THE EASTERN REALISTS
A GLANCE BACKWARD
* * * * *
SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF AUTHORS AND THEIR CHIEF WORKS
INDEX
[Transcriber's note:
Index not included in this electronic version.]
HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
CHAPTER I
COLONIAL LITERATURE
RELATION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE.--The literature produced in that part of
America known as the United States did not begin as an independent
literature. The early colonists were Englishmen who brought with them their
own language, books, and modes of thought. England had a world-famous
literature before her sons established a permanent settlement across the
Atlantic. Shakespeare had died four years before the Pilgrims landed at
Plymouth. When an American goes to Paris he can neither read the books, nor
converse with the citizens, if he knows no language but his own. Let him
cross to London, and he will find that, although more than three hundred
years have elapsed since the first colonists came to America, he
immediately feels at home, so far as the language and literature are
concerned.
For nearly two hundred years after the first English settlements in
America, the majority of the works read there were written by English
authors. The hard struggle necessary to obtain a foothold in a wilderness
is not favorable to the early development of a literature. Those who
remained in England could not clear away the forest, till the soil, and
conquer the Indians, but they could write the books and send them across
the ocean. The early settlers were for the most part content to allow
English authors to do this. For these reasons it would be surprising if
early American literature could vie with that produced in England during
the same period.
When Americans began to write in larger numbers, there was at first close
adherence to English models. For a while it seemed as if American
literature would be only a feeble imitation of these models, but a change
finally came, as will be shown in later chapters. It is to be hoped,
however, that American writers of the future will never cease to learn from
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, and Wordsworth.
AMERICAN LITERATURE AN IMPORTANT STUDY.--We should not begin the study of
American literature in an apologetic spirit. There should be no attempt to
minimize the debt that America owes to English literature, nor to conceal
the fact that American literature is young and has not had time to produce
as many masterpieces as England gave to the world during a thousand years.
However, it is now time also to record the fact that the literature of
England gained something from America. Cultivated Englishmen to-day
willingly admit that without a study of Cooper, Poe, and Hawthorne no one
could give an adequate account of the landmarks of achievement in fiction,
written in our common tongue. French critics have even gone so far as to
canonize Poe. In a certain field he and Hawthorne occupy a unique place in
the world's achievement. Again, men like Bret Harte and Mark Twain are not
common in any literature. Foreigners have had American books translated
into all the leading languages of the world. It is now more than one
hundred years since Franklin, the great American philosopher of the
practical, died, and yet several European nations reprint nearly every year
some of his sayings, which continue to influence the masses. English
critics, like John Addington Symonds, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edward
Dowden, have testified to the power of the democratic element in our
literature and have given the dictum that it cannot be neglected.
Some of the reasons why American literature developed along original lines
and thus conveyed a message of its own to the world are to be found in the
changed environment and the varying problems and ideals of American life.
Even more important than the changed ways of earning a living and the
difference in climate, animals, and scenery were the struggles leading to
the Revolutionary War, the formation and guidance of the Republic, and the
Civil War. All these combined to give individuality to American thought and
literature.
Taken as a whole, American literature has accomplished more than might
reasonably have been expected. Its study is especially important for us,
since the deeds associated with our birthplace must mean more to us than
more remarkable achievements of men born under other skies. Our literature,
even in its humble beginnings, contains a lesson that no American can
afford to miss. Unless we know its ideals and moral aims and are swayed by
them, we cannot keep our heritage.
WHY VIRGINIA WAS COLONIZED.--In 1607 the first permanent English colony
within the present limits of the United States was planted at Jamestown in
Virginia. The colony was founded for commercial reasons by the London
Company, an organization formed to secure profits from colonization. The
colonists and the company that furnished their ship and outfit expected
large profits from the gold mines and the precious stones which were
believed to await discovery. Of course, the adventurers were also
influenced by the honor and the romantic interest which they thought would
result from a successful settlement.
When the expedition sailed from England in December, 1606, Michael Drayton,
an Elizabethan poet, wrote verses dedicated "To the Virginian Voyage."
These stanzas show the reason for sending the colonizers to Virginia:--
"You brave heroic minds,
Worthy your country's name,
That honor still pursue,
Whilst loit'ring hinds
Lurk here at home with shame,
Go and subdue.
* * * * *
And cheerfully at sea,
Success you still entice,
To get the pearl and gold;
And ours to hold
Virginia,
Earth's only paradise."
The majority of the early Virginian colonists were unfit for their task.
Contemporary accounts tell of the "many unruly gallants, packed hither by
their friends to escape ill destinies." Beggars, vagabonds, indentured
servants, kidnapped girls, even convicts, were sent to Jamestown and became
the ancestors of some of the "poor white trash" of the South. After the
execution of Charles I. in 1649, and the setting up of the Puritan
Commonwealth, many of the royalists, or Cavaliers, as they were called,
came to Virginia to escape the obnoxious Puritan rule. They became the
ancestors of Presidents and statesmen, and of many of the aristocratic
families of the South.
The ideals expressed by Captain John Smith, the leader and preserver of the
Jamestown colony, are worthy to rank beside those of the colonizers of New
England. Looking back at his achievement in Virginia, he wrote, "Then
seeing we are not born for ourselves but each to help other ... Seeing
honor is our lives' ambition ... and seeing by no means would we be abated
of the dignities and glories of our predecessors; let us imitate their
virtues to be worthily their successors."
WHY THE PURITANS COLONIZED NEW ENGLAND.--During the period from 1620 to
1640, large numbers of Englishmen migrated to that part of America now
known as New England. These emigrants were not impelled by hope of wealth,
or ease, or pleasure. They were called Puritans because they wished to
purify the Church of England from what seemed to them great abuses; and the
purpose of these men in emigrating to America was to lay the foundations of
a state built upon their religious principles. These people came for an
intangible something--liberty of conscience, a fuller life of the
spirit--which has never commanded a price on any stock exchange in the
world. They looked beyond
"Things done that took the eye and had the price;
O'er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice."
These Puritans had been more than one century in the making. We hear of
them in the time of Wycliffe (1324-1384). Their religion was a constant
command to put the unseen above the seen, the eternal above the temporal,
to satisfy the aspiration of the spirit. James I. (reign, 1603-1625) told
them that he would harry them out of the kingdom unless they conformed to
the rites of the Established Church. His son and successor Charles I.
(reign, 1625-1649) called to his aid Archbishop Laud (1573-1645), a bigoted
official of that church. Laud hunted the dissenting clergy like wild
beasts, threw them into prison, whipped them in the pillory, branded them,
slit their nostrils, and mutilated their ears. JOHN COTTON, pastor of the
church of Boston, England, was told that if he had been guilty only of an
infraction of certain of the Ten Commandments, he might have been pardoned,
but since his crime was Puritanism, he must suffer. He had great trouble in
escaping on a ship bound for the New England Boston.
[Illustration: JOHN COTTON]
Professor Tyler says: "New England has perhaps never quite appreciated its
great obligations to Archbishop Laud. It was his overmastering hate of
nonconformity, it was the vigilance and vigor and consecrated cruelty with
which he scoured his own diocese and afterward all England, and hunted down
and hunted out the ministers who were committing the unpardonable sin of
dissent, that conferred upon the principal colonies of New England their
ablest and noblest men."
It should be noted that the Puritan colonization of New England took place
in a comparatively brief space of time, during the twenty years from 1620
to 1640. Until 1640 persecution drove the Puritans to New England in
multitudes, but in that year they suddenly stopped coming. "During the one
hundred and twenty-five years following that date, more persons, it is
supposed, went back from the New to the Old England than came from the Old
England to the New," says Professor Tyler. The year 1640 marks the
assembling of the Long Parliament, which finally brought to the block both
Archbishop Laud (1645) and King Charles I. (1649), and chose the great
Puritan, Oliver Cromwell, to lead the Commonwealth.
ELIZABETHAN TRAITS.--The leading men in the colonization of Virginia and
New England were born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), and they
and their descendants showed on this side of the Atlantic those
characteristics which made the Elizabethan age preeminent.
In the first place, the Elizabethans possessed initiative. This power
consists, first, in having ideas, and secondly, in passing from the ideas
to the suggested action. Some people merely dream. The Elizabethans dreamed
glorious dreams, which they translated into action. They defeated the
Spanish Armada; they circumnavigated the globe; they made it possible for
Shakespeare's pen to mold the thought and to influence the actions of the
world.
If we except those indentured servants and apprentices who came to America
merely because others brought them, we shall find not only that the first
colonists were born in an age distinguished for its initiative, but also
that they came because they possessed this characteristic in a greater
degree than those who remained behind. It was easier for the majority to
stay with their friends; hence England was not depopulated. The few came,
those who had sufficient initiative to cross three thousand miles of
unknown sea, who had the power to dream dreams of a new commonwealth, and
the will to embody those dreams in action.
In the second place, the Elizabethans were ingenious, that is, they were
imaginative and resourceful. Impelled by the mighty forces of the
Reformation and the Revival of Learning which the England of Elizabeth
alone felt at one and the same time, the Elizabethans craved and obtained
variety of experience, which kept the fountainhead of ingenuity filled. It
is instructive to follow the lives of Elizabethans as different as Sir
Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Captain John Smith,
and John Winthrop, and to note the varied experiences of each. Yankee
ingenuity had an Elizabethan ancestry. The hard conditions of the New World
merely gave an opportunity to exercise to the utmost an ingenuity which the
colonists brought with them.
In the third place, the Elizabethans were unusually democratic; that is,
the different classes mingled together in a marked degree, more than in
modern England, more even than in the United States to-day. This
intermingling was due in part to increased travel, to the desire born of
the New Learning to live as varied and as complete a life as possible, and
to the absence of overspecialization among individuals. This chance for
varied experience with all sorts and conditions of men enabled Shakespeare
to speak to all humanity. All England was represented in his plays. When
the Rev. Thomas Hooker, born in the last half of Elizabeth's reign, was
made pastor at Hartford, Connecticut, he suggested to his flock a
democratic form of government much like that under which we now live.
Let us remember that American life and literature owe their most
interesting traits to these three Elizabethan qualities--initiative,
ingenuity, and democracy. Let us not forget that the Cambridge University
graduate, the cooper, cloth-maker, printer, and blacksmith had the
initiative to set out for the New World, the ingenuity to deal with its
varied exigencies, and the democratic spirit that enabled them to work side
by side, no matter how diverse their former trades, modes of life, and
social condition.
CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH, 1579-1631
[Illustration: JOHN SMITH]
The hero of the Jamestown colony, and its savior during the first two
years, was Captain John Smith, born in Willoughby, Lincolnshire, in 1579,
twenty-four years before the death of Elizabeth and thirty-seven before the
death of Shakespeare. Smith was a man of Elizabethan stamp,--active,
ingenious, imaginative, craving new experiences. While a mere boy, he could
not stand the tediousness of ordinary life, and so betook himself to the
forest where he could hunt and play knight.
In the first part of his young manhood he crossed the Channel, voyaged in
the Mediterranean, fought the Turks, killing three of them in single
combat, was taken prisoner and enslaved by the Tartars, killed his inhuman
master, escaped into Russia, went thence through Europe to Africa, was in
desperate naval battles, returned to England, sailing thence for Virginia,
which he reached at the age of twenty-eight.
He soon became president of the Jamestown colony and labored strenuously
for its preservation. The first product of his pen in America was _A True
Relation of Virginia_, written in 1608, the year in which John Milton was
born. The last work written by Smith in America is entitled: _A Map of
Virginia, with a Description of the Country, the Commodities, People,
Government, and Religion_. His description of the Indians shows his
capacity for quickly noting their traits:--
"They are inconstant in everything, but what fear constraineth them to
keep. Crafty, timorous, quick of apprehension and very ingenious. Some
are of disposition fearful, some bold, most cautious, all savage.
Generally covetous of copper, beads, and such like trash. They are soon
moved to anger, and so malicious that they seldom forget an injury: they
seldom steal one from another, lest their conjurors should reveal it, and
so they be pursued and punished. That they are thus feared is certain,
but that any can reveal their offences by conjuration I am doubtful."
Smith has often been accused of boasting, and some have said that he was
guilty of great exaggeration or something worse, but it is certain that he
repeatedly braved hardships, extreme dangers, and captivity among the
Indians to provide food for the colony and to survey Virginia. After
carefully editing _Captain John Smith's Works_ in a volume of 983 pages,
Professor Edwin Arber says: "For [our] own part, beginning with
doubtfulness and wariness we have gradually come to the unhesitating
conviction, not only of Smith's truthfulness, but also that, in regard to
all personal matters, he systematically understates rather than exaggerates
anything he did."
Although by far the greater part of Smith's literary work was done after he
returned to England, yet his two booklets written in America entitle him to
a place in colonial literature. He had the Elizabethan love of achievement,
and he records his admiration for those whose 'pens writ what their swords
did.' He was not an artist with his pen, but our early colonial literature
is the richer for his rough narrative and for the description of Virginia
and the Indians.
In one sense he gave the Indian to literature, and that is his greatest
achievement in literary history. Who has not heard the story of his capture
by the Indians, of his rescue from torture and death, by the beautiful
Indian maiden, Pocahontas, of her risking her life to save him a second
time from Indian treachery, of her bringing corn and preserving the colony
from famine, of her visit to England in 1616, a few weeks after the death
of Shakespeare, of her royal reception as a princess, the daughter of an
Indian king, of Smith's meeting her again in London, where their romantic
story aroused the admiration of the court and the citizens for the
brown-eyed princess? It would be difficult to say how many tales of Indian
adventure this romantic story of Pocahontas has suggested. It has the honor
of being the first of its kind written in the English tongue.
Did Pocahontas actually rescue Captain Smith? In his account of his
adventures, written in Virginia in 1608, he does not mention this rescue,
but in his later writings he relates it as an actual occurrence. When
Pocahontas visited London, this story was current, and there is no evidence
that she denied it. Professor Arber says, "To deny the truth of the
Pocahontas incident is to create more difficulties than are involved in its
acceptance." But literature does not need to ask whether the story of
Hamlet or of Pocahontas is true. If this unique story of American adventure
is a product of Captain Smith's creative imagination, the literary critic
must admit the captain's superior ability in producing a tale of such
vitality. If the story is true, then our literature does well to remember
whose pen made this truth one of the most persistent of our early romantic
heritages. He is as well known for the story of Pocahontas as for all of
his other achievements. The man who saved the Virginia colony and who first
suggested a new field to the writer of American romance is rightly
considered one of the most striking figures in our early history, even if
he did return to England in less than three years and end his days there in
1631.
LITERARY ACTIVITY IN VIRGINIA COLONY
A POSSIBLE SUGGESTION FOR SHAKESPEARE'S TEMPEST.--WILLIAM STRACHEY, a
contemporary of Shakespeare and secretary of the Virginian colony, wrote at
Jamestown and sent to London in 1610 the manuscript of _A True Repertory of
the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., upon and from the
Islands of the Bermudas_. This is a story of shipwreck on the Bermudas and
of escape in small boats. The book is memorable for the description of a
storm at sea, and it is possible that it may even have furnished
suggestions to Shakespeare for _The Tempest_. If so, it is interesting to
compare these with what they produced in Shakespeare's mind. Strachey tells
how "the sea swelled above the clouds and gave battle unto heaven." He
speaks of "an apparition of a little round light, like a faint star,
trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze, half the height upon
the main mast, and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud." Ariel says to
Prospero:--
"I boarded the king's ship; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flam'd amazement: Sometimes I'ld divide,
And burn in many places; on the topmast,
The yards, and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join."
Strachey voices the current belief that the Bermudas were harassed by
tempests, devils, wicked spirits, and other fearful objects. Shakespeare
has Ferdinand with fewer words intensify Strachey's picture:--
"Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here."
The possibility that incidents arising out of Virginian colonization may
have turned Shakespeare's attention to "the still vex'd Bermoothes" and
given him suggestions for one of his great plays lends added interest to
Strachey's True Repertory. But, aside from Shakespeare, this has an
interest of its own. It has the Anglo-Saxon touch in depicting the wrath of
the sea, and it shows the character of the early American colonists who
braved a wrath like this.
[Illustration: GEORGE SANDYS]
POETRY IN THE VIRGINIA COLONY.--GEORGE SANDYS (1577-1644), during his
stay in the colony as its treasurer, translated ten books of Ovid's
_Metamorphoses_, sometimes working by the light of a pine knot. This work
is rescued from the class of mere translation by its literary art and
imaginative interpretation, and it possesses for us an additional interest
because of its nativity amid such surroundings. Two lines telling how
Philemon
"Took down a flitch of bacon with a prung,
That long had in the smoky chimney hung,"
show that his environment aided him somewhat in the translation. He himself
says of this version that it was "bred in the new world, whereof it cannot
but participate, especially having wars and tumults to bring it to light,
instead of the muses." He was read by both Dryden and Pope in their
boyhood, and the form of their verse shows his influence.
The only original poem which merits our attention in the early Virginian
colony was found soon after the Revolutionary War in a collection of
manuscripts, known as the _Burwell Papers_. This poem is an elegy on the
death of Nathaniel Bacon (1676), a young Virginian patriot and military
hero, who resisted the despotic governor, Sir William Berkeley. It was
popularly believed that Bacon's mysterious death was due to poison. An
unknown friend wrote the elegy in defense of Bacon and his rebellion. These
lines from that elegy show a strength unusual in colonial poetry:--
"Virginia's foes,
To whom, for secret crimes, just vengeance owes
Deserved plagues, dreading their just desert,
Corrupted death by Paracelsian art,
Him to destroy . . .
Our arms, though ne'er so strong,
Will want the aid of his commanding tongue,
Which conquered more than Caesar."
DESCRIPTIONS OF VIRGINIA.--ROBERT BEVERLY, clerk of the Council of
Virginia, published in London in 1705 a _History and Present State of
Virginia_. This is today a readable account of the colony and its people in
the first part of the eighteenth century. This selection shows that in
those early days Virginians were noted for what has come to be known as
southern hospitality:--
"The inhabitants are very courteous to travellers, who need no other
recommendation, but the being human creatures. A stranger has no more to
do, but to inquire upon the road where any gentleman or good housekeeper
lives, and there he may depend upon being received with hospitality. This
good nature is so general among their people, that the gentry, when they
go abroad, order their principal servant to entertain all visitors with
everything the plantation affords. And the poor planters who have but one
bed, will very often sit up, or lie upon a form or couch all night, to
make room for a weary traveller to repose himself after his journey."
[Illustration: WILLIAM BYRD]
COLONEL WILLIAM BYRD (1674-1744), a wealthy Virginian, wrote a _History of
the Dividing Line run in the Year 1728_. He was commissioned by the
Virginian colony to run a line between it and North Carolina. This book is
a record of personal experiences, and is as interesting as its title is
forbidding. This selection describes the Dismal Swamp, through which the
line ran:--
"Since the surveyors had entered the Dismal they had laid eyes on no
living creature; neither bird nor beast, insect nor reptile came in view.
Doubtless the eternal shade that broods over this mighty bog and hinders
the sunbeams from blessing the ground, makes it an uncomfortable
habitation for anything that has life. Not so much as a Zealand frog
could endure so aguish a situation. It had one beauty, however, that
delighted the eye, though at the expense of all the other senses: the
moisture of the soil preserves a continual verdure, and makes every plant
an evergreen, but at the same time the foul damps ascend without ceasing,
corrupt the air, and render it unfit for respiration. Not even a turkey
buzzard will venture to fly over it, no more than the Italian vultures
will fly over the filthy lake Avernus or the birds in the Holy Land over
the salt sea where Sodom and Gomorrah formerly stood.
"In these sad circumstances the kindest thing we could do for our
suffering friends was to give them a place in the Litany. Our chaplain
for his part did his office and rubbed us up with a seasonable sermon.
This was quite a new thing to our brethren of North Carolina, who live in
a climate where no clergyman can breathe, any more than spiders in
Ireland."
These two selections show that American literature, even before the
Revolution, came to be something more than an imitation of English
literature. They are the product of our soil, and no critic could say that
they might as well have been written in London as in Virginia. They also
show how much eighteenth-century prose had improved in form. Even in
England, modern prose may almost be said to begin with John Dryden, who
died at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In addition to improvement
in form, we may note the appearance of a new quality--humor. Our earliest
writers have few traces of humor because colonization was a serious life
and death affair to them.
DIFFERENT LINES OF DEVELOPMENT OF VIRGINIA AND NEW ENGLAND.--As we now go
back more than a hundred years to the founding of the Plymouth colony in
1620, we may note that Virginia and New England developed along different
lines. We shall find more dwellers in towns, more democracy and mingling of
all classes, more popular education, and more literature in New England.
The ruling classes of Virginia were mostly descendants of the Cavaliers who
had sympathized with monarchy, while the Puritans had fought the Stuart
kings and had approved a Commonwealth. In Virginia a wealthy class of
landed gentry came to be an increasing power in the political history of
the country. The ancestors of George Washington and many others who did
inestimable service to the nation were among this class. It was long the
fashion for this aristocracy to send their children to England to be
educated, while the Puritans trained theirs at home.
[Illustration: EARLY PRINTING PRESS]
New England started a printing press, and was printing books by 1640. In
1671 Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, wrote, "I thank God there
are no free schools, nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these
hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects
into the world, and printing has developed them."
Producers of literature need the stimulus of town life. The South was
chiefly agricultural. The plantations were large, and the people lived in
far greater isolation than in New England, where not only the town, but
more especially the church, developed a close social unit.
One other reason served to make it difficult for a poet of the plowman
type, like Robert Burns, or for an author from the general working class,
like Benjamin Franklin, to arise in the South. Labor was thought degrading,
and the laborer did not find the same chance as at the North to learn from
close association with the intelligent class.
The reason for this is given by Colonel William Byrd, from whom we have
quoted in the preceding section. He wrote in 1736 of the leading men of the
South:--
"They import so many negroes hither, that I fear this Colony will some
time or other be confirmed by the name of New Guinea. I am sensible of
many bad consequences of multiplying these Ethiopians amongst us. They
blow up the pride and ruin the industry of our white people, who seeing a
rank of poor creatures below them, detest work, for fear it should make
them look like slaves."
WILLIAM BRADFORD, 1590-1657
William Bradford was born in 1590 in the Pilgrim district of England, in
the Yorkshire village of Austerfield, two miles north of Scrooby. While a
child, he attended the religious meetings of the Puritans. At the age of
eighteen he gave up a good position in the post service of England, and
crossed to Holland to escape religious persecution. His _History of
Plymouth Plantation_ is not a record of the Puritans as a whole, but only
of that branch known as the Pilgrims, who left England for Holland in 1607
and 1608, and who, after remaining there for nearly twelve years, had the
initiative to be the first of their band to come to the New World, and to
settle at Plymouth in 1620.
For more than thirty years he was governor of the Plymouth colony, and he
managed its affairs with the discretion of a Washington and the zeal of a
Cromwell. His _History_ tells the story of the Pilgrim Fathers from the
time of the formation of their two congregations in England, until 1647.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF FIRST PARAGRAPH OF BRADFORD'S "HISTORY OF
PLYMOUTH PLANTATION"]
In 1897 the United States for the first time came into possession of the
manuscript of this famous _History of Plymouth Plantation_, which had in
some mysterious manner been taken from Boston in colonial times and had
found its way into the library of the Lord Bishop of London. Few of the
English seem to have read it. Even its custodian miscalled it The Log of
the Mayflower, although after the ship finally cleared from England, only
five incidents of the voyage are briefly mentioned: the death of a young
seaman who cursed the Pilgrims on the voyage and made sport of their
misery; the cracking of one of the main beams of the ship; the washing
overboard in a storm of a good young man who was providentially saved; the
death of a servant; and the sight of Cape Cod. On petition, the Lord Bishop
of London generously gave this manuscript of 270 pages to the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts. In a speech at the time of its formal reception, Senator
Hoar eloquently summed up the subject matter of the volume as follows:--
"I do not think many Americans will gaze upon it without a little
trembling of the lips and a little gathering of mist in the eyes, as they
think of the story of suffering, of sorrow, of peril, of exile, of death,
and of lofty triumph which that book tells,--which the hand of the great
leader and founder of America has traced on those pages. There is nothing
like it in human annals since the story of Bethlehem. These Englishmen
and English women going out from their homes in beautiful Lincoln and
York, wife separated from husband and mother from child in that hurried
embarkation for Holland, pursued to the beach by English horsemen; the
thirteen years of exile; the life at Amsterdam, 'in alley foul and lane
obscure'; the dwelling at Leyden; the embarkation at Delfthaven; the
farewell of Robinson; the terrible voyage across the Atlantic; the
compact in the harbor; the landing on the rock; the dreadful first
winter; the death roll of more than half the number; the days of
suffering and of famine; the wakeful night, listening for the yell of
wild beast and the war whoop of the savage; the building of the State on
those sure foundations which no wave or tempest has ever shaken; the
breaking of the new light; the dawning of the new day; the beginning of
the new life; the enjoyment of peace with liberty,--of all these things
this is the original record by the hand of our beloved father and
founder."
In addition to giving matter of unique historical importance, Bradford
entertains his readers with an account of Squanto, the Pilgrims' tame
Indian, of Miles Standish capturing the "lord of misrule" at Merrymount,
and of the failure of an experiment in tilling the soil in common. Bradford
says that there was immediate improvement when each family received the
full returns from working its own individual plot of ground. He thus
philosophizes about this social experiment of the Pilgrims:--
"The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried
sundry years, and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the
vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients, applauded by some
of later times;----that the taking away of property and bringing in
community into a common wealth would make them happy and flourishing....
Let none object this is men's corruption, and nothing to the course
itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in his
wisdom saw another course fitter for them."
America need not be ashamed of either the form or the subject matter of her
early colonial prose in comparison with that produced in England at the
same time.
JOHN WINTHROP, 1588-1649
[Illustration: JOHN WINTHROP]
On March 29, 1630, John Winthrop made the first entry in his _Journal_ on
board the ship Arbella, before she left the Isle of Wight for Massachusetts
Bay. This _Journal_ was to continue until a few months before his death in
1649, and was in after times to receive the dignified name of _History of
New England_, although it might more properly still be called his
_Journal_, as its latest editor does indeed style it.
John Winthrop was born in the County of Suffolk, England, in 1588, the year
of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. He was a wealthy, well-educated
Puritan, the owner of broad estates. As he paced the deck of the _Arbella_,
the night before he sailed for Massachusetts, he knew that he was leaving
comfort, home, friends, position, all for liberty of conscience. Few men
have ever voluntarily abandoned more than Winthrop, or clung more
tenaciously to their ideals.
After a voyage lasting more than two months, he settled with a large number
of Puritans on the site of modern Boston. For the principal part of the
time from his arrival in 1630 until his death in 1649, he served as
governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Not many civil leaders of any age
have shown more sagacity, patriotism, and tireless devotion to duty than
John Winthrop.
His _Journal_ is a record of contemporaneous events from 1630 to 1648.
The early part of this work might with some justice have been called the
_Log of the Arbella_.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF BEGINNING OF MS. OF WINTHROP'S "JOURNAL"]
TRANSLITERATION OF FACSIMILE OF WINTHROP'S "JOURNAL"
"ANNO DOMINI 1630, MARCH 29, MONDAY.
"EASTER MONDAY.
"Riding at the Cowes, near the Isle of Wight, in the _Arbella_,
a ship of 350 tons, whereof Capt. Peter Milborne was master, being
manned with 52 seamen, and 28 pieces of ordnance, (the wind coming to
the N. by W. the evening before,) in the morning there came aboard us
Mr. Cradock, the late governor, and the masters of his 2 ships, Capt.
John Lowe, master of the _Ambrose_, and Mr. Nicholas Hurlston,
master of the _Jewel_, and Mr. Thomas Beecher, master of the
_Talbot_."
The entry for Monday, April 12, 1630, is:--
"The wind more large to the N. a stiff gale, with fair weather. In the
afternoon less wind, and our people began to grow well again. Our
children and others, that were sick and lay groaning in the cabins, we
fetched out, and having stretched a rope from the steerage to the
main-mast, we made them stand, some of one side and some of the other,
and sway it up and down till they were warm, and by this means they soon
grew well and merry."
The following entry for June 5, 1644, reflects an interesting side light on
the government of Harvard, our first American college:--
"Two of our ministers' sons, being students in the college, robbed two
dwelling houses in the night of some fifteen pounds. Being found out,
they were ordered by the governors of the college to be there whipped,
which was performed by the president himself--yet they were about twenty
years of age; and after they were brought into the court and ordered to
twofold satisfaction, or to serve so long for it. We had yet no
particular punishment for burglary."
Another entry for 1644 tells of one William Franklin, condemned for causing
the death of his apprentice:--
"The case was this. He had taken to apprentice one Nathaniel Sewell, one
of those children sent over the last year for the country; the boy had
the scurvy and was withal very noisome, and otherwise ill disposed. His
master used him with continual rigour and unmerciful correction, and
exposed him many times to much cold and wet in the winter season, and
used divers acts of rigour towards him, as hanging him in the chimney,
etc., and the boy being very poor and weak, he tied him upon an horse and
so brought him (sometimes sitting and sometimes hanging down) to Boston,
being five miles off, to the magistrates, and by the way the boy calling
much for water, would give him none, though he came close by it, so as
the boy was near dead when he came to Boston, and died within a few hours
after."
Winthrop relates how Franklin appealed the case when he was found guilty,
and how the Puritans inflicted the death penalty on him after searching the
_Bible_ for a rule on which to base their decision. The most noticeable
qualities of this terrible story are its simplicity, its repression, its
lack of striving after effect. Winthrop, Bradford, and Bunyan had learned
from the 1611 version of the _Bible_ to be content to present any situation
as simply as possible and to rely on the facts themselves to secure the
effect.
Winthrop's finest piece of prose, _Concerning Liberty,_ appears in an entry
for the year 1645. He defines liberty as the power "to do that which is
good, just, and honest. This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard,
not only of your goods, but of your lives, if need be." Winthrop saw
clearly what many since his day have failed to see, that a government
conducted by the people could not endure, if liberty meant more than this.
Winthrop's _Journal_ records almost anything which seemed important to the
colonists. Thus, he tells about storms, fires, peculiar deaths of animals,
crimes, trials, Indians, labor troubles, arrival of ships, trading
expeditions, troubles with England about the charter, politics, church
matters, events that would point a moral, like the selfish refusal of the
authorities to loan a quantity of gunpowder to the Plymouth colony and the
subsequent destruction of that same powder by an explosion, or the drowning
of a child in the well while the parents were visiting on Sunday. In short,
this _Journal_ gives valuable information about the civil, religious, and
domestic life of the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The art of
modern prose writing was known neither in England nor in America in
Winthrop's time. The wonder is that he told the story of this colony in
such good form and that he still holds the interest of the reader so well.
THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL
William Bradford and John Winthrop were governors of two religious
commonwealths. We must not forget that the Puritans came to America to
secure a higher form of spiritual life. In the reign of Elizabeth, it was
thought that the Revival of Learning would cure all ills and unlock the
gates of happiness. This hope had met with disappointment. Then Puritanism
came, and ushered in a new era of spiritual aspiration for something
better, nobler, and more satisfying than mere intellectual attainments or
wealth or earthly power had been able to secure.
The Puritans chose the _Bible_ as the guidebook to their Promised Land. The
long sermons to which they listened were chiefly biblical expositions. The
Puritans considered the saving of the soul the most important matter, and
they neglected whatever form of culture did not directly tend toward that
result. They thought that entertaining reading and other forms of amusement
were contrivances of the devil to turn the soul's attention away from the
_Bible_. Even beauty and art were considered handmaids of the Evil One. The
_Bible_ was read, reread, and constantly studied, and it took the place of
secular poetry and prose.
The New England Puritan believed in the theology of John Calvin, who died
in 1564. His creed, known as Calvinism, emphasized the importance of the
individual, of life's continuous moral struggle, which would land each soul
in heaven or hell for all eternity. In the _New England Primer_, the
children were taught the first article of belief, as they learned the
letter A:--
[Illustration: LETTER "A" IN NEW ENGLAND PRIMER"]
"In Adam's fall,
We sinned all."
Calvinism stressed the doctrine of foreordination, that certain ones, "the
elect," had been foreordained to be saved. THOMAS SHEPHARD (1605-1649), one
of the great Puritan clergy, fixed the mathematical ratio of the damned to
the elect as "a thousand to one." On the physical side, scientists have
pointed out a close correspondence between Calvin's creed and the theory of
evolution, which emphasizes the desperate struggle resulting from the
survival of the fittest. The "fittest" are the "elect"; those who perish in
the contest, the "damned." In the evolutionary struggle, only the few
survive, while untold numbers of the unfit, no matter whether seeds of
plants, eggs of fish, human beings, or any other form of life, go to the
wall.
In spite of the apparent contradiction between free will and
foreordination, each individual felt himself fully responsible for the
saving of his soul. A firm belief in this tremendous responsibility made
each one rise the stronger to meet the other responsibilities of life.
Civil responsibility seemed easier to one reared in this school. The
initiative bequeathed by Elizabethan times was increased by the Puritans'
religion.
Although there were probably as many university men in proportion to the
population in early colonial Massachusetts as in England, the strength and
direction of their religious ideals helped to turn their energy into
activities outside the field of pure literature. In course of time,
however, Nathaniel Hawthorne appeared to give lasting literary expression
to this life.
THE NEW ENGLAND CLERGY.--The clergy occupied a leading place in both the
civil and religious life of New England. They were men of energy and
ability, who could lead their congregations to Holland or to the wilds of
New England. For the purpose in hand the world has never seen superior
leaders. Many of them were graduates of Cambridge University, England.
Their great authority was based on character, education, and natural
ability. A contemporary historian said of John Cotton, who came as pastor
from the old to the new Boston in 1633, that whatever he "delivered in the
pulpit was soon put into an order of court ... or set up as a practice in
the church."
The sermons, from two to four hours long, took the place of magazines,
newspapers, and modern musical and theatrical entertainments. The church
members were accustomed to hard thinking and they enjoyed it as a mental
exercise. Their minds had not been rendered flabby by such a diet of
miscellaneous trash or sensational matter as confronts modern readers. Many
of the congregation went with notebooks to record the different heads and
the most striking thoughts in the sermon, such, for instance, as the
following on the dangers of idleness:--
"Whilst the stream keeps running, it keeps clear; but let it stand still,
it breeds frogs and toads and all manner of filth. So while you keep
going, you keep clear."
The sermons were often doctrinal, metaphysical, and extremely dry, but it
is a mistake to conclude that the clergy did not speak on topics of current
interest. Winthrop in his _Journal_ for 1639 relates how the Rev. John
Cotton discussed whether a certain shopkeeper, who had been arraigned
before the court for extortion, for having taken "in some small things,
above two for one," was guilty of sin and should be excommunicated from the
church, or only publicly admonished. Cotton prescribed admonition and he
laid down a code of ethics for the guidance of sellers.
With the exception of Roger Williams (1604?-1683), who had the modern point
of view in insisting on complete "soul liberty," on the right of every man
to think as he pleased on matters of religion, the Puritan clergy were not
tolerant of other forms of worship. They said that they came to New England
in order to worship God as they pleased. They never made the slightest
pretense of establishing a commonwealth where another could worship as he
pleased, because they feared that such a privilege might lead to a return
of the persecution from which they had fled. If those came who thought
differently about religion, they were told that there was sufficient room
elsewhere, in Rhode Island, for instance, whither Roger Williams went after
he was banished from Salem. The history of the Puritan clergy would have
been more pleasing had they been more tolerant, less narrow, more modern,
like Roger Williams. Yet perhaps it is best not to complain overmuch of the
strange and somewhat repellent architecture of the bridge which bore us
over the stream dividing the desert of royal and ecclesiastical tyranny
from the Promised Land of our Republic. Let us not forget that the clergy
insisted on popular education; that wherever there was a clergyman, there
was almost certain to be a school, even if he had to teach it himself, and
that the clergy generally spoke and acted as if they would rather be "free
among the dead than slaves among the living."
POETRY
The trend of Puritan theology and the hard conditions of life did not
encourage the production of poetry. The Puritans even wondered if singing
in church was not an exercise which turned the mind from God. The Rev. John
Cotton investigated the question carefully under four main heads and six
subheads, and he cited scriptural authority to show that Paul and Silas
(_Acts_, xvi., 25) had sung a _Psalm_ in the prison. Cotton therefore
concluded that the _Psalms_ might be sung in church.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF TITLE-PAGE TO "BAY PSALM BOOK"]
BAY PSALM BOOK.--"The divines in the country" joined to translate "into
English metre" the whole book of _Psalms_ from the original Hebrew, and
they probably made the worst metrical translation in existence. In their
preface to this work, known as the _Bay Psalm Book_ (1640), the first book
of verse printed in the British American colonies, they explained that they
did not strive for a more poetic translation because "God's altar needs not
our polishings." The following verses from _Psalm_ cxxxvii. are a sample of
the so-called metrical translation which the Puritans sang:--
"1. The rivers on of Babilon
there-when wee did sit downe:
yea even then wee mourned, when
wee remembred Sion.
"2. Our Harps wee did it hang amid,
upon the willow tree.
"3. Because there they that us away
led in captivitee,
Requir'd of us a song, & thus
askt mirth: us waste who laid,
sing us among a Sion's song,
unto us then they said."
MICHAEL WIGGLESWORTH (1631-1705).--This Harvard graduate and Puritan
preacher published in 1662 a poem setting forth some of the tenets of
Calvinistic theology. This poem, entitled _The Day of Doom, or a Poetical
Description of the Great and Last Judgment_, had the largest circulation of
any colonial poem. The following lines represent a throng of infants at the
left hand of the final Judge, pleading against the sentence of infant
damnation:--
"'Not we, but he ate of the tree,
whose fruit was interdicted;
Yet on us all of his sad fall
the punishment's inflicted.
How could we sin that had not been,
or how is his sin our,
Without consent, which to prevent
we never had the pow'r?'"
Wigglesworth represents the Almighty as replying:--
"'You sinners are, and such a share
as sinners may expect;
Such you shall have, for I do save
none but mine own Elect.
Yet to compare your sin with their
who liv'd a longer time,
I do confess yours is much less,
though every sin's a crime.
"'A crime it is, therefore in bliss
you may not hope to dwell;
But unto you I shall allow
the easiest room in Hell.'"
When we read verse like this, we realize how fortunate the Puritanism of
Old England was to have one great poet schooled in the love of both
morality and beauty. John Milton's poetry shows not only his sublimity and
high ideals, but also his admiration for beauty, music, and art.
Wigglesworth's verse is inferior to much of the ballad doggerel, but it has
a swing and a directness fitted to catch the popular ear and to lodge in
the memory. While some of his work seems humorous to us, it would not have
made that impression on the early Puritans. At the same time, we must not
rely on verse like this for our understanding of their outlook on life and
death. Beside Wigglesworth's lines we should place the epitaph, "Reserved
for a Glorious Resurrection," composed by the great orthodox Puritan
clergyman, Cotton Mather (p. 46), for his own infant, which died unbaptized
when four days old. It is well to remember that both the Puritans and their
clergy had a quiet way of believing that God had reserved to himself the
final interpretation of his own word.
ANNE BRADSTREET (1612-1672).--Colonial New England's best poet, or "The
Tenth Muse," as she was called by her friends, was a daughter of the
Puritan governor, Thomas Dudley, and became the wife of another Puritan
governor, Simon Bradstreet, with whom she came to New England in 1630.
Although she was born before the death of Shakespeare, she seems never to
have studied the works of that great dramatist. Her models were what Milton
called the "fantastics," a school of poets who mistook for manifestations
of poetic power, far-fetched and strained metaphors, oddities of
expression, remote comparisons, conceits, and strange groupings of thought.
She had especially studied Sylvester's paraphrase of _The Divine Weeks and
Works_ of the French poet Du Bartas, and probably also the works of poets
like George Herbert (1593-1633), of the English fantastic school. This
paraphrase of Du Bartas was published in a folio of 1215 pages, a few years
before Mrs. Bradstreet came to America. This book shows the taste which
prevailed in England in the latter part of the first third of the
seventeenth century, before Milton came into the ascendency. The fantastic
comparison between the "Spirit Eternal," brooding upon chaos, and a hen, is
shown in these lines from Du Bartas:--
"Or as a Hen that fain would hatch a brood
(Some of her own, some of adoptive blood)
Sits close thereon, and with her lively heat,
Of yellow-white balls, doth live birds beget:
Even in such sort seemed the Spirit Eternal
To brood upon this Gulf with care paternal."
A contemporary critic thought that he was giving her early work high praise
when he called her "a right Du Bartas girl." One of her early poems is _The
Four Elements_, where Fire, Air, Earth, and Water
"... did contest
Which was the strongest, noblest, and the best,
Who was of greatest use and mightiest force."
Such a debate could never be decided, but the subject was well suited to
the fantastic school of poets because it afforded an opportunity for much
ingenuity of argument and for far-fetched comparisons, which led nowhere.
Late in life, in her poem, _Contemplations_, she wrote some genuine poetry,
little marred by imitation of the fantastic school. Spenser seems to have
become her master in later years. No one without genuine poetic ability
could have written such lines as:--
"I heard the merry grasshopper then sing,
The black-clad cricket bear a second part,
They kept one tune, and played on the same string,
Seeming to glory in their little art."
These lines show both poetic ease and power:--
"The mariner that on smooth waves doth glide
Sings merrily, and steers his bark with ease,
As if he had command of wind and tide,
And now become great master of the seas."
The comparative excellence of her work in such an atmosphere and amid the
domestic cares incident to rearing eight children is remarkable.
NATHANIEL WARD, 1578?-1652
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF TITLE PAGE TO WARD'S
"SIMPLE COBBLER OF AGAWAM"]
In 1647 Nathaniel Ward, who had been educated for the law, but who
afterward became a clergyman, published a strange work known as _The Simple
Cobbler of Agawam, in America_ "willing," as the sub-title continues, "to
help mend his native country, lamentably tattered, both in the upper
leather and sole, with all the honest stitches he can take." He had been
assistant pastor at Agawam (Ipswich) until ill health caused him to resign.
He then busied himself in compiling a code of laws and in other writing
before he returned to England in 1647. The following two sentences from his
unique book show two points of the religious faith of the Puritans: (1) the
belief in a personal devil always actively seeking the destruction of
mankind, and (2) the assumption that the vitals of the "elect" are safe
from the mortal sting of sin.
"Satan is now in his passions, he feels his passion approaching, he loves
to fish in roiled waters. Though that dragon cannot sting the vitals of
the elect mortally, yet that Beelzebub can fly-blow their intellectuals
miserably."
He is often a bitter satirist, a sort of colonial Carlyle, as this attack
on woman shows:--
"I honor the woman that can honor herself with her attire; a good text
always deserves a fair margent; I am not much offended if I see a trim
far trimmer than she that wears it. In a word, whatever Christianity or
civility will allow, I can afford with London measure: but when I hear a
nugiperous gentledame inquire what dress the Queen is in this week: what
the nudiustertian fashion of the Court; I mean the very newest; with egg
to be in it in all haste, whatever it be; I look at her as the very
gizzard of a trifle, the product of a quarter of a cipher, the epitome of
nothing, fitter to be kicked, if she were of a kickable substance, than
either honored or humored."
He does not hesitate to coin a word. The preceding short selection
introduces us to "nugiperous" and "nudiustertian." Next, he calls the
women's tailor-made gowns "the very pettitoes of infirmity, the giblets of
perquisquilian toys."
The spirit of a reformer always sees work to be done, and Ward emphasized
three remedies for mid-seventeenth-century ills: (1) Stop toleration of
departure from religious truth; (2) banish the frivolities of women and
men; and (3) bring the civil war in England to a just end. In proportion to
the population, his _Simple Cobbler_, designed to mend human ways, was
probably as widely read as Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_ in later days.
In criticism, Ward deserves to be remembered for these two lines:--
"Poetry's a gift wherein but few excel;
He doth very ill that doth not passing well."
SAMUEL SEWALL, 1652-1730
There was born in 1652 at Bishopstoke, Hampshire, England, a boy who sailed
for New England when he was nine years old, and who became our greatest
colonial diarist. This was Samuel Sewall, who graduated from Harvard in
1671 and finally became chief justice of Massachusetts.
[Illustration: SAMUEL SEWALL]
His _Diary_ runs with some breaks from 1673 to 1729, the year before his
death. Good diaries are scarce in any literature. Those who keep them
seldom commit to writing many of the most interesting events and secrets of
their lives. This failing makes the majority of diaries and memoirs very
dry, but this fault cannot be found with Samuel Sewall. His _Diary_ will
more and more prove a mine of wealth to the future writers of our
literature, to our dramatists, novelists, poets, as well as to our
historians. The early chronicles and stories on which Shakespeare founded
many of his plays were no more serviceable to him than this _Diary_ may
prove to a coming American writer with a genius like Hawthorne's.
In Sewall's _Diary_ we at once feel that we are close to life. The
following entry brings us face to face with the children in a Puritan
household:--
"Nov. 6, 1692. Joseph threw a knop of brass and hit his sister Betty on
the forehead so as to make it bleed and swell; upon which, and for his
playing at Prayer-time, and eating when Return Thanks, I whipped him
pretty smartly. When I first went in (called by his Grandmother) he
sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind the head of the cradle:
which gave me the sorrowful remembrance of Adam's carriage."
Sewall was one of the seven judges who sentenced nineteen persons to be put
to death for witchcraft at Salem. After this terrible delusion had passed,
he had the manliness to rise in church before all the members, and after
acknowledging "the blame and shame of his decision," call for "prayers that
God who has an unlimited authority would pardon that sin."
Sewall's _Diary_ is best known for its faithful chronicle of his courtship
of Mrs. Catharine Winthrop. Both had been married twice before, and both
had grown children. He was sixty-nine and she fifty-six. No record of any
other Puritan courtship so unique as this has been given to the world. He
began his formal courtship of Mrs. Winthrop, October 1, 1720. His _Diary_
contains records of each visit, of what they said to each other, of the
Sermons, cake, and gingerbread that he gave her, of the healths that he
drank to her, the lump of sugar that she gave him, of how they "went into
the best room, and clos'd the shutters."
"Nov. 2. Gave her about 1/2 pound of sugar almonds, cost 3 shillings per
[pound]. Carried them on Monday. She seem'd pleas'd with them, ask'd what
they cost. Spake of giving her a hundred pounds per annum if I died
before her. Ask'd her what sum she would give me, if she should die
first?"
"Monday, Nov. 7. I went to Mad. Winthrop; found her rocking her little
Katy in the cradle. I excused my coming so late (near eight). She set me
an arm'd chair and cushion; and so the cradle was between her arm'd chair
and mine. Gave her the remnant of my almonds. She did not eat of them as
before.... The fire was come to one short brand besides the block, which
brand was set up in end; at last it fell to pieces and no recruit was
made.... Took leave of her.... Her dress was not so clean as sometime it
had been. Jehovah jireh!"
Acute men have written essays to account for the aristocratic Mrs.
Winthrop's refusal of Chief-Justice Sewall. Some have said that it was due
to his aversion to slavery and to his refusal to allow her to keep her
slaves. This episode is only a small part of a rich storehouse. The greater
part of the _Diary_ contains only the raw materials of literature, yet some
of it is real literature, and it ranks among the great diaries of the
world.
COTTON MATHER, 1663-1728
[Illustration: COTTON MATHER]
LIFE AND PERSONALITY.--Cotton Mather, grandson of the Rev. John Cotton (p.
14), and the most distinguished of the old type of Puritan clergymen, was
born in Boston and died in his native city, without ever having traveled a
hundred miles from it. He entered Harvard at the age of eleven, and took
the bachelor's degree at fifteen. His life shows such an overemphasis of
certain Puritan traits as almost to presage the coming decline of clerical
influence. He says that at the age of only seven or eight he not only
composed forms of prayer for his schoolmates, but also obliged them to
pray, although some of them cuffed him for his pains. At fourteen he began
a series of fasts to crucify the flesh, increase his holiness, and bring
him nearer to God.
He endeavored never to waste a minute. In his study, where he often worked
sixteen hours a day, he had in large letters the sign, "BE SHORT," to greet
the eyes of visitors. The amount of writing which he did almost baffles
belief. His published works, numbering about four hundred, include sermons,
essays, and books. During all of his adult life, he also preached in the
North Church of Boston.
He was a religious "fantastic" (p. 40), that is, he made far-fetched
applications of religious truth. A tall man suggested to him high
attainments in Christianity; washing his hands, the desirability of a clean
heart.
Although Cotton Mather became the most famous clergyman of colonial New
England, he was disappointed in two of his life's ambitions. He failed to
become president of Harvard and to bring New England back in religious
matters to the first halcyon days of the colony. On the contrary, he lived
to see Puritan theocracy suffer a great decline. His fantastic and strained
application of religious truth, his overemphasis of many things, and
especially his conduct in zealously aiding and abetting the Salem
witchcraft murders, were no mean factors in causing that decline.
His intentions were certainly good. He was an apostle of altruism, and he
tried to improve each opportunity for doing good in everyday life. He
trained his children to do acts of kindness for other children. His _Essays
to Do Good_ were a powerful influence on the life of Benjamin Franklin.
Cotton Mather would not have lived in vain if he had done nothing else
except to help mold Franklin for the service of his country; but this is
only one of Mather's achievements. We must next pass to his great work in
literature.
THE MAGNALIA.--This "prose epic of New England Puritanism," the most famous
of Mather's many works, is a large folio volume entitled _Magnalia Christi
Americana: or the Ecclesiastical History of New England_. It was published
in London in 1702, two years after Dryden's death.
The book is a remarkable compound of whatever seemed to the author most
striking in early New England history. His point of view was of course
religious. The work contains a rich store of biography of the early clergy,
magistrates, and governors, of the lives of eleven of the clerical
graduates of Harvard, of the faith, discipline, and government of the New
England churches, of remarkable manifestations of the divine providence,
and of the "Way of the Lord" among the churches and the Indians.
We may to-day turn to the _Magnalia_ for vivid accounts of early New
England life. Mather has a way of selecting and expressing facts in such a
way as to cause them to lodge in the memory. These two facts about John
Cotton give us a vivid impression of the influence of the early clergy:--
"The keeper of the inn where he did use to lodge, when he came to Derby,
would profanely say to his companions, that he wished Mr. Cotton were
gone out of his house, for he was not able to swear while that man was
under his roof....
"The Sabbath he began the evening before, for which keeping of the
Sabbath from evening to evening he wrote arguments before his coming to
New England; and I suppose 'twas from his reason and practice that the
Christians of New England have generally done so too."
We read that the daily vocation of Thomas Shepard, the first pastor at
Cambridge, Massachusetts, was, to quote Mather's noble phrase, "_A
Trembling Walk with God_" He speaks of the choleric disposition of Thomas
Hooker, the great Hartford clergyman, and says it was "useful unto him,"
because "he had ordinarily as much government of his choler as a man has of
a mastiff dog in a chain; he 'could let out his dog, and pull in his dog,
as he pleased.'" Some of Mather's prose causes modern readers to wonder if
he was not a humorist. He says that a fire in the college buildings in some
mysterious way influenced the President of Harvard to shorten one of his
long prayers, and gravely adds, "that if the devotions had held three
minutes longer, the Colledge had been irrecoverably laid in ashes." One
does not feel sure that Mather saw the humor in this demonstration of
practical religion. It is also doubtful whether he is intentionally
humorous in his most fantastic prose, such, for instance, as his likening
the Rev. Mr. Partridge to the bird of that name, who, because he "had no
defence neither of beak nor claw," took "a flight over the ocean" to escape
his ecclesiastical hunters, and finally "took wing to become a bird of
paradise, along with the winged seraphim of heaven."
Such fantastic conceits, which for a period blighted the literature of the
leading European nations, had their last great exponent in Cotton Mather.
Minor writers still indulge in these conceits, and find willing readers
among the uneducated, the tired, and those who are bored when they are
required to do more than skim the surface of things. John Seccomb, a
Harvard graduate of 1728, the year in which Mather died, then gained fame
from such lines as:--
"A furrowed brow,
Where corn might grow,"
but the best prose and poetry have for a long time won their readers for
other qualities. Even the taste of the next generation showed a change, for
Cotton Mather's son, Samuel, noted as a blemish his father's "straining for
far-fetched and dear-bought hints." Cotton Mather's most repellent habit to
modern readers is his overloading his pages with quotations in foreign
languages, especially in Latin. He thus makes a pedantic display of his
wide reading.
He is not always accurate in his presentation of historical or biographical
matter, but in spite of all that can be said against the _Magnalia_, it is
a vigorous presentation of much that we should not willingly let die. In
fact, when we read the early history of New England, we are frequently
getting from the _Magnalia_ many things in changed form without ever
suspecting the source.
JONATHAN EDWARDS, 1703-1758
LIFE AND WRITINGS.--Jonathan Edwards, who ranks among the world's greatest
theologians and metaphysicians, was born in 1703 in East Windsor,
Connecticut. Like Cotton Mather, Edwards was precocious, entering Yale
before he was thirteen. The year previous to his going to college, he wrote
a paper on spiders, showing careful scientific observation and argument.
This paper has been called "one of the rarest specimens of precocious
scientific genius on record." At fourteen, he read Locke's _Essay on the
Human Understanding_, receiving from it, he says, higher pleasure "than the
most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from
some newly discovered treasure." Before he was seventeen, he had graduated
from Yale, and he had become a tutor there before he was twenty-one.
Like Dante, he had a Beatrice. Thinking of her, he wrote this prose hymn of
a maiden's love for the Divine Power:--
"They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that great
Being who made and rules the world, and there are certain seasons in
which this great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and
fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares
for anything except to meditate on Him, that she expects after a while to
be received up where He is, to be raised up out of the world and caught
up into heaven, being assured that He loves her too well to let her
remain at a distance from Him always. She will sometimes go about from
place to place singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy and
pleasure, 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"
[Illustration: MEMORIAL TABLET TO JONATHAN EDWARDS
(First Church, Northampton, Mass)]
Jonathan Edwards thus places before us Sarah Pierrepont, a New England
Puritan maiden. To note the similarity of thought between the Old Puritan
England and the New, let us turn to the maiden in Milton's Comus:--
"A thousand liveried angels lackey her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt,
And in clear dream and solemn vision,
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear,
Till oft converse with heav'nly habitants
Begin to cast a beam on th'outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence,
Till all be made immortal."
Unlike Dante, Edwards married his Beatrice at the age of seventeen. In
1727, the year of his marriage, he became pastor of the church in
Northampton, Massachusetts. With the aid of his wife, he inaugurated the
greatest religious revival of the century, known as the "Great Awakening,"
which spread to other colonial churches, crossed the ocean, and stimulated
Wesley to call sinners to repentance.
Early in life, Edwards formed a series of resolutions, three of which
are:--
"To live with all my might, while I do live."
"Never to do anything, which, if I should see in another, I should count a
just occasion to despise him for, or to think any way the more meanly of
him."
"Never, henceforward, till I die, to act as if I were any way my own, but
entirely and altogether God's."
He earnestly tried to keep these resolutions until the end. After a
successful pastorate of twenty-three years at Northampton, the church
dismissed him for no fault of his own.
Like Dante, he was driven into exile, and he went from Northampton to the
frontier town of Stockbridge, where he remained for seven years as a
missionary to the Indians. His wife and daughters did their utmost to add
to the family income, and some contributions were sent him from Scotland,
but he was so poor that he wrote his books on the backs of letters and on
the blank margins cut from newspapers. His fame was not swallowed up in the
wilderness. Princeton College called him to its presidency in 1757. He died
in that office in 1758, after less than three months' service in his new
position. His wife was still in Stockbridge when he passed away. "Tell
her," he said to his daughter, "that the uncommon union which has so long
subsisted between us has been of such a nature as I trust is spiritual, and
therefore will continue forever." In September of the same year she came to
lie beside him in the graveyard at Princeton.
In 1900, the church that had dismissed him one hundred and fifty years
before placed on its walls a bronze tablet in his memory, with the noble
inscription from _Malachi_ ii., 6.
As a writer, Jonathan Edwards won fame in three fields. He is (1) America's
greatest metaphysician, (2) her greatest theologian, and (3) a unique
poetic interpreter of the universe as a manifestation of the divine love.
His best known metaphysical work is _The Freedom of the Will_ (1754). The
central point of this work is that the will is determined by the strongest
motive, that it is "repugnant to reason that one act of the will should
come into existence without a cause." He boldly says that God is free to do
only what is right. Edwards emphasizes the higher freedom, gained through
repeated acts of the right kind, until both the inclination and the power
to do wrong disappear.
As a theologian, America has not yet produced his superior. His _Treatise
concerning the Religious Affections_, his account of the Great Awakening,
called _Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God_, and _Thoughts on
the Revival_, as well as his more distinctly technical theological works,
show his ability in this field. Unfortunately, he did not rise superior to
the Puritan custom of preaching about hell fire. He delivered on that
subject a sermon which causes modern readers to shudder; but this, although
the most often quoted, is the least typical of the man and his writings.
Those in search of really typical statements of his theology will find them
in such specimens as, "God and real existence is the same. God is and there
is nothing else." He was a theological idealist, believing that all the
varied phenomena of the universe are "constantly proceeding from God, as
light from the sun." Such statements suggest Shelley's lines, which tell
how
"... the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear."
Dr. Allen, Edwards's biographer and critic, and a careful student of his
unpublished, as well as of his published, writings, says, "He was at his
best and greatest, most original and creative, when he described the divine
love." Such passages as the following, and also the one quoted on page 51,
show this quality:--
"When we behold the fragrant rose and lily, we see His love and purity.
So the green trees and fields and singing of birds are the emanations of
His infinite joy and benignity. The easiness and naturalness of trees and
vines are shadows of His beauty and loveliness."
His favorite text was, "I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the
valleys," and his favorite words were "sweet and bright."
ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE PERIOD
The great English writers between the colonization of Jamestown in 1607 and
the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754 are: (1) JOHN MILTON
(1608-1674), the great poetic spokesman of Puritan England, whose _Comus_
is addressed to those, who:--
"... by due steps aspire
To lay their just hands on that golden key
That opes the palace of eternity,"
whose _Sonnets_ breathe a purposeful prayer to live this life as ever in
his great Taskmaster's eye, and whose _Paradise Lost_ is the colossal epic
of the loss of Eden through sin; (2) JOHN BUNYAN (1628-1688), whose
_Pilgrim's Progress_ addressed itself in simple, earnest English to each
individual human being, telling him what he must do to escape the City of
Destruction and to reach the City of All Delight; (3) JOHN DRYDEN
(1631-1700), a master in the field of satiric and didactic verse and one of
the pioneers in the field of modern prose criticism; (4) ALEXANDER POPE
(1688-1744), another poet of the satiric and didactic school, who exalted
form above matter, and wrote polished couplets which have been models for
so many inferior poets; (5) the essayists, RICHARD STEELE (1672-1729) and
JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719), the latter being especially noted for the easy,
flowing prose of his papers in the _Spectator_; (6) JONATHAN SWIFT
(1667-1745), a master of prose satire, whose _Gulliver's Travels_ has not
lost its fascination; (7) DANIEL DEFOE (1661?-1731) whose _Robinson Crusoe_
continues to increase in popularity; (8) SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689-1761), and
HENRY FIELDING (1707-1754), the two great mid-eighteenth-century novelists.
The colonial literature of this period was influenced only in a very minor
degree by the work of these men, for a generation usually passed before the
influence of contemporary English authors appeared in American literature.
In the next chapter, we shall see evidences of the influence of Pope.
Benjamin Franklin will tell us how Bunyan and Addison were his teachers,
and the early fiction will show its indebtedness to the work of Samuel
Richardson.
LEADING HISTORICAL FACTS
Virginia and Massachusetts produced the most of our colonial literature.
There were, however, thirteen colonies stretched along the seaboard from
Georgia (1733), the last to be founded, to Canada. Although these colonies
were established under different grants or charters, and although some had
more liberty and suffered less from the interference of England than
others, it is nevertheless true that every colony was a school for a
self-governing democracy. No colonies elsewhere in the world had the same
amount of liberty. This period was a necessary preparation for the coming
republic.
We must not suppose that there was complete liberty in those days. Such a
state has not been reached even in the twentieth century. The early
government of Virginia was largely aristocratic; that of Massachusetts,
theocratic. Virginia persecuted the Puritans. The early settlers of
Massachusetts drove out Roger Williams and hanged Quakers. New York
persecuted those who did not join the Church of England. The central truth,
however, is that these thirteen colonies were making the greatest of all
world experiments in democracy and liberty.
The important colony of New Netherland (New York) was settled by the Dutch
early in the seventeenth century. They established an aristocracy with
great landed estates along the Hudson. The student of literature is
specially interested in this colony because Washington Irving (p. 112) has
invested it with a halo of romance. He shows us the sturdy Knickerbockers,
the Van Cortlands, the Van Dycks, the Van Wycks, and other chivalrous Dutch
burghers, sitting in perfect silence, puffing their pipes, and thinking of
nothing for hours together in those "days of simplicity and sunshine." For
literary reasons it is well that this was not made an English colony until
the Duke of York took possession of it in 1664.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the colonists in the middle and
northern part of the country divided their energies almost equally between
trade and agriculture. At the South, agriculture was the chief occupation
and tobacco and rice were the two leading staples. These were produced
principally by the labor of negro slaves. There were also many indentured
servants at the South, where the dividing lines between the different
classes were most strongly marked.
Up to 1700 the history of each colony is practically that of a separate
unit. Almost all the colonies had trouble with Indians and royal governors.
Pirates, rapacious politicians, religious matters, or witchcraft were
sometimes sources of disturbance. All knew the hard labor and the
privations involved in subduing the wilderness and making permanent
settlements in a new land. History tells of the abandonment of many other
colonies and of the subjugation of many other races, but no difficulty and
no foe daunted this Anglo-Saxon stock.
In 1700 the population of New England was estimated at about one hundred
and ten thousand. In 1754, the beginning of the French and Indian War,
Connecticut alone had that number, while all New England probably had at
this time nearly four hundred thousand. The middle colonies began the
eighteenth century with about fifty-nine thousand and grew by the middle of
the century to about three hundred and fifty-five thousand. During the same
period, the southern group increased from about ninety thousand to six
hundred thousand. By 1750 the thirteen colonies probably had a total
population of nearly fourteen hundred thousand. Since no census was taken
until 1790, these figures are only approximately correct.
Such development serves to show the trend of coming events. This remarkable
increase in population soon caused numbers to go farther west. This
movement resulted in collision with the French, who were at this time
holding the central part of the country, from the Gulf into Canada. One
other result followed. The colonies began to seem valuable to England
because they furnished a market for English manufactures and a carrying
trade for English ships. The previous comparative insignificance of the
colonies and the trouble in England had served to protect them, but their
trade had now assumed a proportion that made the mother country realize
what a valuable commercial asset she would have if she regulated the
colonies in her own interest.
SUMMARY
In this chapter we have traced the history of American colonial literature
from the foundation of the Jamestown Colony until 1754. Before 1607
Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare had written, and before 1620 the King
James version of the _Bible_ had been produced. England had, therefore, a
wonderful literature before her colonies came to America. They were the
heirs of all that the English race had previously accomplished; and they
brought to these shores an Elizabethan initiative, ingenuity, and
democratic spirit.
The Virginia colony was founded, as colonies usually are, for a commercial
reason. The Virginians and the other southern colonists lived more by
agriculture, were more widely scattered, had fewer schools, more slaves,
and less town life than the New Englanders. Under the influence of a
commanding clergy, common schools, and the stimulus of town life, the New
England colony produced more literature.
The chief early writers of Virginia are: (1) Captain John Smith, who
described the country and the Indians, and gave to literature the story of
Pocahontas, thereby disclosing a new world to the imagination of writers;
(2) William Strachey, who outranks contemporary colonial writers in
describing the wrath of the sea, and who may even have furnished a
suggestion to Shakespeare for _The Tempest_; (3) two poets, (a) George
Sandys, who translated part of Ovid, and (b) the unknown author of the
elegy on Nathaniel Bacon; and (4) Robert Beverly and William Byrd, who gave
interesting descriptions of early Virginia.
The chief colonial writers of New England are: (1) William Bradford, whose
_History of Plymouth Plantation_ tells the story of the first Pilgrim
colony; (2) John Winthrop, who wrote in his _Journal_ the early history of
the Massachusetts Bay Colony; (3) the poets, including (a) the translators
of the _Bay Psalm Book_, the first volume of so-called verse printed in the
British American colonies, (b) Wigglesworth, whose _Day of Doom_, was a
poetic exposition of Calvinistic theology, (c) Anne Bradstreet, who wrote a
small amount of genuine poetry, after she had passed from the influence of
the "fantastic" school of poets; (4) Nathaniel Ward, the author of _The
Simple Cobbler of Agawam_, an attempt to mend human ways; (5) Samuel
Sewall, New England's greatest colonial diarist; (6) Cotton Mather, the
most famous clerical writer, whose _Magnalia_ is a compound of early
colonial history and biography, sometimes written in a "fantastic" style;
(7) Jonathan Edwards, America's greatest metaphysician and theologian, who
maintained that the action of the human will is determined by the strongest
motive, that the substance of this universe is nothing but "the divine
Idea," communicated to human consciousness, and who could invest spiritual
truth with the beauty of the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the valleys.
The New England colonist came to America because of religious feeling. His
religion was to him a matter of eternal life or eternal death. From the
modern point of view, this religion may seem too inflexibly stern, too
little illumined by the spirit of love, too much darkened by the shadow of
eternal punishment, but unless that religion had communicated something of
its own dominating inflexibility to the colonist, he would never have
braved the ocean, the wilderness, the Indians; he would never have flung
the gauntlet down to tyranny at Lexington and Concord.
The greatest lesson taught by colonial literature, by men like Bradford,
Winthrop, Edwards, and the New England clergy in general, is moral heroism,
the determination to follow the shining path of the Eternal over the wave
and through the forest to a new temple of human liberty. Their aspiration,
endeavor, suffering, accomplishment, should strengthen our faith in the
worth of those spiritual realities which are not quoted in the markets of
the world, but which alone possess imperishable value.
REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
HISTORICAL
ENGLISH HISTORY.--In either Gardiner's _Students' History of England_,
Walker's _Essentials in English History_, Andrews's _History of England_,
or Cheney's _Short History of England_, read the chapters dealing with the
time of Elizabeth, James I., Charles I., the Commonwealth, Charles II.,
James II., William and Mary, Anne, George I. and II. A work like Halleck's
_History of English Literature_, covering these periods, should be read.
AMERICAN HISTORY.--Read the account from the earliest times to the outbreak
of the French and Indian War in any of the following:--
Thwaites's _The Colonists_, 1492-1750.
Fisher's _Colonial Era_.
Lodge's _A Short History of the English Colonies in America_.
Doyle's _The English in America_.
Hart's _Essentials in American History_.
Channing's _A Students' History of the United States_.
Eggleston's _A Larger History of the United States of America_.
James and Sanford's _American History_.
For an account of special colonies, consult the volumes in _American
Commonwealths_ series, and also,
Fiske's _Beginnings of New England_, _The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in
America_, _Old Virginia and Her Neighbors_.
LITERARY
Tyler's _A History of American Literature during the Colonial Time_, 2
vols.
Otis's _American Verse_, 1625-1807.
Richardson's _American Literature_, 2 vols.
Trent's _A History of American Literature_, 1607-1865.
Wendell's _History of Literature in America_.
_Narratives of Early Virginia_, edited by Tyler.
Bradford's _History of Plymouth Plantation_. New edition, edited by Davis.
(Scribner, 1908.)
Winthrop's _Journal_ ("History of New England"). New edition, edited by
Hosmer, 2 vols., (Scribner, 1908.)
Chamberlain's _Samuel Sewall and the World He Lived in_.
Lodge's "A Puritan Pepys" (Sewall) in _Studies in History_.
Campbell's _Anne Bradstreet and her Time_.
Twichell's _John Winthrop_.
Walker's _Thomas Hooker_.
Wendell's _Life of Cotton Mather_.
Allen's _Life of Jonathan Edwards_.
Gardiner's _Jonathan Edwards, a Retrospect_.
SUGGESTED READINGS
The following volumes of selections from American Literature will be
referred to either by the last name of the author, or, if there are more
authors than one, by the initials of the last names:--
Cairns's _Selections from Early American Writers_, 1607-1800. (Macmillan.)
Trent and Wells's _Colonial Prose and Poetry_, 3 vols., 1607-1775.
(Crowell.)
Stedman and Hutchinson's _A Library of American Literature_, 1608-1890, 11
vols. (Benjamin.)
Carpenter's _American Prose Selections_. (Macmillan.)
Trent's _Southern Writers: Selections in Prose and Verse_. (Macmillan.)
At least one of the selections indicated for each author should be read.
JOHN SMITH.--The Beginnings of Jamestown (from _A True Relation of
Virginia_, 1608); The Religious Observances of the Indians (from _A Map of
Virginia_, published in 1612), Cairns, pp. 2-4, 10-14; The Romance of
Pocahontas (from _The General History of Virginia_, 1624), S. & H., Vol.
I., pp. 10-17; T. & W., Vol. I., pp. 12-22.
WILLIAM STRACHEY.--Read the selection from _A True Repertory of the Wrack
and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates_, in Cairns, 19-26.
POETRY IN THE VIRGINIA COLONY.--For George Sandys, see pp. 51-58 in Vol. I.
of Tyler's _A History of American Literature during the Colonial Time_.
For the elegy on the death of Nathaniel Bacon, see Tyler, Vol. I., 78, 79;
Cairns, 185-188; T. & W., II., 166-169; S. & H., I., 456-458; Trent, 12-14.
DESCRIPTIONS OF VIRGINIA.--The best selection from Beverly's _History and
Present State of Virginia_ may be found in T. & W., II., 354-360. See also
Trent, 16-18; S. & H., II., 270-272.
For selections from Byrd's _History of the Dividing Line_, see Cairns,
_passim_, 259-272; Trent, 19-22; T. & W., III., 23-32; S. & H., II.,
302-305.
WILLIAM BRADFORD.--The Voyage of the Mayflower, Cairns, 31-35; Early
Difficulties of the Pilgrim Fathers, T. & W., I., 42-45; The Communal
System Abandoned, T. & W., I., 46-49; The Landing of the Pilgrims and their
Settlement at Plymouth, S. & H., L, 124-130.
JOHN WINTHROP.--Twenty-five entries from his _Journal_ or _History of New
England_ are given in Cairns, 44-48, and fourteen in T. & W., I., 99-105.
His famous speech on _Liberty_ may be found in T. & W., I., 106-116; in S.
& H., I., 302-303; and in Cairns, 50-53.
EARLY NEW ENGLAND VERSE.--The selection in the text (p. 38) from the _Bay
Psalm Book_ is sufficient.
For Wigglesworth's _Day of Doom_, see Cairns, 166-177; T. & W., II., 54-60;
S. & H., _passim_, II., 3-16.
Anne Bradstreet's best poem, _Contemplations_, may be found in Cairns,
154-162; T. & W., I., 280-283; S. & H., I., 314, 315.
WARD'S SIMPLE COBBLER OF AGAWAM.--His view of religious toleration is given
in Cairns, 113-118, and T. & W., I., 253-259. For the satiric essay on
women's fashions, see Cairns, 119-124; T. & W., I., 260-266; S. & H. I.,
276-280.
SAMUEL SEWALL.--Cairns, 240-243, gives from the _Diary_ the events of a
month. Notes on the Witchcraft Persecution and his prayer of repentance for
"the blame and shame of it" may be found in T. & W., II., 294-296. The
record of his courtship of Madam Winthrop is given in Cairns, 245-249; T. &
W., II., 304-319; and S. & H., II., 192-200. For his early anti-slavery
tract, see T. & W., II., 320-326; S. & H., II., 189-192.
COTTON MATHER.--His fantastic life of Mr. Ralph Partridge from the
_Magnalia_ is given in Cairns, 228, 229. The interesting story of the New
England argonaut, Sir William Phips, may be found in T. & W., II., 257-266,
and in S. & H., II., 143-149. One of his best biographies is that of Thomas
Hooker, S. & H., II., 149-156.
JONATHAN EDWARDS.--For a specimen of an almost poetic exposition of the
divine love, read the selection in Cairns, 280, 281; T. & W., III., 148,
149; S. & H., II., 374; and Carpenter, 16, 17, beginning, "I am the Rose of
Sharon and the Lily of the valleys." Selections from his _Freedom of the
Will_ are given in Cairns. 291-294; T. & W., III., 185-187; and S. & H.,
II., 404-407 (the best).
QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Is Captain John Smith more remarkable for chronicling what passed before
his senses or for explaining what he saw? How does his account of the
Indians (p. 18 of this text) compare with modern accounts? Is he apparently
a novice, or somewhat skilled in writing prose? Does he seem to you to be a
romancer or a narrator of a plain unvarnished tale?
Compare Strachey's storm at sea with _Act I._ of Shakespeare's _Tempest_.
In what part of this _Act_ and under what circumstances does he mention
"the still-vex'd Bermoothes"?
Compare the ability of the three great early colonizers, Smith, Bradford,
and Winthrop, in writing narrative prose. Smith's story of Pocahontas is
easily accessible. Those who can find the complete works of Bradford and
Winthrop may select from Bradford for comparison his story of Squanto, the
Pilgrims' tame Indian. Winthrop's _Journal_ contains many specimens of
brief narrative, such as the story of the voyage across the Atlantic from
March 29 to June 14, 1630; of Winthrop's losing himself in the wood,
October 11, 1631; of shipwreck on the Isle of Shoals, August 16, 1635; of
an indentured servant, March 8, 1636; of an adventure with Indians, July
20-30, August 24, and October 8, 1636. Those without opportunity to consult
the works of Bradford and Winthrop will find in the books of selections
sufficient material for comparison.
Is brevity or prolixity a quality of these early narrators? What English
prose written before 1640 is superior to the work of these three men? Why
is it especially important for Americans to know something of their
writings? What advance in prose narrative do you find in Beverly and Byrd?
What characteristic of a famous English prose writer of the nineteenth
century is noticeable in Ward's essay on fashions?
Why could fine poetry not be reasonably expected in early Virginia and New
England? What are some of the Calvinistic tenets expounded in
Wigglesworth's _Day of Doom?_ Choose the best two short selections of
colonial poetry.
What are some of the qualifications of a good diarist? Which of these do
you find in the _Diary_ of Samuel Sewall?
Point out some of the fantastic prose expressions of Cotton Mather. Compare
his narrative of Captain Phips with the work of Smith, Bradford, and
Winthrop, on the one hand, and of Beverly and Byrd, on the other.
Compare the theology in Edwards's "Rose of Sharon" selection (p. 54) with
that in Wigglesworth's _Day of Doom._ Why may this selection from Edwards
be called a "poetic exposition of the divine love"? What is his view of the
freedom of the will?
CHAPTER II
THE EMERGENCE OF A NATION
PROGRESS TOWARD NATIONALITY.--The French and Indian War, which began in
1754, served its purpose in making the colonists feel that they were one
people. At this time most of them were living on the seacoast from Georgia
to Maine, and had not yet even crossed the great Appalachian range of
mountains. The chief men of one colony knew little of the leaders in the
other colonies. This war made George Washington known outside of Virginia.
There was not much interchange of literature between the two leading
colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts. Prior to this time, the other
colonies had not produced much that had literary value. No national
literature could be written until the colonists were welded together.
The French and Indian War, which decided whether France or England was to
be supreme in America, exposed the colonists to a common danger. They
fought side by side against the French and Indians, and learned that the
defeat of one was the defeat of all. After a desperate struggle France
lost, and the Anglo-Saxon race was dominant on the new continent. By the
treaty of Paris, signed in 1763, England became the possessor of Canada and
the land east of the Mississippi River.
THE REVOLUTION.--All of the colonies had been under English rule, although
they had in large part managed in one way or another to govern
themselves. At the close of the French and Indian War, the colonists had
not thought of breaking away from England, although they had learned the
lesson of union against a common foe. George III. came to the throne in
1760. By temperament he was unusually adapted to play his part in
changing the New World's history. He was determined to rule according to
his own personal inclinations. He dominated his cabinet and controlled
Parliament by bribery. He decided that the American colonies should feel
the weight of his authority, and in 1763 his prime minister, George
Grenville, undertook to execute measures in restraint of colonial trade.
Numbers of commodities, like tobacco, for instance, could not be traded
with France or Spain or Holland, but must be sent to England. If there
was any profit to be made in selling goods to foreign nations, England
would make that profit. He also planned to tax the colonists and to
quarter British troops among them. These measures aroused the colonies
to armed resistance and led to the Revolutionary War, which began in
1775.
Freneau (p. 96), a poet of the Revolution, thus expresses in verse some of
these events:--
"When a certain great king, whose initial is G,
Shall force stamps upon paper and folks to drink tea;
When these folks burn his tea and stampt paper like stubble,
You may guess that this king is then coming to trouble."
THE ESSAYISTS
The pen helped to prepare the way for the sword and to arouse and prolong
the enthusiasm of those who had taken arms. Before the battle of Lexington
(1775), writers were busy on both sides of the dispute, for no great
movement begins without opposition. Many colonists did not favor resistance
to England. Even at the time of the first battle, comparatively few wished
absolute separation from the mother country.
THOMAS PAINE (1737-1809) was an Englishman who came to America in 1774 and
speedily made himself master of colonial thought and feeling. Early in 1776
he published a pamphlet entitled _Common Sense,_ which advocated complete
political independence of England. The sledge hammer blows which he struck
hastened the _Declaration of Independence._ Note the energy, the
directness, and the employment of the concrete method in the following:--
[Illustration: THOMAS PAINE]
"But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon
her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war
upon their families; wherefore, the assertion, if true, turns to her
reproach.... This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted
lovers of civil and religious liberty from _every part_ of Europe. Hither
have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the
cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same
tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their
descendants still."
In the latter part of 1776 Washington wrote, "If every nerve is not
strained to recruit the new army with all possible expedition, I think the
game is pretty nearly up." In those gloomy days, sharing the privations of
the army, Thomas Paine wrote the first number of an irregularly issued
periodical, known as the _Crisis_, beginning:--
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the
sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his
country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man
and woman."
Some have said that the pen of Thomas Paine was worth more to the cause of
liberty than twenty thousand men. In the darkest hours he inspired the
colonists with hope and enthusiasm. Whenever the times seemed to demand
another number of the _Crisis_, it was forthcoming. Sixteen of these
appeared during the progress of the struggle for liberty. He had an almost
Shakespearean intuition of what would appeal to the exigencies of each
case. After the Americans had triumphed, he went abroad to aid the French,
saying, "Where Liberty is not, there is my home." He died in America in
1809. He is unfortunately more remembered for his skeptical _Age of Reason_
than for his splendid services to the cause of liberty.
[Illustration: THOMAS JEFFERSON]
THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826), the third President of the United States,
wrote much political prose and many letters, which have been gathered into
ten large volumes. Ignoring these, he left directions that the words,
"Author of the Declaration of American Independence," should immediately
follow his name on his monument. No other American prose writer has, in an
equal number of words, yet surpassed this _Declaration of Independence_.
Its influence has encircled the world and modified the opinions of nations
as widely separated as the French and the Japanese.
Jefferson may have borrowed some of his ideas from _Magna Charta_
(1215) and the _Petition of Right_ (1628); he may have incorporated
in this _Declaration_ the yearnings that thousands of human souls had
already felt, but he voiced those yearnings so well that his utterances
have become classic. It has been said that he "poured the soul of the
continent" into that _Declaration_, but he did more than that. He poured
into it the soul of all freedom-loving humanity, and he was accepted as the
spokesman of the dweller on the Seine as enthusiastically as of the
revolutionists in America. Those who have misconstrued the meaning of his
famous expression, "All men are created equal" have been met with the
adequate reply, "No intelligent man has ever misconstrued it except
intentionally."
America has no _Beowulf_ celebrating the slaying of land-devastating
monsters, but she has in this _Declaration_ a deathless battle song against
the monsters that would throttle Liberty. Outside of Holy Writ, what words
are more familiar to our ears than these?--
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That,
to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Every student will find his comprehension of American literature aided by a
careful study of this _Declaration_. This trumpet-tongued declaration of
the fact that every man has an equal right with every other man to his own
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has served as an ideal to
inspire some of the best things in our literature. This ideal has not yet
been completely reached, but it is finding expression in every effort for
the social and moral improvements of our population. Jefferson went a step
beyond the old Puritans in maintaining that happiness is a worthy object of
pursuit. Modern altruists are also working on this line, demanding a fuller
moral and industrial liberty, and endeavoring to develop a more widespread
capacity for happiness.
ALEXANDER HAMILTON (1757-1804), because of his wonderful youthful
precocity, reminds us of Jonathan Edwards (p. 50). In 1774, at the age of
seventeen, Hamilton wrote in answer to a Tory who maintained that England
had given New York no charter of rights, and that she could not complain
that her rights had been taken away:--
"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old
parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam, in the
whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can
never be erased or obscured by mortal power."
[Illustration: ALEXANDER HAMILTON]
A profound student of American constitutional history says of Hamilton's
pamphlets: "They show great maturity, a more remarkable maturity than has
ever been exhibited by any other person, at so early an age, in the same
department of thought."
After the Americans were victorious in the war, Hamilton suggested that a
constitutional convention be called. For seven years this suggestion was
not followed, but in 1787 delegates met from various states and framed a
federal constitution to be submitted to the states for ratification.
Hamilton was one of the leading delegates. After the convention had
completed its work, it seemed probable that the states would reject the
proposed constitution. To win its acceptance, Hamilton, in collaboration
with JAMES MADISON (1751-1836) and JOHN JAY (1745-1829), wrote the famous
_Federalist_ papers. There were eighty-five of these, but Hamilton wrote
more than both of his associates together. These papers have been collected
into a volume, and to this day they form a standard commentary on our
Constitution. This work and Hamilton's eloquence before the New York
convention for ratification helped to carry the day for the Constitution
and to terminate a period of dissension which was tending toward anarchy.
THE ORATORS
There are times in the history of a nation when there is unusual need for
the orator to persuade, to arouse, and to encourage his countrymen. Many
influential colonists disapproved of the Revolution; they wrote against it
and talked against it. When the war progressed slowly, entailing not only
severe pecuniary loss but also actual suffering to the revolutionists, many
lost their former enthusiasm and were willing to have peace at any price.
At this period in our history the orator was as necessary as the soldier.
Orators helped to launch the Revolution, to continue the war, and, after it
was finished, to give the country united constitutional government. It will
be instructive to make the acquaintance of some of these orators and to
learn the secret of their power.
JAMES OTIS (1725-1783) was born in Massachusetts and educated at Harvard.
He studied literature for two years after he graduated and then became a
lawyer. He was appointed to the position of king's advocate-general, a
high-salaried office. There came an order from England, allowing the king's
officers to search the houses of Americans at any time on mere suspicion of
the concealment of smuggled goods. Otis resigned his office and took the
side of the colonists, attacking the constitutionality of a law that
allowed the right of unlimited search and that was really designed to
curtail the trade of the colonies. He had the advantage of many modern
orators in having something to say on his subject, in feeling deeply
interested in it, and in talking to people who were also interested in the
same thing. Without these three essentials, there cannot be oratory of the
highest kind. We can imagine the voice of Otis trembling with feeling as he
said in 1761:--
[Illustration: JAMES OTIS]
"Now one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom
of one's house. A man's house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he
is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be
declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege. Custom-house
officers may enter our houses, when they please; we are commanded to
permit their entry. Their menial servants may enter, may break locks,
bars, and everything in their way; and whether they break through malice
or revenge, no man, no court, can inquire."
We may to-day be more interested in other things than in the homes and
unrestricted trade of our colonial ancestors, but Otis was willing to give
up a lucrative office to speak for the rights of the humblest cottager. He,
like the majority of the orators of the Revolution, also possessed another
quality, often foreign to the modern orator. What this quality is will
appear in this quotation from his speech:--
"Let the consequences be what they will, I am determined to proceed. The
only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a gentleman or a man
are to sacrifice estate, ease, health, and applause, and even life, to
the sacred calls of his country. These manly sentiments, in private life,
make the good citizen; in public life, the patriot and the hero."
John Adams, who became the second President of the United States, listened
to this speech for five hours, and called Otis "a flame of fire." "Then and
there," said Adams, with pardonable exaggeration, "the child Independence
was born."
PATRICK HENRY (1736-1799), a young Virginia lawyer, stood before the First
Continental Congress, in 1774, saying:--
[Illustration: PATRICK HENRY]
"Where are your landmarks, your boundaries of Colonies? The distinctions
between Virginians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not
a Virginian, but an American."
These words had electrical effect on the minds of his listeners, and helped
to weld the colonies together. In 1775 we can hear him again speaking
before a Virginian Convention of Delegates:--
"Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope.
We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the
song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts....
"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of
experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.
And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the
conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years, to justify those
hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the
House? ...
"Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they
have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price
of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course
others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death."
It is hardly too much to say that these words have communicated to the
entire American nation an intenser desire for liberty, that their effect
has not yet passed away, and that they may during the coming centuries
serve to awaken Americans in many a crisis.
SAMUEL ADAMS (1722-1803), a Bostonian and graduate of Harvard, probably
gave his time in fuller measure to the cause of independence than any other
writer or speaker. For nine years he was a member of the Continental
Congress. When there was talk of peace between the colonies and the mother
country, he had the distinction of being one of two Americans for whom
England proclaimed in advance that there would be no amnesty granted. We
can seem to hear him in 1776 in the Philadelphia State House, replying to
the argument that the colonists should obey England, since they were her
children:--
[Illustration: SAMUEL ADAMS]
"Who among you, my countrymen, that is a father, would claim authority to
make your child a slave because you had nourished him in his infancy?"
After he had signed the _Declaration of Independence,_ he spoke to the
Pennsylvanians like a Puritan of old:--
"We have explored the temple of royalty, and found that the idol we have
bowed down to has eyes which see not, ears that hear not our prayer, and
a heart like the nether millstone. We have this day restored the
Sovereign, to whom alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven,
and with a propitious eye beholds His subjects assuming that freedom of
thought and dignity of self-direction which He bestowed on them."
These sentences plainly show the influence of biblical thought and diction.
A century before, this compound of patriot, politician, orator, and
statesman would also have been a clergyman.
An examination of these three typical orators of the Revolution will show
that they gained their power (1) from intense interest in their subject
matter, (2) from masterful knowledge of that matter, due either to
first-hand acquaintance with it or to liberal culture or to both, (3) from
the fact that the subject of their orations appealed forcibly to the
interest of that special time, (4) from their character and personality.
Most of what they said makes dry reading to-day, but we shall occasionally
find passages, like Patrick Henry's apotheosis of liberty, which speak to
the ear of all time and which have in them something of a Homeric or
Miltonic ring.
INCREASING INFLUENCE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION.--Not one of the great orators
of the Revolution was a clergyman. The power of the clergy in political
affairs was declining, while the legal profession was becoming more and
more influential. James Otis, Patrick Henry, Alexander Hamilton, and John
Jay (p. 71) were lawyers. Life was becoming more diversified, and there
were avenues other than theology attractive to the educated man. At the
same time, we must remember that the clergy have never ceased to be a
mighty power in American life. They were not silent or uninfluential during
the Revolution. Soon after the battle of Bunker Hill, John Adams wrote from
Philadelphia to his wife in Boston, asking, "Does Mr. Wibird preach against
oppression and other cardinal vices of the time? Tell him the clergy here
of every denomination, not excepting the Episcopalian, thunder and lighten
every Sabbath."
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1706-1790
[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN]
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND LIFE.--Franklin's _Autobiography_ stands first among
works of its kind in American literature. The young person who does not
read it misses both profit and entertainment. Some critics have called it
"the equal of Robinson Crusoe, one of the few everlasting books in the
English language." In this small volume, begun in 1771, Franklin tells us
that he was born in Boston in 1706, one of the seventeen children of a poor
tallow chandler, that his branch of the Franklin family had lived for three
hundred years or more in the village of Ecton, Northamptonshire, where the
head of the family, in Queen Mary's reign, read from an English _Bible_
concealed under a stool, while a child watched for the coming of the
officers. He relates how he attended school from the age of eight to ten,
when he had to leave to help his father mold and wick candles. His meager
schooling was in striking contrast to the Harvard education of Cotton
Mather and the Yale training of Jonathan Edwards, who was only three years
Franklin's senior. But no man reaches Franklin's fame without an education.
His early efforts to secure this are worth giving in his own language:--
"From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came
into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the _Pilgrim's
Progress_, my first collection was of John Bunyan's works in separate
little volumes.... Plutarch's _Lives_ there was in which I read
abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage. There
was also a book of De Foe's, called an _Essay on Projects_, and another
of Dr. Mather's, called _Essays to do Good_, which perhaps gave me a turn
of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events
of my life.... Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the
night."
He relates how he taught himself to write by reading and reproducing in his
own language the papers from Addison's _Spectator_. Franklin says that the
"little ability" in writing, developed through his self-imposed tasks, was
a principal means of his advancement in after life.
He learned the printer's trade in Boston, and ran away at the age of
seventeen to Philadelphia, where he worked at the same trade. Keith, the
proprietary governor, took satanic pleasure in offering to purchase a
printing outfit for the eighteen-year-old boy, to make him independent.
Keith sent the boy to London to purchase this outfit, assuring him that the
proper letters to defray the cost would be sent on the same ship. No such
letters were ever written, and the boy found himself without money three
thousand miles from home. By working at the printer's trade he supported
himself for eighteen months in London. He relates how his companions at the
press drank six pints of strong beer a day, while he proved that the
"Water-American," as he was called, was stronger than any of them. The
workmen insisted that he should contribute to the general fund for drink.
He refused, but so many things happened to his type whenever he left the
room that he came to the following conclusion: "Notwithstanding the
master's protection, I found myself oblig'd to comply and pay the money,
convinc'd of the folly of being on ill terms with those one is to live with
continually." Such comments on the best ways of dealing with human nature
are frequent in the _Autobiography_.