Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is enclosed in _underscores_; boldface
text is enclosed in =equals signs=.
A Manual
of
American Literature
Edited by
Theodore Stanton, M.A. (Cornell)
In Collaboration with
Members of the Faculty of
Cornell University
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1909
COPYRIGHT, 1909
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
TO
PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT
THIS
MEMORIAL VOLUME
IS DEDICATED
IN TOKEN OF HIGH REGARD AND ADMIRATION.
TAUCHNITZ.
EDITOR’S PREFACE
This book has been prepared for publication as No. 4000, a “Memorial
Volume,” of the “Tauchnitz Edition.” Perhaps it may be well to explain
to American readers what the “Tauchnitz Edition” is and what a
“Memorial Volume” is in this collection.
The “Collection of British Authors,” or, as it is more popularly known
on the European Continent, the “Tauchnitz Edition,” was instituted
in 1841, at Leipsic, by one of the most distinguished of German
publishers, the late Baron Bernhard Tauchnitz, whose son is now at
the head of the house. The father records that he was “incited to the
undertaking by the high opinion and enthusiastic fondness which I have
ever entertained for English literature: a literature springing from
the selfsame root as the literature of Germany, and cultivated in the
beginning by the same Saxon race.... As a German-Saxon it gave me
particular pleasure to promote the literary interest of my Anglo-Saxon
cousins, by rendering English literature as universally known as
possible beyond the limits of the British Empire.” In another place,
Baron Tauchnitz describes “the mission” of his Collection to be the
“spreading and strengthening the love for English literature outside of
England and her Colonies.”
Baron Tauchnitz early felt that the general title of the series,
“Collection of _British_ Authors,” was a misnomer, which might even
give offence to an important branch of the English-speaking race; for,
though Bulwer and Dickens led off in the Collection, “Pelham” being the
first volume issued and “The Pickwick Papers” the second, the fourth
volume, added at the beginning of the second year of publication, in
1842, was Fenimore Cooper’s “The Spy,” followed in the same year by a
second volume of the same author. Furthermore, the year 1843 opened
with Washington Irving’s “Sketch Book,” immediately followed by a third
novel by Cooper; and, though it was not till 1850 that another American
work gained admittance into this charmed circle, not fewer than three
of Irving’s books succeeded one another in the single twelvemonth.
In 1852, Hawthorne was welcomed with “The Scarlet Letter” and Mrs.
Stowe with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; from that time on, scarcely a year has
passed without some new American book being included in the Collection,
and under the present routine each year’s issue, comprising some
seventy-five volumes, includes several American works.
In fact, the representation of American authors in the “Tauchnitz
Edition” is now so considerable that the list calls for a place by
itself at the end of this volume, where it presents an interesting
evidence of the growth of the popularity of American literature in
Europe. The reader will notice that there are cases where some of the
best works of an author are not included in the “Tauchnitz Edition.”
The cause of these omissions is sometimes other than taste or choice.
But the catalogue is suggestive just as it stands.
The “Memorial Volumes” form a little series of special issues published
at turning-points. This Manual has been made a Memorial Volume out
of compliment to American literature and is dedicated, with his
permission, to President Roosevelt. In this way, the present Baron
Tauchnitz has striven to show his high appreciation of the group of
American authors in the Edition, and to follow in the footsteps of his
high-minded father.
In his Preface to the first Memorial Volume, No. 500, entitled “Five
Centuries of the English Language and Literature,” being a collection
of characteristic specimens of British writers from Wycliffe to Thomas
Gray, the first Baron Tauchnitz refers to the literature “on the other
side of the Atlantic,” and says in a footnote to this Preface: “A
glance at my list of authors will show that America has contributed no
small part to my Collection. Nevertheless I did not deem it necessary
to alter the title under which my undertaking was started, as I thought
that the term ‘British Authors’ might not improperly be applied to
writers employing the language common to the two nations on either
side of the Atlantic.” No. 1000--Tischendorf’s edition of The New
Testament--is dedicated “to my English and American Authors,” while
in No. 2000--“Of English Literature in the Reign of Victoria, with
a Glance at the Past”--the author, the late Professor Henry Morley,
who long filled the chair of English Literature at the University of
London, opens his Preface with these words: “When Baron Tauchnitz asked
me to write this little book, he also wished me to include in it some
record of the literature of America. But Baron Tauchnitz cordially
agreed to a suggestion that the kindred literature of America,
though we are proud in England to claim closest brotherhood with our
fellow-countrymen of the United States, has a distinct interest of its
own, large enough for the whole subject of another memorial volume,
and that an American author would best tell the story of its rise and
progress.”
Another work in the “Tauchnitz Edition,” but not a Memorial Volume,
offered a good opportunity to present American literature to the
attention of the European public. I refer to the two volumes of the
late George L. Craik, sometime Professor of English Literature at
Queen’s College, Belfast, entitled “A Manual of English Literature,
and of the History of the English Language, from the Norman Conquest;
with Numerous Specimens.” Here again no space is given to our authors,
though they are mentioned once in a reference to “the leading poetical
writers who have arisen in the American division of the English race,
two or three of whom may be reckoned as of the second rank, though
certainly not one as of the first.”
Towards the end of 1893, as the time was approaching for the issuing
of No. 3000, and again, in 1900, when No. 3500 was soon to be reached,
I hinted to my Leipsic friends the peculiar fitness of singling out
one of these possible Memorial Volumes and making it a sketch of
our literary life, in accordance with the promise made in Professor
Morley’s Preface. I even suggested that Professor Moses Coit Tyler, who
had then just completed his great work on our literature, be invited
to perform the task. The last letter I ever received from this genial
spirit, dated from the Isle of Wight, September 5, 1897, contains
this passage: “I appreciate the honour you have done me in mentioning
my name to Baron Tauchnitz, in connection with a proposed volume on
American literature.” Nothing, however, came of this; and when, some
ten years later, I was invited to prepare the present volume, my first
thought was to utilise the _magnum opus_ of Professor Tyler, who had,
in the meanwhile, passed away. So my chief care has been the first two
chapters, drawn, with the kind permission of the publishers, Messrs.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, and of the family of Professor Tyler, from his
four authoritative volumes, “A History of American Literature during
the Colonial Period,” and “The Literary History of the American
Revolution,” to which Sir George Otto Trevelyan refers in his “American
Revolution” as “a remarkable specimen of the historical faculty.”
The chief labour in the preparation of this volume has fallen upon my
friends and collaborators of the Department of English and the Sage
School of Philosophy of my Alma Mater. Acknowledgment is, further,
particularly due to Professors J. M. Hart and M. W. Sampson, also of
Cornell University, for valuable suggestions and considerable help. The
work of seeing the American edition through the press has been done by
Professors Northup and Cooper.
THEODORE STANTON.
PARIS, September, 1908.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
COLONIAL LITERATURE.
By the late MOSES COIT TYLER, LL.D., Professor of American
History in Cornell University. Abridged by the Editor.
I. First Period (1607-1676) 1
II. Second Period (1676-1765) 19
III. General Literary Forces in the Colonial Time 30
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.
By the late MOSES COIT TYLER. Abridged by the Editor.
I. A General View 39
II. The Principal Writers 48
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
I. The Historians 89
By ISAAC MADISON BENTLEY, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of
Psychology in Cornell University.
II. The Novelists 115
By CLARK SUTHERLAND NORTHUP, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
of the English Language and Literature in Cornell
University.
III. The Poets 240
By LANE COOPER, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of the English
Language and Literature in Cornell University.
IV. The Essayists and the Humorists 321
By ELMER JAMES BAILEY, A.M., Instructor in English in
Cornell University.
V. The Orators and the Divines 359
By LANE COOPER.
VI. The Scientists 392
By CLARK SUTHERLAND NORTHUP.
VII. The Periodicals 434
By CLARK SUTHERLAND NORTHUP.
LIST OF AMERICAN AUTHORS IN THE TAUCHNITZ EDITION 455
INDEX. 457
By JOSEPH Q. ADAMS, JR., Ph.D., Instructor in English
in Cornell University.
Colonial Literature
and
The Literature of the Revolutionary Period
A Manual of American Literature
COLONIAL LITERATURE
I. FIRST PERIOD (1607-1676)
_The Beginning._--The present race of Americans who are of English
lineage--that is, the most numerous and decidedly the dominant portion
of the American people of to-day--are the direct descendants of the
crowds of Englishmen who came to America in the seventeenth century.
Our first literary period, therefore, fills the larger part of that
century in which American civilisation had its planting; even as its
training into some maturity and power has been the business of the
eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Of course, also, the most
of the men who produced American literature during that period were
immigrant authors of English birth and English culture; while the
most of those who have produced American literature in the subsequent
periods have been authors of American birth and of American culture.
Notwithstanding their English birth, these first writers in America
were Americans: we may not exclude them from our story of American
literature. They founded that literature; they are its Fathers; they
stamped their spiritual lineaments upon it; and we shall never deeply
enter into the meaning of American literature in its later forms
without tracing it back, affectionately, to its beginning with them. At
the same time, our first literary epoch cannot fail to bear traces of
the fact that nearly all the men who made it were Englishmen who had
become Americans merely by removing to America. American life, indeed,
at once reacted upon their minds, and began to give its tone and hue to
their words; and for every reason, what they wrote here, we rightfully
claim as a part of American literature; but England has a right to
claim it likewise as a part of English literature. Indeed England and
America are joint proprietors of this first tract of the great literary
territory which we have undertaken to survey.
Since the earliest English colonists upon these shores began to make a
literature as soon as they arrived here, it follows that we can fix the
exact date of the birth of American literature. It is that year 1607,
when Englishmen, by transplanting themselves to America, first began
to be Americans. Thus may the history of our literature be traced back
from the present hour, as it recedes along the track of our national
life, through the early days of the republic, through five generations
of colonial existence, until, in the first decade of the seventeenth
century, it is merged in its splendid parentage--the written speech of
England.
_The First Writer._--Among those first Englishmen huddled together
behind palisadoes in Jamestown in 1607, were some who laid the
foundations of American literature, and there was one who still has a
considerable name in the world. When he first set foot in Virginia,
Captain John Smith was only twenty-seven years old; but even then he
had made himself somewhat famous in England as a daring traveller in
Southern Europe, in Turkey and the East. This extremely vivid and
resolute man comes before us for study, not because he was the most
conspicuous person in the first successful American colony, but
because he was the writer of the first book in American literature.
_A True Relation of Virginia_ is of deep interest to us, not only on
account of its graphic style and the strong light it throws upon the
very beginning of our national history, but as being unquestionably the
earliest book in American literature. It was written during the first
thirteen months of the life of the first American colony, and gives a
simple and picturesque account of the stirring events which took place
there during that time, under his own eye. After all the abatements
which a fair criticism must make from the praise of Captain John Smith
either as a doer or as a narrator, his writings still make upon us
the impression of a certain personal largeness in him, magnanimity,
affluence, sense, and executive force. As a writer his merits are
really great--clearness, force, vividness, picturesque and dramatic
energy, a diction racy and crisp; and during the first two decades of
the seventeenth century he did more than any other Englishman to make
an American nation and an American literature possible.
_William Strachey._--During the first decade of American literature
a little book was written in Virginia, which, as is believed by some
authors, soon rendered an illustrious service to English literature by
suggesting to Shakespeare the idea of one of his noblest masterpieces,
_The Tempest_. It was in May, 1610, that Sir Thomas Gates, with two
small vessels and 150 companions, had at last found his way into
the James River after a voyage of almost incredible difficulty and
peril. Among those who had borne a part in this ghastly and almost
miraculous expedition was William Strachey, of whom but little is known
except what is revealed in his own writings. He was a man of decided
literary aptitude. Soon after his arrival here he was made secretary
of Virginia, and in July, 1610, he wrote at Jamestown and sent off to
England _A True Reportory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas
Gates, Kt., upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas_. Whoever reads
this little book will be quite ready to believe that it may have
brought suggestion and inspiration even to the genius of William
Shakespeare. It is a book of marvellous power. Its account of Virginia
is well done; but its most striking merit is its delineation of his
dreadful sea-voyage, and particularly of the tempest which, after the
terror and anguish of a thousand deaths, drove them upon the rocks of
the Bermudas. Here his style becomes magnificent; it has some sentences
which for imaginative and pathetic beauty, for vivid implications of
appalling danger and disaster, can hardly be surpassed in the whole
range of English prose.
_George Sandys._--The last one of this group of early writers, George
Sandys, was perhaps the only one of all his fellow-craftsmen here
who was a professed man of letters. He was well known as a traveller
in Eastern lands, as a scholar, as an admirable prose-writer, but
especially as a poet. His claim to the title of poet then rested
chiefly on his fine metrical translation of the first five books of
Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. This fragment was a specimen of literary
workmanship in many ways creditable; and that he was able, during the
next few years, robbing sleep of its rights, to complete his noble
translation of the fifteen books, is worthy of being chronicled among
the heroisms of authorship. In 1626, he brought out in London, in a
folio volume, the first edition of his finished work. The writings
which precede this book in our literary history were all produced for
some immediate practical purpose, and not with any avowed literary
intentions. This book may well have for us a sort of sacredness, as
being the first monument of English poetry, of classical scholarship,
and of deliberate literary art, reared on these shores. And when we
open the book, and examine it with reference to its merits, first, as
a faithful rendering of the Latin text, and, second, as a specimen of
fluent, idiomatic, and musical English poetry, we find that in both
particulars it is a work that we may be proud to claim as in some sense
our own, and to honour as the morning-star at once of poetry and of
scholarship in the New World.
_The Burwell Papers._--In the year 1676 there occurred in Virginia
an outburst of popular excitement which, for a hundred and fifty
years afterward, was grotesquely misrepresented by the historians,
and which only within recent years has begun to work itself clear of
the traditional perversion. This excitement is still indicated by the
sinister name that was at first applied to it, Bacon’s Rebellion. With
this remarkable event the literary history of Virginia now becomes
curiously involved.
In the spring of 1676, at the very moment when the minds of men
were torn by anxieties at the lawless interference of the King and
Parliament with their most valuable rights, suddenly there swept
toward them the terror of an aggressive Indian war. The people called
upon the royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley, to take the necessary
measures for repelling these assaults. For reasons of jealousy,
indolence, selfishness, and especially avarice, this Governor gave
to the people promises of help, and promises only. Then the people
arose in their anger, and since their Governor would not lead them
to the war, with unanimous voice they called upon one of their own
number to be their leader, Nathaniel Bacon, a man only thirty years
of age, of considerable landed wealth, of high social connections, a
lawyer trained in the Inns of Court in London, an orator of commanding
eloquence, a man who by his endowments of brain and eye and hand was
a natural leader and king of men. He obeyed the call of the people
and led them against the Indians, whom he drove back with tremendous
punishment. But by the jealous and haughty despot in the governor’s
chair, he was at once proclaimed a rebel; a price was set upon his
head; and the people who followed him were put under ban. Then followed
a series of swift conflicts, military and political, between Bacon
and the Governor; and at last, in that same year, Bacon himself died,
suddenly and mysteriously, and twenty-five persons were hung or shot.
Shortly after our Revolutionary War, it was discovered that in an
old and honourable family in the Northern Neck of Virginia, some
manuscripts had been preserved, evidently belonging to the seventeenth
century, evidently written by one or more of the adherents of Nathaniel
Bacon. These manuscripts are sometimes called the Burwell Papers,
from the name of a family in King William County by whom they were
first given to the public. The author of the prose portion of these
manuscripts reflects, on this side of the ocean, the literary foibles
that were in fashion on the other side of the ocean. But apart from the
disagreeable air of verbal affectation and of effort in these writings,
they are undeniably spirited; they produce before us departed scenes
with no little energy and life; and the flavour of mirth which seasons
them is not unpleasant.
As the cause of Bacon’s death was a mystery, so a mystery covered even
the place of his burial; for his friends, desiring to save his lifeless
body from violation at the hands of the victorious party, placed it
secretly in the earth. And the love of Bacon’s followers, which in
his lifetime had shown itself in services of passionate devotion, and
which, after his death, thus hovered as a protecting silence over his
hidden grave, found expression also in some sorrowing verses that,
upon the whole, are of astonishing poetic merit. Who may have been the
author of these verses, it is perhaps now impossible to discover. They
are prefaced by the quaint remark that after Bacon “was dead, he was
bemoaned in lines drawn by the man that waited upon his person as it
is said, and who attended his corpse to their burial-place.” Of course
this statement is but a blind; the author of such a eulogy of the
dead rebel could not safely avow himself. But certainly no menial of
Bacon’s, no mere “man that waited upon his person,” could have written
this noble dirge, which has a stateliness, a compressed energy, and a
mournful eloquence, reminding one of the commemorative verse of Ben
Jonson.
_Early Literature in Virginia and New England._--During the first epoch
in the history of American literature, there were but two localities
which produced in the English language anything that can be called
literature,--Virginia and New England. As we have seen, there were in
Virginia, during the first twenty years of its existence, authors who
produced writings that live yet and deserve to live. But at the end of
that period and for the remainder of the century, nearly all literary
activity in Virginia ceased; the only exception to this statement being
the brief anonymous literary memorials which have come down to us from
the uprising of the people under Nathaniel Bacon. Even of those writers
of the first two decades, all excepting one, Alexander Whitaker, “the
Apostle of Virginia,” flitted back to England after a brief residence
in Virginia: so that besides Whitaker, the colony had during all
that period no writer who gave his name to her as being willing to
identify himself permanently with her fate, and to live and die in her
immediate service. This, as we shall see, is in startling contrast to
the contemporaneous record of New England, which, even in that early
period, had a great throng of writers, nearly all of whom took root in
her soil.
_New England Traits in the Seventeenth Century._--Did the people of New
England in their earliest age begin to produce a literature? Who can
doubt it? With their incessant activity of brain, with so much both of
common and of uncommon culture among them, with intellectual interests
so lofty and strong, with so many outward occasions to stir their
deepest passions into the same great currents, it would be hard to
explain it had they indeed produced no literature. Moreover, contrary
to what is commonly asserted of them, they were not without a literary
class. In as large a proportion to the whole population as was then
the case in the mother-country, there were in New England many men
trained to the use of books, accustomed to express themselves fluently
by voice and pen, and not so immersed in the physical tasks of life as
to be deprived of the leisure for whatever writing they were prompted
to undertake. It was a literary class made up of men of affairs,
country-gentlemen, teachers, above all of clergymen; men of letters who
did not depend upon letters for their bread, and who thus did their
work under conditions of intellectual independence.
For the study of literature, they turned with eagerness to the ancient
classics; read them freely; quoted them with apt facility. Though their
new home was but a province, their minds were not provincial: they
had so stalwart and chaste a faith in the ideas which brought them to
America as to think that wherever those ideas were put into practice,
there was the metropolis. In the public expression of thought they
limited themselves by restraints which, though then prevalent in all
parts of the civilised world, now seem shameful and intolerable: the
printing-press in New England during the seventeenth century was in
chains. The first was set up at Cambridge in 1639, under the auspices
of Harvard College; and for the subsequent twenty-three years the
president of that college was in effect responsible for the good
behaviour of the terrible machine. His control of it did not prove
sufficiently vigilant. The fears of the clergy were excited by the
lenity that had permitted the escape into the world of certain books
which tended “to open the door of heresy”; therefore, in 1662 two
official licensers were appointed, without whose consent nothing was
to be printed. Even this did not make the world seem safe; and two
years afterward the law was made more stringent. Other licensers were
appointed; excepting the one at Cambridge no printing-press was to be
allowed in the colony; and if from the printing-press that was allowed,
anything should be printed without the permission of the licensers, the
peccant engine was to be forfeited to the government and the printer
himself was to be forbidden the exercise of his profession. But even
the new licensers were not severe enough. In the leading colony of New
England legal restraints upon printing were not entirely removed until
about twenty-one years before the Declaration of Independence.
The chief literary disadvantages of New England were, that her writers
lived far from the great repositories of books, and far from the
central currents of the world’s best thinking; that the lines of their
own literary activity were few; and that, though they nourished their
minds upon the Hebrew Scriptures and upon the classics of the Roman
and Greek literatures, they stood aloof, with a sort of horror, from
the richest and most exhilarating types of classic writing in their
own tongue. In many ways their literary development was stunted and
stiffened by the narrowness of Puritanism. Nevertheless, what they
lacked in symmetry of culture and in range of literary movement, was
something which the very integrity of their natures was sure to compel
them, either in themselves or in their posterity, to acquire.
_William Bradford._--William Bradford, of the _Mayflower_ and Plymouth
Rock, deserves the pre-eminence of being called the father of American
history. After he had been in America ten years and had seen proof of
the permanent success of the heroic movement in which he was a leader,
his mind seems to have been possessed by the historic significance of
that movement; and thenceforward for twenty years he gave his leisure
to the composition of a work in which the story of the settlement of
New England should be told in a calm, just, and authentic manner. The
result was his _History of Plymouth Plantation_. There is no other
document upon New England history that can take precedence of this
either in time or in authority. Governor Bradford wrote of events that
had passed under his own eye, and that had been shaped by his own hand;
and he had every qualification of a trustworthy narrator. His mind was
placid, grave, well-poised; he was a student of many books and of many
languages; and being thus developed both by letters and by experience,
he was able to tell well the truth of history as it had unfolded itself
during his own strenuous and benignant career. His history is an
orderly, lucid, and most instructive work; it contains many tokens of
its author’s appreciation of the nature and requirements of historical
writing; and though so recently--1855--published in a perfect form, it
must henceforth take its true place at the head of American historical
literature, and win for its author the patristic dignity that we have
ascribed to him.
_John Winthrop._--In the early spring of 1630, a fleet of four vessels
sailed out into the sea from a beautiful harbour in the Isle of Wight,
their prows pointed westward. On board that fleet were the greatest
company of wealthy and cultivated persons that have ever emigrated
in any one voyage from England to America. They were prosperous
English Puritans. Foremost among them in intellectual power and in
weight of character was John Winthrop, already chosen Governor of the
Massachusetts Company, and qualified by every personal trait to be the
conductor and the statesman of the new Puritan colony of Massachusetts
Bay. Immediately upon going on board ship he began a piece of writing,
which he continued to work at not only during the rest of the voyage
but during the rest of his life, and which is a treasure beyond price
among our early historic memorials,--_The History of New England_. His
plan was to jot down significant experiences in the daily life of his
company, not only while at sea but after their arrival in America.
For almost twenty years the story went forward, from 1630 until a
few weeks before the writer’s death in 1649. It is quite evident
that Winthrop wrote what he did with the full purpose of having it
published as a history; but he wrote it amid the hurry and weariness
of his unloitering life, with no anxiety about style, with no other
purpose than to tell the truth in plain and honest fashion. There is
one portion of this History that has acquired great celebrity: it is
the one embodying Winthrop’s speech, in 1645, in the general court, on
his being acquitted of the charge of having exceeded his authority as
deputy-governor. One passage of it, containing Winthrop’s statement
of the nature of liberty, is of pre-eminent merit, worthy of being
placed by the side of the weightiest and most magnanimous sentences of
John Locke or Algernon Sidney. A distinguished American publicist has
declared that this is the best definition of liberty in the English
language, and that in comparison with it what Blackstone says about
liberty seems puerile.[1]
_Descriptions of Nature._--A delightful group of writings belonging to
our earliest age is made up of those which preserve for us, in the very
words of the men themselves, the curiosity, the awe, the bewilderment,
the fresh delight, with which the American Fathers came face to face
for the first time with the various forms of nature and of life in the
New World. Examples of this class of writings were produced by the
early men of Virginia; and among the founders of New England there was
no lack of the same sensitiveness to the vast, picturesque, and novel
aspects of nature which they encountered upon the sea and the land, in
their first journeys hither. The evidence of this fact is scattered
thick through all their writings, in letters, sermons, histories,
poems; while there remain several books, written by them immediately
after their arrival here, describing in the first glow of elated
feeling the vision that unfolded itself before them of the new realms
of existence upon which they were entering.
_Theological Writers._--Without doubt, the sermons produced in
New England during the colonial times, and especially during the
seventeenth century, are the most authentic and characteristic
revelations of the mind of New England for all that wonderful epoch.
The theological and religious writings of early New England may not
now be readable; but they are certainly not despicable. They represent
an enormous amount of subtile, sustained, and sturdy brain-power. They
are, of course, grave, dry, abstruse, dreadful; to our debilitated
attentions they are hard to follow; in style they are often uncouth
and ponderous; they are technical in the extreme; they are devoted
to a theology that yet lingers in the memory of mankind only through
certain shells of words long since emptied of their original meaning.
Nevertheless, these writings are monuments of vast learning, and of a
stupendous intellectual energy both in the men who produced them and
in the men who listened to them. Of course they can never be recalled
to any vital human interest. They have long since done their work in
moving the minds of men. Few of them can be cited as literature. In
the mass, they can only be labelled by the antiquarians and laid away
upon shelves to be looked at occasionally as curiosities of verbal
expression, and as relics of an intellectual condition gone for ever.
They were conceived by noble minds; they are themselves noble. They are
superior to our jests. We may deride them, if we will; but they are not
derided.
Of all the great preachers who came to New England in our first age,
there were three who, according to the universal opinion of their
contemporaries, towered above all others,--Thomas Hooker, Thomas
Shepard, John Cotton. These three could be compared with one another;
but with them could be compared no one else. They stood apart, above
rivalry, above envy. In personal traits they differed; they were
alike in bold and energetic thinking, in massiveness of erudition,
in a certain overpowering personal persuasiveness, in the gift of
fascinating and resistless pulpit oratory.
“_The Simple Cobbler of Agawam._”--Soon after his arrival in
Massachusetts, Nathaniel Ward became minister to a raw settlement
of Puritans at Agawam, the beautiful Indian name of that district,
afterward foolishly exchanged for Ipswich. Early in 1645, he commenced
writing the remarkable book, _The Simple Cobbler of Agawam_, which
will keep for him a perpetual place in early American literature. It
had the good fortune to fit the times and the passions of men; it was
caught up into instant notice, and ran through four editions within
the first year. _The Simple Cobbler of Agawam_ may be described as
a prose satire upon what seemed to the author to be the frightful
license of new opinions in his time, both in New England and at
home; upon the frivolity of women and the long hair of men; and
finally upon the raging storm of English politics, in the strife then
going forward between sects, parties, Parliament, and King. It is a
tremendous partisan pamphlet. After all, the one great trait in this
book which must be to us the most welcome, is its superiority to the
hesitant, imitative, and creeping manner that is the sure sign of a
provincial literature. The first accents of literary speech in the
American forests seem not to have been provincial, but free, fearless,
natural. Our earliest writers, at any rate, wrote the English language
spontaneously, forcefully, like honest men. We shall have to search
in some later period of our intellectual history to find, if at all,
a race of literary snobs and imitators--writers who in their thin and
timid ideas, their nerveless diction, and their slavish simulation of
the supposed literary accent of the mother-country, make confession of
the inborn weakness and beggarliness of literary provincials.
_Roger Williams._--From his early manhood even down to his late old
age, Roger Williams stands in New England a mighty and benignant form,
always pleading for some magnanimous idea, some tender charity, the
rectification of some wrong, the exercise of some sort of forbearance
toward men’s bodies or souls. He became an uncompromising Separatist.
By the spectacle of the white men helping themselves freely to the
lands of the red men, he became an assailant of the validity, in that
particular, of the New England charters. Roger Williams also held that
it was a shocking thing--one of the abominations of the age--for
men who did not even pretend to have religion in their hearts, to
be muttering publicly the words of religion with their mouths; and
that such persons ought not to be called on to perform any acts of
worship, even the taking of an oath. Finally, he held another doctrine,
that the power of the civil magistrate “extends only to the bodies
and goods and outward state of men,” and not at all to their inward
state, their consciences, their opinions. For these four crimes,
particularly mentioned by Governor Haynes in pronouncing sentence upon
him, Massachusetts deemed it unsafe to permit such a nefarious being as
Roger Williams to abide anywhere within her borders.
The illustrious Westminster Assembly of Divines had been in session
since July, 1643. Already the Presbyterians in it had come to hard
blows with the Congregationalists in it, with respect to the form
of church government to be erected in England upon the ruins of the
Episcopacy. On that subject Roger Williams had a very distinct opinion.
While some were for having the new national church of this pattern, and
others were for having it of that, Roger Williams boldly stepped two
or three centuries ahead of his age, and affirmed that there should be
no national church at all. Putting his argument into the differential
form of mere questions, he published, in 1644, what he called _Queries
of Highest Consideration_. This, of course, was stark and dreadful
heresy; but it was heresy for which Roger Williams had already suffered
loss and pain, and was prepared to suffer more. Above all, his nature
had become absolutely clear in its adjustment of certain grand ideas,
of which the chief was liberty of soul. On behalf of that idea, having
now an opportunity to free his mind, he resolved to do so, keeping
nothing back; and accordingly, almost upon the heels of the little
book that has just been mentioned, he sent out another--not a little
one; a book of strong, limpid, and passionate argument, glorious for
its intuitions of the world’s coming wisdom, and in its very title
flinging out defiantly a challenge to all comers. He called it _The
Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience_. His book reached
in due time the library of John Cotton, and stirred him up to make a
reply, which bore a title reverberating that given by Roger Williams
to his book: _The Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of
the Lamb_. Cotton’s book quickly found Roger Williams, at his home
in Rhode Island, and of course aroused him to write a rejoinder.
Its title is a reiteration of that given to his former work, and is
likewise a characteristic retort upon the modification made of it by
his antagonist: _The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton’s
Endeavour to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb_. This book is
the most powerful of the writings of Roger Williams. There are three
principal matters argued in it,--the nature of persecution, the limits
of the power of the civil sword, and the tolerance already granted by
Parliament.
With Roger Williams, the mood for composition seems to have come in
gusts. His writings are numerous; but they were produced spasmodically
and in clusters, amid long spaces of silence. He is known to have
written two or three works which were never printed at all, and which
are now lost. In 1652, he published, in addition to his rejoinder to
John Cotton, two small treatises. From that time, no book of his was
given to the press until the year 1676, when he published at Boston a
quarto volume of nearly 350 pages, embodying his own report of a series
of stormy public debates, which he had held in Rhode Island, not long
before, with certain robust advocates of Quakerism. This book bears a
punning title, _George Fox Digged out of his Burrows_. Besides those of
his writings that were intended for books, there are many in the form
of letters, some addressed to the public, most of them to his personal
friends. In these letters, which cover his whole life from youth to
old age, we seem to get very near to the man himself.
_Puritanism and Poetry._--A happy surprise awaits those who come to
the study of the early literature of New England with the expectation
of finding it altogether arid in sentiment, or void of the spirit and
aroma of poetry. The New Englander of the seventeenth century was
indeed a typical Puritan; and it will hardly be said that any typical
Puritan of that century was a poetical personage. In proportion to
his devotion to the ideas that won for him the derisive honour of his
name, was he at war with nearly every form of the beautiful. He himself
believed that there was an inappeasable feud between religion and
art; and hence the duty of suppressing art was bound up in his soul
with the master-purpose of promoting religion. Hence, very naturally,
he turned away likewise from certain great and splendid types of
literature,--from the drama, from the playful and sensuous verse of
Chaucer and his innumerable sons, from the secular prose writings of
his contemporaries, and from all forms of modern lyric verse except
the Calvinistic hymn. Nevertheless, the Puritan did not succeed in
eradicating poetry from his nature. Of course, poetry was planted there
too deep even for his theological grub-hooks to root it out. Though
denied expression in one way, the poetry that was in him forced itself
into utterance in another. If his theology drove poetry out of many
forms in which it had been used to reside, poetry itself practised a
noble revenge by taking up its abode in his theology. Though he stamped
his foot in horror and scorn upon many exquisite and delicious types of
literary art, yet the idea that filled and thrilled his soul was one in
every way sublime, immense, imaginative, poetic. How resplendent and
superb was the poetry that lay at the heart of Puritanism, was seen by
the sightless eyes of John Milton, whose great epic is indeed the epic
of Puritanism.
Turning to Puritanism as it existed in New England, we may perhaps
imagine it as solemnly declining the visits of the Muses of poetry,
sending out to them the blunt but honest message--“Otherwise engaged.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. It is an extraordinary fact
about these grave and substantial men of New England, especially during
our earliest literary age, that they all had a lurking propensity
to write what they sincerely believed to be poetry,--and this, in
most cases, in unconscious defiance of the edicts of nature and of a
predetermining Providence. It is impressive to note, as we inspect
our first period, that neither advanced age, nor high office, nor
mental unfitness, nor previous condition of respectability, was
sufficient to protect any one from the poetic vice. Here and there,
even a town-clerk, placing on record the deeply prosaic proceedings
of the selectmen, would adorn them in the sacred costume of poetry.
Remembering their unfriendly attitude towards art in general, this
universal mania of theirs for some forms of the poetic art--this
unrestrained proclivity toward the “lust of versification”--must seem
to us an odd psychological freak. Or, shall we rather say that it was
not a freak at all, but a normal effort of nature, which, being unduly
repressed in one direction, is accustomed to burst over all barriers in
another? As respects the poetry which was perpetrated by our ancestors,
it must be mentioned that a benignant Providence has its own methods of
protecting the human family from intolerable misfortune; and that the
most of this poetry has perished.
_Anne Bradstreet._--There was, however, belonging to this primal
literary period, one poet who, in some worthy sense, found in poetry a
vocation. The first professional poet of New England was a woman. In
the year 1650 there was published, in London, a book of poems written
by a gifted young woman of the New England wilderness, Anne Bradstreet
by name. She was born in England, in 1612. She was the laborious wife
of a New England farmer, the mother of eight children, and herself
from childhood of a delicate constitution. The most of her poems were
produced between 1630 and 1642, that is, before she was thirty years
old; and during these years she had neither leisure, nor elegant
surroundings, nor freedom from anxious thoughts, nor even abounding
health. Somehow, during her busy lifetime, she contrived to put upon
record compositions numerous enough to fill a royal octavo volume of
400 pages,--compositions which entice and reward our reading of them,
two hundred years after she lived.
II. SECOND PERIOD (1676-1765)
_The Two Periods._--I have taken the year 1676 as the year of partition
between the two periods into which our colonial age seems to fall.
Before 1676, the new civilisation in America was principally in the
hands of Americans born in England; after 1676, it was principally
in the hands of Americans born in America, and the subjects of such
training as was to be had here. Our first colonial period, therefore,
transmits to us a body of writings produced by immigrant Americans;
preserving for us the ideas, the moods, the efforts, the very phrases
of the men who founded the American nation; representing to us, also,
the earliest literary results flowing from the reactions of life in
the New World upon an intellectual culture formed in the Old World.
Our second colonial period does more: it transmits to us a body of
writings, produced in the main by the American children of those
immigrants, and representing the earliest literary results flowing from
the reactions of life in the New World upon an intellectual culture
that was itself formed in the New World.
Our first colonial period, just seventy years long, we have now briefly
examined. For my part, I have no apology to make for it: I think it
needs none. It was a period principally engaged in other tasks than the
tasks of the pen; it laid, quietly and well, the foundation of a new
social structure that was to cover a hemisphere, was to give shelter
and comfort to myriads of the human race, was to endure to centuries
far beyond the gropings of our guesswork. Had it done that deed alone,
and left no written word at all, not any man since then could have
wondered; still less could any man have flung at it the reproach of
intellectual lethargy or neglect. But if, besides what it did in the
founding of a new commonwealth, we consider what it also did in the
founding of a new literature--the muchness of that special work, the
downright merit of it--we shall find it hard to withhold from that
period the homage of our admiration.
From the year 1676, when our first colonial period ends, there
stretches onward a space of just eighty-nine years, at the end of which
the American colonies underwent a swift and portentous change,--losing,
all at once, their colonial content, and passing suddenly into the
earlier and the intellectual stage of their struggle for independence.
This space of eighty-nine years forms, of course, our second colonial
period.
_New England Verse-Writers._--Urian Oakes, born in 1631, was reared
in the woods of Concord. The splendid literary capacity of this early
American--this product of our pioneer and autochthonous culture--is
seen in this: as his sermons are among the noblest specimens of prose
to be met with, in that class of writings, during the colonial time,
so the one example that is left to us of his verse reaches the highest
point touched by American poetry during the same era. The poem thus
referred to is an elegy upon the death of a man to whom the poet seems
to have been bound by the tenderest friendship,--a poem in fifty-two
six-lined stanzas; not without some mechanical defects; blurred also by
some patches of the prevailing theological jargon; yet, upon the whole,
affluent, stately, pathetic; beautiful and strong with the beauty and
strength of true imaginative vision.