colonial time, was Michael Wigglesworth, the explicit and unshrinking
rhymer of the Five Points of Calvinism; a poet who so perfectly uttered
in verse the religious faith and emotion of Puritan New England that,
for more than a hundred years, his writings had universal diffusion
there, and a popular influence only inferior to that of the Bible
and the Shorter Catechism. No one holding a different theology from
that held by Michael Wigglesworth can do justice to him as a poet,
without exercising the utmost intellectual catholicity. His verse
is quite lacking in art; its ordinary form being a crude, swinging
ballad-measure, with a sort of cheap melody, a shrill, reverberating
clatter, that would instantly catch and please the popular ear, at
that time deaf to daintier and more subtile effects in poetry. In the
multitude of his verses, Michael Wigglesworth surpasses all other poets
of the colonial time, excepting Anne Bradstreet. Besides numerous minor
poems, he is the author of three poetical works of considerable length.
One of these, _God’s Controversy with New England_, was “written in the
time of the great drought,” 1662. The argument of the poem is this:
“New England planted, prospered, declining, threatened, punished.”
The poet holds the opinion, common enough in his day, that before the
arrival of the English in America, this continent had been the choice
and peculiar residence of the Devil and his angels. Another large poem
of Wigglesworth’s is _Meat out of the Eater; or, Meditations concerning
the Necessity, End, and Usefulness of Afflictions unto God’s Children,
all tending to prepare them for and comfort them under the Cross_.
Here we have simply the Christian doctrine of comfort in sorrow,
translated into metrical jingles. It was first published, probably,
in 1669; ten years afterward, it had passed through at least four
editions; and during the entire colonial age, it was a much-read manual
of solace in affliction. But the masterpiece of Michael Wigglesworth’s
genius, and his most delectable gift to an admiring public, was
that blazing and sulphurous poem, _The Day of Doom; or, A poetical
Description of the great and last Judgment_. This great poem, which,
with entire unconsciousness, attributes to the Divine Being a character
the most execrable and loathsome to be met with, perhaps, in any
literature, Christian or pagan, had for a hundred years a popularity
far exceeding that of any other work, in prose or verse, produced in
America before the Revolution. The eighteen hundred copies of the first
edition were sold within a single year; which implies the purchase of
a copy of _The Day of Doom_ by at least every thirty-fifth person then
in New England,--an example of the commercial success of a book never
afterward equalled in this country. Since that time, the book has been
repeatedly published; at least once in England, and at least eight
times in America--the last time being in 1867.
_The Dynasty of the Mathers._--At the time of his arrival in
Boston--August, 1635--Richard Mather was thirty-nine years of age;
a man of extensive and precise learning in the classics, in the
Scriptures, and in divinity; already a famous preacher. This man, “the
progenitor of all the Mathers in New England,” and the first of a line
of great preachers and great men of letters that continued to hold sway
there through the entire colonial era, had in himself the chief traits
that distinguished his family through so long a period;--great physical
endurance, a voracious appetite for the reading of books, an alarming
propensity to the writing of books, a love of political leadership in
church and state, the faculty of personal conspicuousness, finally,
the homiletic gift. His numerous writings were, of course, according
to the demand of his time and neighbourhood;--sermons, a catechism,
a treatise on justification, public letters upon church government,
several controversial documents, the preface to the Old Bay Psalm Book,
and many of the marvels of metrical expression to be viewed in the body
of that work.
Of the six sons of Richard Mather, four became famous preachers, two
of them in Ireland and in England, other two in New England; the
greatest of them all being the youngest, born at Dorchester, June 21,
1639, and at his birth adorned with the name of Increase, in graceful
recognition of “the increase of every sort, wherewith God favoured the
country about the time of his nativity.” Even in childhood he began to
display the strong and eager traits that gave distinction and power
to his whole life, and that bore him impetuously through the warfare
of eighty-four mortal years. In 1657, on his eighteenth birthday, he
preached in his father’s pulpit his first sermon. From 1661 to 1664
he divided his services between his father’s church at Dorchester and
the North Church of Boston. At last, in 1664, he consented to be made
minister of the latter church, which, thenceforward, to the end of his
own life, and to the end of the life of his more famous son, continued
to be the tower and the stronghold of the Mathers in America. Here,
then, was a person, born in America, bred in America,--a clean specimen
of what America could do for itself in the way of keeping up the brave
stock of its first imported citizens. As to learning, he even exceeded
all other New Englanders of the colonial time, except his own son,
Cotton. His power as a pulpit-orator was very great. It was a common
saying of his contemporaries, that Increase Mather was “a complete
preacher.” From a literary point of view, his writings certainly have
considerable merit. The publications of Increase Mather defy mention,
except in the form of a catalogue. From the year 1669, when he had
reached the age of thirty, until the year 1723, when he died, hardly
a twelvemonth was permitted to pass in which he did not solicit the
public attention through the press. An authentic list of his works
would include at least ninety-two titles. Of all the great host of
Increase Mather’s publications, perhaps only one can be said to have
still any power of walking alive on the earth,--the book commonly known
by a name not given to it by the author, _Remarkable Providences_.
It cannot be denied that the conception of the book is thoroughly
scientific; for it is to prove by induction the actual presence of
supernatural forces in the world. Its chief defect, of course, is its
lack of all cross-examination of the witnesses, and of all critical
inspection of their testimony, together with a palpable eagerness on
the author’s part to welcome, from any quarter of the earth or sea or
sky, any messenger whatever who may be seen hurrying toward Boston with
his mouth full of marvels.
In the intellectual distinction of the Mather family, there seemed to
be, for at least three generations, a certain cumulative felicity. The
general acknowledgment of this fact is recorded in an old epitaph,
composed for the founder of the illustrious tribe:
Under this stone lies Richard Mather,
Who had a son greater than his father,
And eke a grandson greater than either.
This overtopping grandson was, of course, none other than Cotton
Mather, the literary behemoth of New England in our colonial era; the
man whose fame as a writer surpasses, in later times and especially
in foreign countries, that of any other pre-Revolutionary American,
excepting Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. The most famous
book produced by him--the most famous book, likewise, produced by any
American during the colonial time--is _Magnalia Christi Americana; or,
The Ecclesiastical History of New England, from its first Planting,
in the Year 1620, unto the Year of our Lord 1698_. The Magnalia is,
indeed, what the author called it, “a bulky thing,”--the two volumes
of the latest edition having upwards of thirteen hundred pages. The
_Magnalia_ has great merits; it has, also, fatal defects. In its mighty
chaos of fables and blunders and misrepresentations, are of course
lodged many single facts of the utmost value, personal reminiscences,
social gossip, snatches of conversations, touches of description,
traits of character and life, that can be found nowhere else, and that
help us to paint for ourselves some living picture of the great men
and the great days of early New England; yet herein, also, history
and fiction are so jumbled and shuffled together that it is never
possible to tell, without other help than the author’s, just where the
fiction ends and the history begins. On no disputed question of fact
is the unaided testimony of Cotton Mather of much weight. The true
place of Cotton Mather in our literary history is indicated when we
say that he was the last, the most vigorous, and, therefore, the most
disagreeable representative of the Fantastic School in literature;
and that he prolonged in New England the methods of that school even
after his most cultivated contemporaries there had outgrown them,
and had come to dislike them. The expulsion of the beautiful from
thought, from sentiment, from language; a lawless and a merciless fury
for the odd, the disorderly, the grotesque, the violent; strained
analogies, unexpected images, pedantries, indelicacies, freaks of
allusion, monstrosities of phrase;--these are the traits of Cotton
Mather’s writing, even as they are the traits common to that perverse
and detestable literary mood that held sway in different countries
of Christendom during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its
birthplace was Italy; New England was its grave; Cotton Mather was its
last great apostle.
Samuel Mather, the son of Cotton Mather, was born in 1706. In him,
evidently, the ancestral fire had become almost extinct. He had
abundant learning; was extremely industrious; published many things;
but there was not in them, as there was not in him, the victorious
energy of an original mind, or even the winning felicity of an
imitative one. He was a sturdy and a worthy man. He left no successor
to continue the once-splendid dynasty of his tribe. He was the last,
and the least, of the Mathers.
_The Laity in New England Literature._--In the history of literature
in New England during the colonial time, one fact stands out above
all others,--the intellectual leadership of the clergy, and that,
too, among a laity neither ignorant nor weak. This leadership was
in every sense honourable, both for the leaders and the led. It was
not due alone to the high authority of the clerical office in New
England; it was due still more to the personal greatness of the men
who filled that office, and who themselves made the office great. They
were intellectual leaders because they deserved to be; for, living
among a well-educated and high-spirited people, they knew more, were
wiser, were abler, than all other persons in the community. Of such a
leadership, it was an honour even to be among the followers. And in
the literary achievements of New England in the colonial time, the
clergy filled by far the largest space, because, in all departments
of writing, they did by far the largest amount of work. After the
first half-century of New England life, another fact comes into
notice,--the advance of the laity in literary activity. By that time,
many strong and good men, who had been educated there in all the
learning of the age, either not entering the clerical profession or not
remaining in it, began to organise and to develop the other learned
professions--the legal, medical, and tuitionary--and, appealing to the
public through various forms of literature, to divide more and more
with the clergy the leadership of men’s minds. Moreover, in the last
decade of the seventeenth century, an attempt was made to establish a
newspaper in New England. The attempt failed. In the first decade of
the eighteenth century, another attempt was made, and did not fail; and
long before the end of our colonial epoch, a new profession had come
into existence, having a power to act on the minds of men more mightily
than any other,--the profession of journalism.
_The Almanac._--No one who would penetrate to the core of early
American literature, and would read in it the secret history of the
people in whose minds it took root and from whose minds it grew, may
by any means turn away, in lofty literary scorn, from the almanac. The
earliest record of this species of literature in America carries us
back to the very beginning of printed literature in America; for, next
after a sheet containing _The Freeman’s Oath_, the first production
that came from the printing-press in this country was _An Almanac
calculated for New England, by Mr. Pierce_, and printed at Cambridge,
in 1639. Thenceforward for a long time, scarcely a year passed over
that solitary printing-press at Cambridge without receiving a similar
salute from it. In 1676, Boston itself grew wise enough to produce
an almanac of its own. Ten years afterward, Philadelphia began to
send forth almanacs--a trade in which, in the following century, it
was to acquire special glory. In 1697, New York entered the same
enticing field of enterprise. The first almanac produced in Rhode
Island was in 1728; the first almanac produced in Virginia was in
1731. In 1733, Benjamin Franklin began to publish what he called _Poor
Richard’s Almanac_, to which his own personal reputation has given a
celebrity surpassing that of all other almanacs published anywhere
in the world. Thus, year by year, with the multiplication of people
and of printing-presses in this country, was there a multiplication
of almanacs, some of them being of remarkable intellectual and even
literary merit. Throughout our colonial time, when larger books were
costly and few, the almanac had everywhere a hearty welcome and
frequent perusal.
_History and Biography in New England._--The one form of secular
literature for which, during the entire colonial age, the writers of
New England had the most authentic vocation is history. Our second
literary period produced four considerable historians,--William
Hubbard, Cotton Mather, Thomas Prince, Thomas Hutchinson: the first two
excelling in popularity all other historians of the colonial time; the
last two excelling all others in specific training for the profession
of history, and in the conscious accumulation of materials for historic
work. Of that species of history which is devoted to the lives of
individuals rather than of communities, there were many specimens
produced in the colonial epoch. But it is a singular fact that, in
literary quality, the biographies written in colonial New England are
far inferior to its histories.
_Pulpit Literature in New England._--In our progress over the various
fields of literature in New England during the colonial time, we
encounter not one form of writing in which we are permitted to lose
sight of the clergy of New England,--their tireless and versatile
activity, their learning, their force of brain, their force of
character. The immigrant clergy of New England--the founders of this
noble and brilliant order--were, in nearly all qualities of personal
worth and greatness, among the greatest and the worthiest of their
time, in the mother-country,--mighty scholars, orators, sages, saints.
And by far the most wonderful thing about these men is, that they
were able to convey across the Atlantic, into a naked wilderness, all
the essential elements of that ancient civilisation out of which they
came; and, at once, to raise up and educate, in the New World, a line
of mighty successors in their sacred office, without the least break
in the sequence, without the slightest diminution in scholarship, in
eloquence, in intellectual energy, in moral power.
_Jonathan Edwards._--Jonathan Edwards, the most original and acute
thinker yet produced in America, was born in 1703; in 1758 he was
installed as president of the College of New Jersey, and died a few
weeks afterward. Both by his father and by his mother, he came of
the gentlest and most intellectual stock in New England. In early
childhood, he began to manifest those powerful, lofty, and beautiful
endowments, of mind and of character, that afterward distinguished
him,--spirituality, conscientiousness, meekness, simplicity,
disinterestedness, and a marvellous capacity for the acquisition of
knowledge and for the prosecution of independent thought. It is,
perhaps, impossible to name any department of intellectual exertion,
in which, with suitable outward facilities, he might not have achieved
supreme distinction. Certainly, he did enough to show that had he given
himself to mathematics, or to physical science, or to languages, or to
literature--especially the literature of imagination and of wit--he
would have become one of the world’s masters. The traditions of his
family, the circumstances of his life, the impulses derived from his
education and from the models of personal greatness before his eyes,
all led him to give himself to mental science and divinity; and in
mental science and divinity, his achievements will be remembered to the
end of time.
III. GENERAL LITERARY FORCES IN THE COLONIAL TIME
_Colonial Isolation._--The study of American literature in the colonial
time is the study of a literature produced, in isolated portions, at
the several local seats of English civilisation in America. Before
the year 1765, we find in this country, not one American people,
but many American peoples. At the various centres of our colonial
life--Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New
York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts--there were, indeed,
populations of the same English stock; but these populations differed
widely in personal and social peculiarities--in spirit, in opinion,
in custom. The germs of a future nation were here, only they were far
apart, unsympathetic, at times even unfriendly. No cohesive principle
prevailed, no centralising life; each little nation was working out
its own destiny in its own fashion. In general, the characteristic
note of American literature in the colonial time is, for New England,
scholarly, logical, speculative, unworldly, rugged, sombre; and as one
passes southward along the coast, across other spiritual zones, this
literary note changes rapidly toward lightness and brightness, until it
reaches the sensuous mirth, the satire, the persiflage, the gentlemanly
grace, the amenity, the jocular coarseness, of literature in Maryland,
Virginia, and the farther South.
_Colonial Fellowship._--On the other hand, the fact must not be
overlooked that, while the tendency toward colonial isolation had its
way, throughout the entire colonial age, there was also an opposite
tendency--a tendency toward colonial fellowship--that asserted itself
even from the first, and yet at the first faintly, but afterward
with steadily increasing power as time went on; until at last, in
1765, aided by a fortunate blunder in the statesmanship of England,
this tendency became suddenly dominant, and led to that united
and great national life, without which a united and great national
literature here would have been for ever impossible. This august fact
of fellowship between the several English populations in America--a
fellowship maintained and even strengthened after the original occasion
of it had ceased--has perhaps saved the English language in America
from finally breaking up into a multitude of mutually repellent
dialects; it has certainly saved American literature from the pettiness
of permanent local distinctions, from fitfulness in its development,
and from disheartening limitations in its audience. Besides these
general causes leading toward colonial union,--kinship, religion,
commerce, dependence on the same sovereign, peril from the same
enemies,--there were three other causes that may be described as purely
intellectual--the rise of journalism, the founding of colleges, and the
study of physical science. They worked strongly for the development
of that intercolonial fellowship without which no national literature
would ever have been born here, and, also, were in themselves literary
forces of extraordinary importance.
_Early American Journalism._--The first newspaper ever published in
America appeared in Boston in 1690, and was named _Public Occurrences_.
For the crime of uttering “reflections of a very high nature,” it was
immediately extinguished by the authorities of Massachusetts,--not
even attaining the dignity of a second number. Under this rough blow,
the real birth of American journalism hesitated for fourteen years. On
April 4, 1704, was published in Boston the first number of an American
newspaper that lived. It was called _The Boston News-Letter_. For
fifteen years, it continued to be the only newspaper in America. At
last, on December 21, 1719, a rival newspaper was started, named _The
Boston Gazette_; and on the twenty-second day of the same month, in
the same year, there appeared in Philadelphia the first newspaper
published in this country outside of Boston. This was called _The
American Weekly Mercury_. From that time onward, the fashion of
having newspapers spread rapidly. Nearly all of these newspapers were
issued once each week; many of them were on diminutive sheets; and
for a long time all of them clung to the prudent plan of publishing
only news and advertisements, abstaining entirely from the audacity
of an editorial opinion, or disguising that dangerous luxury under
pretended letters from correspondents. News from Europe,--when it was
to be had,--and especially news from England, occupied a prominent
place in these little papers; but, necessarily, for each one, the
affairs of its own colony, and next, the affairs of the other colonies,
furnished the principal items of interest. Thus it was that early
American journalism, even though feeble, sluggish, and timid, began
to lift the people of each colony to a plane somewhat higher than its
own boundaries, and to enable them, by looking abroad, this way and
that, upon the proceedings of other people in this country, and upon
other interests as precious as their own, to correct the pettiness
and the selfishness of mere localism in thought. Colonial journalism
was a necessary and a great factor in the slow process of colonial
union. Besides this, our colonial journalism soon became, in itself,
a really important literary force. It could not remain for ever a
mere disseminator of public gossip, or a placard for the display of
advertisements. The instinct of critical and brave debate was strong
even among those puny editors, and it kept struggling for expression.
Moreover, each editor was surrounded by a coterie of friends, with
active brains and a propensity to utterance; and these constituted
a sort of unpaid staff of editorial contributors, who, in various
forms,--letters, essays, anecdotes, epigrams, poems, lampoons,--helped
to give vivacity and even literary value to the paper.
Our early journalism, likewise, included publications of a more
explicit literary intention than the newspapers; publications in which
the original work was done with far greater care, and in which far more
space was surrendered to literary news and literary criticism, and to
the exercise of many sorts of literary talent. The generic name for
these publications is the magazine; and the first one issued in this
country was by Benjamin Franklin, at Philadelphia, in 1741. By far the
most admirable example of our literary periodicals in the colonial
time was _The American Magazine_, published at Philadelphia from
October, 1757, to October, 1758, and conducted, according to its own
announcement, “by a society of gentlemen.”