still later, Enthusiasts, who swarmed into their
precincts and troubled the churches with "prophesyings" and novel
opinions. Some of those were banished, others were flogged or
imprisoned, and a few were put to death. Of the exiles the most
noteworthy was Roger Williams, an impetuous, warm-hearted man, who was
so far in advance of his age as to deny the power of the civil
magistrate in cases of conscience, or who, in other words, maintained
the modern doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Williams
was driven away from the Massachusetts colony--where he had been
minister of the church at Salem--and with a few followers fled into the
southern wilderness and settled at Providence. There, and in the
neighboring plantation of Rhode Island, for which he obtained a
charter, he established his patriarchal rule and gave freedom of
worship to all comers. Williams was a prolific writer on theological
subjects, the most important of his writings being, perhaps, his
_Bloody Tenent of Persecution_, 1644, and a supplement to the same
called out by a reply to the former work from the pen of Mr. John
Cotton, minister of the First Church at Boston, entitled _The Bloody
Tenent Washed and made White in the Blood of the Lamb_. Williams was
also a friend to the Indians, whose lands, he thought, should not be
taken from them without payment, and he anticipated Eliot by writing,
in 1643, a _Key into the Language of America_. Although at odds with
the theology of Massachusetts Bay, Williams remained in correspondence
with Winthrop and others in Boston, by whom he was highly esteemed. He
visited England in 1643 and 1652, and made the acquaintance of John
Milton.
Besides the threat of an Indian war and their anxious concern for the
purity of the Gospel in their churches, the colonists were haunted by
superstitious forebodings of the darkest kind. It seemed to them that
Satan, angered by the setting up of the kingdom of the saints in
America, had "come down in great wrath," and was present among them,
sometimes even in visible shape, to terrify and tempt. Special
providences and unusual phenomena, like earth quakes, mirages, and the
northern lights, are gravely recorded by Winthrop and Mather and others
as portents of supernatural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchinson,
the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, according to rumor,
been delivered of a monstrous birth, the Rev. John Cotton, in open
assembly, at Boston, upon a lecture day, "thereupon gathered that it
might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness." "There
will be an unusual range of the devil among us," wrote Mather, "a
little before the second coming of our Lord. The evening wolves will
be much abroad when we are near the evening of the world." This belief
culminated in the horrible witchcraft delusion at Salem in 1692, that
"spectral puppet play," which, beginning with the malicious pranks of a
few children who accused certain uncanny old women and other persons of
mean condition and suspected lives of having tormented them with magic,
gradually drew into its vortex victims of the highest character, and
resulted in the judicial murder of over nineteen people. Many of the
possessed pretended to have been visited by the apparition of a little
black man, who urged them to inscribe their names in a red book which
he carried--a sort of muster-roll of those who had forsworn God's
service for the devil's. Others testified to having been present at
meetings of witches in the forest. It is difficult now to read without
contempt the "evidence" which grave justices and learned divines
considered sufficient to condemn to death men and women of unblemished
lives. It is true that the belief in witchcraft was general at that
time all over the civilized world, and that sporadic cases of
witch-burnings had occurred in different parts of America and Europe.
Sir Thomas Browne, in his _Religio Medici_, 1635, affirmed his belief
in witches, and pronounced those who doubted of them "a sort of
atheist." But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and
executions, and was the more shocking from the general high level of
intelligence in the community in which these were held. It would be
well if those who lament the decay of "faith" would remember what
things were done in New England in the name of faith less than two
hundred years ago. It is not wonderful that, to the Massachusetts
Puritans of the seventeenth century, the mysterious forest held no
beautiful suggestion; to them it was simply a grim and hideous
wilderness, whose dark aisles were the ambush of prowling savages and
the rendezvous of those other "devil-worshipers" who celebrated there a
kind of vulgar Walpurgis night.
The most important of original sources for the history of the
settlement of New England are the journals of William Bradford, first
governor of Plymouth, and John Winthrop, the second governor of
Massachusetts, which hold a place corresponding to the writings of
Captain John Smith in the Virginia colony, but are much more sober and
trustworthy. Bradford's _History of Plymouth Plantation_ covers the
period from 1620 to 1646. The manuscript was used by later annalists
but remained unpublished, as a whole, until 1855, having been lost
during the War of the Revolution and recovered long afterward in
England. Winthrop's Journal, or _History of New England_, begun on
shipboard in 1630, and extending to 1649, was not published entire
until 1826. It is of equal authority with Bradford's, and perhaps, on
the whole the more important of the two, as the colony of Massachusetts
Bay, whose history it narrates, greatly outwent Plymouth in wealth and
population, though not in priority of settlement. The interest of
Winthrop's Journal lies in the events that it records rather than in
any charm in the historian's manner of recording them. His style is
pragmatic, and some of the incidents which he gravely notes are trivial
to the modern mind, though instructive as to our forefathers' way of
thinking. For instance, of the year 1632: "At Watertown there was (in
the view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a
snake, and after a long fight the mouse prevailed and killed the snake.
The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of
it, gave this interpretation: that the snake was the devil, the mouse
was a poor, contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which
should overcome Satan here and dispossess him of his kingdom." The
reader of Winthrop's Journal comes every-where upon hints which the
imagination has since shaped into poetry and romance. The germs of
many of Longfellow's _New England Tragedies_, of Hawthorne's _Maypole
of Merrymount_, and _Endicott's Red Cross_, and of Whittier's _John
Underhill_ and _The Familists' Hymn_ are all to be found in some dry,
brief entry of the old Puritan diarist. "Robert Cole, having been oft
punished for drunkenness, was now ordered to wear a red D about his
neck for a year," to wit, the year 1633, and thereby gave occasion to
the greatest American romance, _The Scarlet Letter_. The famous
apparition of the phantom ship in New Haven harbor, "upon the top of
the poop a man standing with one hand akimbo under his left side, and
in his right hand a sword stretched out toward the sea," was first
chronicled by Winthrop under the year 1648. This meteorological
phenomenon took on the dimensions of a full-grown myth some forty years
later, as related, with many embellishments, by Rev. James Pierpont, of
New Haven, in a letter to Cotton Mather. Winthrop put great faith in
special providences, and among other instances narrates, not without a
certain grim satisfaction, how "the _Mary Rose_, a ship of Bristol, of
about 200 tons," lying before Charleston, was blown in pieces with her
own powder, being twenty-one barrels, wherein the judgment of God
appeared, "for the master and company were many of them profane
scoffers at us and at the ordinances of religion here." Without any
effort at dramatic portraiture or character-sketching, Winthrop managed
in all simplicity, and by the plain relation of facts, to leave a clear
impression of many prominent figures in the first Massachusetts
immigration. In particular there gradually arises from the entries in
his diary a very distinct and diverting outline of Captain John
Underhill, celebrated in Whittier's poem. He was one of the few
professional soldiers who came over with the Puritan fathers, such as
John Mason, the hero of the Pequot War, and Miles Standish, whose
_Courtship_ Longfellow sang. He had seen service in the Low Countries,
and in pleading the privilege of his profession "he insisted much upon
the liberty which all States do allow to military officers for free
speech, etc., and that himself had spoken sometimes as freely to Count
Nassau." Captain Underhill gave the colony no end of trouble, both by
his scandalous living and his heresies in religion. Having been
seduced into Familistical opinions by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, who was
banished for her beliefs, he was had up before the General Court and
questioned, among other points, as to his own report of the manner of
his conversion. "He had lain under a spirit of bondage and a legal way
for years, and could get no assurance, till, at length, as he was
taking a pipe of tobacco, the Spirit set home an absolute promise of
free grace with such assurance and joy as he never since doubted of his
good estate, neither should he, though he should fall into sin. . . .
The Lord's day following he made a speech in the assembly, showing that
as the Lord was pleased to convert Paul as he was in persecuting, etc.,
so he might manifest himself to him as he was taking the moderate use
of the creature called tobacco." The gallant captain, being banished
the colony, betook himself to the falls of the Piscataquack (Exeter,
N.H.), where the Rev. John Wheelwright, another adherent of Mrs.
Hutchinson, had gathered a congregation. Being made governor of this
plantation, Underhill sent letters to the Massachusetts magistrates,
breathing reproaches and imprecations of vengeance. But meanwhile it
was discovered that he had been living in adultery at Boston with a
young woman whom he had seduced, the wife of a cooper, and the captain
was forced to make public confession, which he did with great unction
and in a manner highly dramatic. "He came in his worst clothes (being
accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness), without a
band, in a foul linen cap, and pulled close to his eyes, and standing
upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs and abundance of tears, lay
open his wicked course." There is a lurking humor in the grave
Winthrop's detailed account of Underhill's doings. Winthrop's own
personality comes out well in his Journal. He was a born leader of
men, a _conditor imperii_, just, moderate, patient, wise; and his
narrative gives, upon the whole, a favorable impression of the general
prudence and fair-mindedness of the Massachusetts settlers in their
dealings with one another, with the Indians, and with the neighboring
plantations.
Considering our forefathers' errand and calling into this wilderness,
it is not strange that their chief literary staples were sermons and
tracts in controversial theology. Multitudes of these were written and
published by the divines of the first generation, such as John Cotton,
Thomas Shepard, John Norton, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hooker, the
founder of Hartford, of whom it was finely said that "when he was doing
his Master's business he would put a king into his pocket." Nor were
their successors in the second or the third generation any less
industrious and prolific. They rest from their labors and their works
do follow them. Their sermons and theological treatises are not
literature: they are for the most part dry, heavy, and dogmatic, but
they exhibit great learning, logical acuteness, and an earnestness
which sometimes rises into eloquence. The pulpit ruled New England,
and the sermon was the great intellectual engine of the time. The
serious thinking of the Puritans was given almost exclusively to
religion; the other world was all their art. The daily secular events
of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissitude of the seasons, were
important enough to find record in print only in so far as they
manifested God's dealings with his people. So much was the sermon
depended upon to furnish literary food that it was the general custom
of serious-minded laymen to take down the words of the discourse in
their note-books. Franklin, in his _Autobiography_, describes this as
the constant habit of his grandfather, Peter Folger; and Mather, in his
life of the elder Winthrop, says that "tho' he wrote not after the
preacher, yet such was his _attention_ and such his _retention_ in
hearing, that he repeated unto his family the sermons which he had
heard in the congregation." These discourses were commonly of great
length; twice, or sometimes thrice, the pulpit hour-glass was silently
inverted while the orator pursued his theme even unto "fourteenthly."
The book which best sums up the life and thought of this old New
England of the seventeenth century is Cotton Mather's _Magnalia Christi
Americana_. Mather was by birth a member of that clerical aristocracy
which developed later into Dr. Holmes's "Brahmin Caste of New England."
His maternal grandfather was John Cotton. His father was Increase
Mather, the most learned divine of his generation in New England,
minister of the North Church of Boston, President of Harvard College,
and author, _inter alia_, of that characteristically Puritan book, _An
Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences_. Cotton Mather
himself was a monster of erudition and a prodigy of diligence. He was
graduated from Harvard at fifteen. He ordered his daily life and
conversation by a system of minute observances. He was a book-worm,
whose life was spent between his library and his pulpit, and his
published works number upward of three hundred and eighty. Of these
the most important is the _Magnalia_, 1702, an ecclesiastical history
of New England from 1620 to 1698, divided into seven parts: I.
Antiquities; II. Lives of the Governors; III. Lives of Sixty Famous
Divines; IV. A History of Harvard College, with biographies of its
eminent graduates; V. Acts and Monuments of the Faith; VI. Wonderful
Providences; VII. The Wars of the Lord--that is, an account of the
Afflictions and Disturbances of the Churches and the Conflicts with the
Indians. The plan of the work thus united that of Fuller's _Worthies
of England_ and _Church History_ with that of Wood's _Athenae
Oxonienses_ and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_.
Mather's prose was of the kind which the English Commonwealth writers
used. He was younger by a generation than Dryden; but, as literary
fashions are slower to change in a colony than in the mother-country,
that nimble English which Dryden and the Restoration essayists
introduced had not yet displaced in New England the older manner.
Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton, Brown,
Fuller, and Burton, a style ponderous with learning and stiff with
allusions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quotations from the
Greek and the Latin. A page of the _Magnalia_ is almost as richly
mottled with italics as one from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and the
quaintness which Mather caught from his favorite Fuller disports itself
in textual pun and marginal anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his
books and chapters. He speaks of Thomas Hooker as having "_angled_
many scores of souls into the kingdom of heaven," anagrammatizes Mrs.
Hutchinson's surname into "the non-such;" and having occasion to speak
of Mr. Urian Oakes's election to the presidency of Harvard College,
enlarges upon the circumstance as follows:
"We all know that _Britain_ knew nothing more famous than their ancient
sect of DRUIDS; the philosophers, whose order, they say, was instituted
by one _Samothes_, which is in English as much as to say, an heavenly
man. The _Celtic_ name, _Deru_, for an Oak was that from whence they
received their denomination; as at this very day the _Welch_ call this
tree _Drew_, and this order of men _Derwyddon_. But there are no small
antiquaries who derive this oaken religion and philosophy from the
_Oaks of Mamre_, where the Patriarch _Abraham_ had as well a dwelling
as an _altar_. That _Oaken-Plain_ and the eminent OAK under which
_Abraham_ lodged was extant in the days of _Constantine_, as _Isidore_,
_Jerom_, and _Sozomen_ have assured us. Yea, there are shrewd
probabilities that _Noah_ himself had lived in this very _Oak-plain_
before him; for this very place was called _Ogge_ [see Transcriber's
Note #1 at end of chapter], which was the name of _Noah_, so styled
from the _Oggyan_ (_subcineritiis panibus_) sacrifices, which he did
use to offer in this renowned _Grove_. And it was from this example
that the ancients, and particularly that the Druids of the nations,
chose _oaken_ retirements for their studies. Reader, let us now, upon
another account, behold the students of _Harvard College_, as a
rendezvous of happy _Druids_, under the influences of so rare a
president. But, alas! our joy must be short-lived, for on _July_ 25,
1681, the stroke of a sudden death felled the _tree_,
"Qui tantum inter caput extulit omnes
Quantum lenta solent inter viberna cypressi.
"Mr. _Oakes_ thus being transplanted into the better world the
presidentship was immediately tendered unto _Mr. Increase Mather_."
This will suffice as an example of the bad taste and laborious pedantry
which disfigured Mather's writing. In its substance the book is a
perfect thesaurus; and inasmuch as nothing is unimportant in the
history of the beginnings of such a nation as this is and is destined
to be, the _Magnalia_ will always remain a valuable and interesting
work. Cotton Mather, born in 1663, was of the second generation of
Americans, his grandfather being of the immigration, but his father a
native of Dorchester, Mass. A comparison of his writings and of the
writings of his contemporaries with the works of Bradford, Winthrop,
Hooker, and others of the original colonists, shows that the simple and
heroic faith of the Pilgrims had hardened into formalism and doctrinal
rigidity. The leaders of the Puritan exodus, notwithstanding their
intolerance of errors in belief, were comparatively broad-minded men.
They were sharers in a great national movement, and they came over when
their cause was warm with the glow of martyrdom and on the eve of its
coming triumph at home. After the Restoration, in 1660, the currents
of national feeling no longer circulated so freely through this distant
member of the body politic, and thought in America became more
provincial. The English dissenters, though socially at a disadvantage
as compared with the Church of England, had the great benefit of living
at the center of national life, and of feeling about them the pressure
of vast bodies of people who did not think as they did. In New
England, for many generations, the dominant sect had things all its own
way--a condition of things which is not healthy for any sect or party.
Hence Mather and the divines of his time appear in their writings very
much like so many Puritan bishops, jealous of their prerogatives,
magnifying their apostolate, and careful to maintain their authority
over the laity. Mather had an appetite for the marvelous, and took a
leading part in the witchcraft trials, of which he gave an account in
his _Wonders of the Invisible World_, 1693. To the quaint pages of the
_Magnalia_ our modern authors have resorted as to a collection of
romances or fairy tales. Whittier, for example, took from thence the
subject of his poem _The Garrison of Cape Anne_; and Hawthorne embodied
in _Grandfather's Chair_ the most elaborate of Mather's biographies.
This was the life of Sir William Phipps, who, from being a poor
shepherd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to be the royal
governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures
in raising the freight of a Spanish ship, sunk on a reef near Port de
la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some ancient fable, with
talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and plate and jewels and "pieces of
eight."
Of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewall, Chief-Justice of
Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and venerable figure, who is
intimately known through his Diary, kept from 1673 to 1729. This has
been compared with the more famous diary of Samuel Pepys, which it
resembles in its confidential character and the completeness of its
self-revelation, but to which it is as much inferior in historic
interest as "the petty province here" was inferior in political and
social importance to "Britain far away." For the most part it is a
chronicle of small beer, the diarist jotting down the minutiae of his
domestic life and private affairs, even to the recording of such haps
as this: "March 23, I had my hair cut by G. Barret." But it also
affords instructive glimpses of public events, such as King Philip's
War, the Quaker troubles, the English Revolution of 1688, etc. It
bears about the same relation to New England history at the close of
the seventeenth century as Bradford's and Winthrop's Journals bear to
that of the first generation. Sewall was one of the justices who
presided at the trial of the Salem witches; but for the part which he
took in that wretched affair he made such atonement as was possible, by
open confession of his mistake and his remorse in the presence of the
Church. Sewall was one of the first writers against African slavery,
in his brief tract, _The Selling of Joseph_, printed at Boston in 1700.
His _Phenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica_, a mystical interpretation of
prophecies concerning the New Jerusalem, which he identifies with
America, is remembered only because Whittier, in his _Prophecy of
Samuel Sewall_, has paraphrased one poetic passage which shows a loving
observation of nature very rare in our colonial writers.
Of poetry, indeed, or, in fact, of pure literature, in the narrower
sense--that is, of the imaginative representation of life--there was
little or none in the colonial period. There were no novels, no plays,
no satires, and--until the example of the _Spectator_ had begun to work
on this side the water--no experiments even at the lighter forms of
essay-writing, character-sketches, and literary criticism. There was
verse of a certain kind, but the most generous stretch of the term
would hardly allow it to be called poetry. Many of the early divines
of New England relieved their pens, in the intervals of sermon-writing,
of epigrams, elegies, eulogistic verses, and similar grave trifles
distinguished by the crabbed wit of the so-called "metaphysical poets,"
whose manner was in fashion when the Puritans left England; the manner
of Donne and Cowley, and those darlings of the New-English muse, the
_Emblems_ of Quarles and the _Divine Week_ of Du Bartas, as translated
by Sylvester. The _Magnalia_ contains a number of these things in
Latin and English, and is itself well bolstered with complimentary
introductions in meter by the author's friends. For example:
COTTONIUS MATHERUS.
ANAGRAM.
_Tuos Tecum Ornasti_.
"While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise
_Thine, with thyself thou dost immortalize_.
To view the odds thy learned lives invite
'Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite.
But all succeeding ages shall despair
A fitting monument for thee to _rear_.
Thy own rich pen (peace, silly Momus, peace!)
Hath given them a lasting _writ of ease_."
The epitaphs and mortuary verses were especially ingenious in the
matter of puns, anagrams, and similar conceits. The death of the Rev.
Samuel Stone, of Hartford, afforded an opportunity of this sort not to
be missed, and his threnodist accordingly celebrated him as a
"whetstone," a "loadstone," an "Ebenezer"--
"A stone for kingly David's use so fit
As would not fail Goliath's front to hit," etc.
The most characteristic, popular, and widely circulated poem of
colonial New England was Michael Wigglesworth's _Day of Doom_ (1663), a
kind of doggerel _Inferno_, which went through nine editions, and "was
the solace," says Lowell, "of every fireside, the flicker of the
pine-knots by which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to
its premonitions of eternal combustion." Wigglesworth had not the
technical equipment of a poet. His verse is sing-song, his language
rude and monotonous, and the lurid horrors of his material hell are
more likely to move mirth than fear in a modern reader. But there are
an unmistakable vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief in his
gloomy poem which hold it far above contempt, and easily account for
its universal currency among a people like the Puritans. One stanza
has been often quoted for its grim concession to unregenerate infants
of "the easiest room in hell"--a _limbus infantum_ which even Origen
need not have scrupled at.
The most authoritative expounder of New England Calvinism was Jonathan
Edwards (1703-58), a native of Connecticut and a graduate of Yale, who
was minister for more than twenty years over the church in Northampton,
Mass., afterward missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, and at the time
of his death had just been inaugurated president of Princeton College.
By virtue of his _Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will_, 1754, Edwards
holds rank as the subtlest metaphysician of his age. This treatise was
composed to justify, on philosophical grounds, the Calvinistic
doctrines of fore-ordination and election by grace, though its
arguments are curiously coincident with those of the scientific
necessitarians, whose conclusions are as far asunder from Edwards's "as
from the center thrice to the utmost pole." His writings belong to
theology rather than to literature, but there is an intensity and a
spiritual elevation about them, apart from the profundity and acuteness
of the thought, which lift them here and there into the finer ether of
purely emotional or imaginative art. He dwelt rather upon the terrors
than the comfort of the word, and his chosen themes were the dogmas of
predestination, original sin, total depravity, and eternal punishment.
The titles of his sermons are significant: _Men Naturally God's
Enemies_, _Wrath upon the Wicked to the Uttermost_, _The Final
Judgment_, etc. "A natural man," he wrote in the first of these
discourses, "has a heart like the heart of a devil. . . . The heart of
a natural man is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, cold
corpse is of vital heat." Perhaps the most famous of Edwards's sermons
was _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_, preached at Enfield, Conn.,
July 8, 1741, "at a time of great awakenings," and upon the ominous
text, _Their foot shall slide in due time_. "The God that holds you
over the pit of hell," runs an oft-quoted passage from this powerful
denunciation of the wrath to come, "much as one holds a spider or some
loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully
provoked. . . . You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes
than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. . . . You hang by a
slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about
it. . . . If you cry to God to pity you he will be so far from pitying
you in your doleful case that he will only tread you under foot. . . .
He will crush out your blood and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled
on his garments so as to stain all his raiment." But Edwards was a
rapt soul, possessed with the love as well as the fear of the God, and
there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his _Treatise
Concerning Religious Affections_, 1746. Such is his portrait of Sarah
Pierpont, "a young lady in New Haven," who afterward became his wife
and who "will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly,
and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the
fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always
conversing with her." Edwards's printed works number thirty-six
titles. A complete edition of them in ten volumes was published in
1829 by his great grandson, Sereno Dwight. The memoranda from
Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and biographer, exhibit a
remarkable precocity. Even as a school-boy and a college student he
had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might
have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal
cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley in denying the
existence of matter. In passing from Mather to Edwards we step from
the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. There is the same
difference between them in style and turn of thought as between Milton
and Locke, or between Fuller and Bryden. The learned digressions, the
witty conceits, the perpetual interlarding of the text with scraps of
Latin, have fallen off, even as the full-bottomed wig and the clerical
gown and bands have been laid aside for the undistinguishing dress of
the modern minister. In Edwards's English all is simple, precise,
direct, and business-like.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), who was strictly contemporary with
Edwards, was a contrast to him in every respect. As Edwards represents
the spirituality and other-worldliness of Puritanism, Franklin stands
for the worldly and secular side of American character, and he
illustrates the development of the New England Englishman into the
modern Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or romance
or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and
utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's
sturdy figure became typical of his time and his people. He was the
first and the only man of letters in colonial America who acquired a
cosmopolitan fame and impressed his characteristic Americanism upon the
mind of Europe. He was the embodiment of common sense and of the
useful virtues, with the enterprise but without the nervousness of his
modern compatriots, uniting the philosopher's openness of mind to the
sagacity and quickness of resource of the self-made business man. He
was representative also of his age, an age of _aufklärung_,
_eclaircissement_, or "clearing up." By the middle of the eighteenth
century a change had taken place in American society. Trade had
increased between the different colonies; Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia were considerable towns; democratic feeling was spreading;
over forty newspapers were published in America at the outbreak of the
Revolution; politics claimed more attention than formerly, and theology
less. With all this intercourse and mutual reaction of the various
colonies upon one another, the isolated theocracy of New England
naturally relaxed somewhat of its grip on the minds of the laity. When
Franklin was a printer's apprentice in Boston, setting type on his
brother's _New England Courant_, the fourth American newspaper, he got
hold of an odd volume of the _Spectator_, and formed his style upon
Addison, whose manner he afterward imitated in his _Busy-Body_ papers
in the Philadelphia _Weekly Mercury_. He also read Locke and the
English deistical writers, Collins and Shaftesbury, and became himself
a deist and free-thinker; and subsequently when practicing his trade in
London, in 1724-26, he made the acquaintance of Dr. Mandeville, author
of the _Fable of the Bees_, at a pale-ale house in Cheapside, called
"The Horns," where the famous free-thinker presided over a club of wits
and boon companions. Though a native of Boston, Franklin is identified
with Philadelphia, whither he arrived in 1723, a runaway 'prentice boy,
"whose stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling
in copper." The description in his _Autobiography_ of his walking up
Market Street munching a loaf of bread, and passing his future wife,
standing on her father's doorstep, has become almost as familiar as the
anecdote about Whittington and his cat.
It was in the practical sphere that Franklin was greatest, as an
originator and executor of projects for the general welfare. The list
of his public services is almost endless. He organized the
Philadelphia fire department and street-cleaning service, and the
colonial postal system which grew into the United States Post Office
Department. He started the Philadelphia public library, the American
Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania, and the first
American magazine, _The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle_; so
that he was almost singly the father of whatever intellectual life the
Pennsylvania colony could boast. In 1754, when commissioners from the
colonies met at Albany, Franklin proposed a plan, which was adopted,
for the union of all the colonies under one government. But all these
things, as well as his mission to England in 1757, on behalf of the
Pennsylvania Assembly in its dispute with the proprietaries; his share
in the Declaration of Independence--of which he was one of the
signers--and his residence in France as embassador of the United
Colonies, belong to the political history of the country; to the
history of American science belong his celebrated experiments in
electricity; and his benefits to mankind in both of these departments
were aptly summed up in the famous epigram of the French statesman
Turgot:
"_Eripuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyranniis_."
Franklin's success in Europe was such as no American had yet achieved,
as few Americans since him have achieved. Hume and Voltaire were among
his acquaintances and his professed admirers. In France he was fairly
idolized, and when he died Mirabeau announced, "The genius which has
freed America and poured a flood of light over Europe has returned to
the bosom of the Divinity."
Franklin was a great man, but hardly a great writer, though as a
writer, too, he had many admirable and some great qualities. Among
these were the crystal clearness and simplicity of his style. His more
strictly literary performances, such as his essays after the
_Spectator_, hardly rise above mediocrity, and are neither better nor
worse than other imitations of Addison. But in some of his lighter
bagatelles there are a homely wisdom and a charming playfulness which
have won them enduring favor. Such are his famous story of the
_Whistle_, his _Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout_, his letters to
Madame Helvetius, and his verses entitled _Paper_. The greater portion
of his writings consists of papers on general politics, commerce, and
political economy, contributions to the public questions of his day.
These are of the nature of journalism rather than of literature, and
many of them were published in his newspaper, the _Pennsylvania
Gazette_, the medium through which for many years he most strongly
influenced American opinion. The most popular of his writings were his
_Autobiography_ and _Poor Richard's Almanac_. The former of these was
begun in 1771, resumed in 1788, but never completed. It has remained
the most widely current book in our colonial literature. _Poor
Richard's Almanac_, begun in 1732 and continued for about twenty-five
years, had an annual circulation of ten thousand copies. It was filled
with proverbial sayings in prose and verse, inculcating the virtues of
industry, honesty, and frugality.[1] Some of these were original with
Franklin, others were selected from the proverbial wisdom of the ages,
but a new force was given them by pungent turns of expression. Poor
Richard's saws were such as these: "Little strokes fell great oaks;"
"Three removes are as bad as a fire;" "Early to bed and early to rise
makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise;" "Never leave that till
to-morrow which you can do to-day;" "What maintains one vice would
bring up two children;" "It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright."
Now and then there are truths of a higher kind than these in Franklin,
and Sainte-Beuve, the great French critic, quotes, as an example of his
occasional finer moods, the saying, "Truth and sincerity have a certain
distinguishing native luster about them which cannot be counterfeited;
they are like fire and flame that cannot be painted." But the sage who
invented the Franklin stove had no disdain of small utilities; and in
general the last word of his philosophy is well expressed in a passage
of his _Autobiography_: "Human felicity is produced not so much by
great pieces of good fortune, that seldom happen, as by little
advantages that occur every day; thus, if you teach a poor young man to
shave himself and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to
the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas."
1. Captain John Smith. _A True Relation of Virginia_, Deane's edition.
Boston: 1866.
2. Cotton Mather. _Magnalia Christi Americana_. Hartford: 1820.
3. Samuel Sewall. _Diary_. Massachusetts Historical Collections.
Fifth Series. Vols. v, vi, and vii. Boston: 1878.
4. Jonathan Edwards. _Eight Sermons on Various Occasions_. Vol. vii
of Edwards's Works. Edited by Sereno Dwight. New York: 1829.
5. Benjamin Franklin. _Autobiography_. Edited by John Bigelow.
Philadelphia: 1869. [J. B. Lippincott & Co.]
6. _Essays and Bagatelles_. Vol. ii of Franklin's Works. Edited by
Jared Sparks. Boston: 1836.
7. Moses Coit Tyler. _A History of American Literature_. 1607-1765.
New York: 1878. [G. P. Putnam's Sons.]
[1]_The Way to Wealth, Plan for Saving One Hundred Thousand Pounds,
Rules of Health, Advice to a Young Tradesman, The Way to Make Money
Plenty in Every Man's Pocket_, etc.
[Transcriber's Note: The word "Ogge" was transliterated from the Greek
characters Omicron, gamma, gamma, eta.]