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A HISTORY OF AMERICAN
LITERATURE
BY
PERCY H. BOYNTON
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
AUTHOR OF "PRINCIPLES OF COMPOSITION," "LONDON IN ENGLISH
LITERATURE," EDITOR OF "AMERICAN POETRY"
GINN AND COMPANY
BOSTON · NEW YORK · CHICAGO · LONDON
ATLANTA · DALLAS · COLUMBUS · SAN FRANCISCO
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY PERCY H. BOYNTON
ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
419.11
_The Athenæum Press_
GINN AND COMPANY · PROPRIETORS ·
BOSTON · U.S.A.
PREFACE
The general purpose in the preparation of this book has been to
eliminate negligible detail and to subordinate or omit authors of minor
importance in order to stress the men and the movements that are most
significant in American intellectual history. The book has therefore
been written with a view to showing the drift of American thought as
illustrated by major writers or groups and as revealed by a careful
study of one or two cardinal works by each. In this sequence of thought
the growth of American self-consciousness and the changing ideals of
American patriotism have been kept in mind throughout. The attempt
is made to induce _study_ of representative classics and _extensive
reading_ of the American literature which illuminates the past of the
country--chiefly, of course, in reminiscent fiction, drama, and poetry.
As an aid to the student, there are appended to each chapter (except
the last three) topics and problems for study, and book lists which
summarize the output of each man, indicate available editions, and
point to the critical material which may be used as a supplement, but
not as a substitute, for first-hand study. This critical material
has been selected with a view, also, to suggesting books which might
reasonably be included in libraries of normal schools and colleges, as
well as in universities.
As further aids to the student, there have been included two
maps, three chronological charts, and, in an appendix, a brief
characterization of the American periodicals which have been most
significant in stimulating American authorship by providing a market
for fiction, poetry, and the essay.
In the writing of the book the author's chief obligation has naturally
been to the many university classes who have stimulated its
preparation, not only by their attention but by their free discussion.
Special acknowledgment is gratefully made to Mr. William W. Ellsworth
for a careful reading of all the manuscript and to Miss Marie
Gulbransen for the initial work in formulating the appendix on the
American magazines.
Acknowledgment is due to the publishers of _The Nation_ and _The New
Republic_ for portions of the chapters on Crèvecoeur, the Poetry of
the Revolution, Emerson, Lowell, Whitman, Sill, and Miller, which
originally appeared in these weeklies.
PERCY H. BOYNTON
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 1
II. THE EARLIEST VERSE 17
III. THE TRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 27
IV. JONATHAN EDWARDS AND BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 41
V. CRÈVECOEUR, THE "AMERICAN FARMER" 59
VI. THE POETRY OF THE REVOLUTION AND PHILIP FRENEAU 69
VII. THE EARLY DRAMA 89
VIII. CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN 100
IX. IRVING AND THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL 110
X. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 141
XI. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 158
XII. EDGAR ALLAN POE 173
XIII. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 190
XIV. RALPH WALDO EMERSON 199
XV. HENRY DAVID THOREAU 221
XVI. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 236
XVII. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 252
XVIII. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 267
XIX. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 282
XX. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE 299
XXI. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 310
XXII. SOME METROPOLITAN POETS 324
XXIII. THE POETRY OF THE SOUTH 343
XXIV. WALT WHITMAN 362
XXV. THE WEST AND MARK TWAIN 380
XXVI. THE WEST IN SILL AND MILLER 396
XXVII. THE RISE OF FICTION; WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 411
XXVIII. CONTEMPORARY DRAMA 437
XXIX. THE LATER POETRY 453
INDEX TO LEADING NINETEENTH-CENTURY PERIODICALS 487
INDEX 503
A HISTORY OF AMERICAN
LITERATURE
THE COLONIAL PERIOD
CHAPTER I
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
In its beginnings American literature differs from the literatures
of most other great nations; it was a transplanted thing. It sprang
in a way like Minerva, full-armed from the head of Jove,--Jove in
this case being England, and the armor being the heritage which the
average American colonist had secured in England before he crossed
the Atlantic. In contrast, Greek, Roman, French, German, English,
and the other less familiar literatures can all be more or less
successfully traced back to primitive conditions. Their early life was
interwoven with the growth of the language and the progress of a rude
civilization, and their earliest products which have come down to us
were not results of authorship as we know it to-day. They were either
folk poetry, composed perhaps and certainly enjoyed by the people in
groups and accompanied by group singing and dancing,--like the psalms
and the simpler ballads,--or they were the record of folk tradition,
slowly and variously developed through generations and finally
collected into a continuous story like the Iliad, the Æneid, the "Song
of Roland," the "Nibelungenlied," and "Beowulf." They were composed by
word of mouth and not reduced to writing for years or generations, and
they were not put into print until centuries after they were current in
speech or transcribed by monks and scholars.
The one great story-poem of this sort in American literature is the
"Song of Hiawatha," but this is the story of a conquered and vanishing
race; it has nothing basic to do with the Americans of to-day; it is
far less related to them than the earlier epics of the older European
nations to whom we trace our ancestry. Except for a few place-names
even the language of America owes nothing to that of the Indians,
for the English tongue is a compound of Greek and Latin and French
and German. Our literary beginnings, then, go back to two groups of
educated English colonists, or immigrants, and our knowledge of them
to conditions in the divided England from which they first came to
Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.
* * * * *
The English of the early seventeenth century were an eager, restless,
driving people. The splendid reign of Queen Elizabeth was just past.
The country was secure from foreign enemies and confident in its
strength. Great naval leaders had brought new honors to her name;
great explorers had planted her flag on mysterious and new-discovered
coasts; a group of dramatists had made the theater as popular as the
moving-picture house of to-day; a great architect was adorning London
with his churches; poets and novelists, preachers and statesmen,
scientists and scholars, were all working vividly and keenly. There
was an active enthusiasm for the day's doings, a kind of living assent
to Hamlet's commentary, on "this goodly frame, the earth, ... this
most excellent canopy, the air, ... this brave o'erhanging firmament,
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire"; and to the exclamation
that follows: "What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how
infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in
action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty
of the world! the paragon of animals!" And under a strong and tactful
monarch the nation had been kept at peace with itself.
Yet in this fallow soil the seeds of controversy had been steadily
taking root; and when Elizabeth was followed on the throne by the vain
and unregal James I, the crop turned out to be a harvest of dragons'
teeth. Puritan democrats and cavalier Royalists fought with each other
over the body of England till it was prostrate and helpless. What
followed was the rise of Puritan power, culminating with the execution
of Charles II and the establishment of the Commonwealth under the
Cromwells from 1649 to 1660, and the peaceful restoration of monarchy
at the latter date. It was during the mid-stages of these developments
that the first settlements were made in English America. Both factions
included large numbers of vigorous individuals of the pioneer type.
The Puritans were technically called "dissenters" and "nonconformists"
because of their attitude toward the established Church of England; but
the Royalists who came over to America were simply nonconformists of
another type who preferred doing things out on the frontier to living
conventional lives at home.
The Royalists, who settled in the South, came away, like other
travelers and explorers of their day, to settle new English territory
as a landed aristocracy. They were a mixed lot, but on the whole they
were not an irreligious lot. They believed in the established church
as they did in the established government, and they persecuted with a
good will those who tried to follow other forms of worship than their
own. They were, however, chiefly fortune hunters, just as were the
men who surged out to California in 1849 or those who went to Alaska
fifty years later; they hoped to make their money in the west and to
spend it back in the east, and they had little thought of literature,
either as a thing to enjoy or as a thing to create. When they wrote
they did so to give information about the country, the Indians, and the
new conditions of living, or to keep in touch with relatives, legal
authorities, or sources of money supply; and always they had in mind
the thought of attracting new settlers, for they needed labor more than
anything else. They made no attempt at general education, adopting
the now-abandoned aristocratic theory that too much knowledge would
be a dangerous source of discontent among the working people. Some
few individuals wrote accounts and descriptions that are interesting
to the modern reader, but these were not representative of the people
as a whole. They were Englishmen away from home, living temporarily
in _Virgin_-ia (the province of the virgin queen, Elizabeth), in
_James_-town, in the _Carolinas_ (from the Latin for Charles), in
_Mary_-land, and, even as late as 1722, in _George_-ia.
The nonconformists whom adverse winds drove to the North in 1620 were
a very different folk. They were predominantly Puritan in prejudice
and in upbringing. Many of their leaders were graduates of Cambridge
University who had gone into the Church of England, only to be driven
out of it because of their unorthodox preaching--born leaders who
were brave enough to risk comfort and safety for conscience' sake.
They came over to America in order, as Mrs. Hemans put it, to have
"freedom to worship God," but not to give this freedom to others.
They had endured so much for their religious faith that they wanted
a place where this, and this only, should be tolerated. So they
became, not illogically, the fiercest kind of persecutors, practicing
with a vengeance the lessons in oppression that they had learned in
England at the cost of blood and suffering. They settled in compact
towns where they could believe and worship together; they put up
"meetinghouses" where they could listen to the preacher on the Lord's
Day and where they could transact public business, with the same man
as "moderator," on week days. He was the controlling power--"pastor,"
or shepherd, and "dominie," or master, of the community. And when the
meetinghouses were finished, the settlers erected as their next public
buildings the schoolhouses, where the children might learn to read the
Scriptures so that they could "foil the ould deluder, Satan." Education
became compulsory as well as public. The Puritans' place-names were
Indian--Massachusetts and Agawam; derived from England of Puritan
associations, like Boston, Plymouth, and Falmouth; or quaintly
Scriptural, like Marthas Vineyard, Providence, and Salem. These people,
unlike the settlers in the South, came over to live and die here. They
wrote for the same social and business reasons that the Virginians did,
but they also wrote much about their religion, compiled the "Bay Psalm
Book," published sermons, and recorded their struggles, which began
very early and were doomed to final failure, to keep their New England
free from "divers religions." At first their writings were sent to
England for publication, but before long, in 1638, they had their own
printing press, and the things that were printed on it were not so much
the sayings of individual men as the opinions of the community.
The history of the migrations to the North and to the South during
the seventeenth century is one with the history of the civil struggle
in England. Up to 1640 colonization was slow and consistent at both
points. From 1640 to 1660 it increased rapidly in the South and
declined in the North, for in those years the grip of the Puritans
on the old country relieved them from persecution there and from the
consequent need to avoid it and, at the same time, made many Royalists
glad of a chance to escape to some more peaceful spot. From 1660
on, with the return of the Royalists to power in England, Puritan
migration was once more started to the North, and the home country was
again secure for the followers of the king. But the real characters
of the two districts were unchanged. They were firmly established in
the earliest years, and they have persisted during the intervening
centuries clear up to the present time. The America of to-day is a
compound whose basic native qualities are inherited from the oldest
traditions of aristocratic Virginia and the oldest traits of democratic
and Puritan Massachusetts.
In dealing with the early periods of any literature the exercise
of artistic judgment is always very charitable. Rough, uncouth,
fragmentary pieces are taken into account because they serve as
a bridge to the remoter past. Harsh critics of colonial American
literature seem to forget this practice when they rule out of court
everything produced in this country before the days of Irving and
Cooper. A great deal of the earlier writing should, of course, be
considered only as source material for the historian; but some of it
has the same claim to attention as the old chronicles, plays, and
ballads in English literary history. It deserves study if it portrays
or criticizes or even unconsciously reflects the life and thought of
the times, and it is significant as an American product if in form
or content or point of view it clearly belongs to this side of the
Atlantic.
The nature of settlement and the neglect of popular education led to an
early lapse in authorship in the Southern colonies, so that in a survey
as brief as this chapter their writers do not come into view until they
find expression in the oratory and statesmanship of the Revolutionary
period. Their narratives and descriptions of colonial life, as long as
they wrote them at all, were quite like most of the earliest Northern
writings of the sort. The one outstanding difference is that in
whatever they wrote, the religious motive for settlement and the belief
in a personal Providence were less insistently recorded than by the
Puritans. Thus where John Smith was content with the general phrase "it
pleased God," Anthony Thacher, saved from shipwreck in Boston Harbor,
wrote devoutly, "the Lord directed my toes into a crevice in the rock";
and where Smith's companions hoped for the benevolent favor of the
Most High, Thacher's fellow-worshipers were perfectly certain that
every step they took was ordained by God, so that even their apparent
misfortunes were His punishments for misconduct.
In all the great mass of Puritan writing in the first century of
residence in America one definite current appears, and that is the
quiet but irresistible current of change in human thought. The Puritans
had made the profound but constantly repeated mistake of assuming
that after thousands of years of groping by mankind, they had at last
discovered the "ultimate truth"; that for the rest of time men need do
nothing but follow the precepts which God had revealed to them about
life here and life hereafter. They were, in their own serious way,
happy in their confident possession of truth and sternly resolved to
bestow it or, if necessary, impose it on all whom they could control.
Their failure was recorded with their earliest attempts, and it came,
not because of their particular weakness or the strength of their
particular adversaries, but because they were trying to obstruct the
progress of human thought, which is as inexorable as any other force
of nature. They might as well have entered into an argument with
gravitation or the tides. The most interesting and the best-written
pieces of seventeenth-century New England literature all give evidence
of this rearguard action against the advancing forces of truth.
The Puritanism against which this rising tide of dissent developed was
admirably embodied in William Bradford (1590-1657), the _Mayflower_
Pilgrim who was more than thirty times governor of his colony and the
author of "A History of Plimouth Plantation." He was a brave, sober,
devout leader with an abiding sense of the holy cause in which he was
enlisted. His journal of the first year in America and his history
are clearly and sometimes finely written, and give ample proof of his
stalwart character--"fervent in spirit, serving the Lord," and free
from the personal narrowness which is often mistakenly ascribed to all
Puritans. In his account, for example, of the reasons for the Pilgrims'
removal from Leyden the chronicle tells of the hardships under which
they had lived there, the encroachments of old age, the disturbing
effects of the life on the children, and, lastly, the great hope they
entertained of advancing the church of Christ in some remote part
of the world. It recounts many of the objections advanced against
attempting settlement in America, and concludes:
It was answered, that all great and honorable actions are accompanied
with great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome
with answerable courages. It was granted the dangers were great, but
not desperate; the difficulties were many, but not invincible. For
though there were many of them likely, yet they were not certain; it
might be sundry of the things feared might never befall; others, by
provident care and the use of good means, might in a great measure
be prevented; and all of them, through the help of God, by fortitude
and patience, might either be borne or overcome. True it was, that
such attempts were not to be made and undertaken without good ground
and reason; not rashly or lightly, as many have done for curiosity
or hope of gain, etc. But their condition was not ordinary; their
ends were good and honorable; their calling lawful and urgent; and
therefore they might expect the blessing of God in their proceeding.
Yea, though they should lose their lives in this action, yet might
they have comfort in the same, and their endeavors would be honorable.
Unhappily this heroic trait of Puritanism was coupled with a desperate
religious bigotry which the world is even yet slow to forgive.
One of the earliest local dissenters was Thomas Morton (1575?-1646),
author of the "New English Canaan," published in London, 1637. It is a
half-pathetic fact that this should stand out to-day beyond anything
else written in the same decade in America, for the best of it--the
third book--is a savage satire on the Puritans in Massachusetts.
Morton, it is needless to say, was not a Puritan himself. He was a
restless, dishonest, unscrupulous gentleman-adventurer from London
who gave the best part of his life to fighting the Puritans on their
own grounds. He started a fur-trading post at "Merry Mount," just
southeast of Boston, sold the Indians liquor and firearms, consorted
with their women, and in wanton mockery set up a Maypole there and
taught the Indians the English games and dances which were particularly
offensive to the grave residents of Plymouth and Boston. If he had
not written his book, he would be remembered now only as one of the
chief trouble-makers whom the Puritans had to fight down; but he did
them more damage with his pen than with all his active misbehavior.
He undermined their influence by not treating them soberly. He made
fun of their costume, derided their speech, ridiculed their religious
formalities, and held the valiant Miles Standish up to scorn by
nicknaming him Captain Shrimp. He went further, and questioned their
motives and their honesty, their integrity in business, and their
sincerity in religion. A great deal of what he wrote about them was
libelously unfair; he should never be taken as an authority for facts
unless supported by other writers of his day. But underneath all his
clever abuse of them and their ways, there is an evident basis of truth
which is confirmed by the sober study of history. Although the Puritans
were brave, strong, self-denying servants of the stern God whom they
worshiped, they were sometimes sanctimonious, sometimes cruelly
vengeful, and all too often so eager to achieve His ends on earth that
they were regardless of the means they took. At the very beginning of
their life in America, Thomas Morton held these characteristics up to
public scorn; and in so doing he made his book an omen of the long,
losing battle they were destined to fight. Morton's effectiveness as
a writer lies in the fact that however ill-behaved he may have been,
he was attractively--maybe dangerously--genial in character. He was in
truth "a cheerful liar"; but he lied like the writer of fiction who
disregards the exact facts because he is telling a good story as well
as he can and because that good story is based on real life. The next
New Englander to give proof that the Puritans were not having an easy
time in their "new English Canaan" was Nathaniel Ward (1578-1652?),
author of "The Simple Cobler of Aggawam." In character and convictions
he was as different from Morton as a man could be. When he wrote this
book, which was published in London in 1647, he was an irascible old
Puritan who had suffered much for his faith, and was still fighting
for it, although very near to his threescore years and ten. He had been
graduated at Cambridge, gone into the Church of England, been hounded
there for his liberalism, come to America, and served a pastorate
at Agawam (now Ipswich), Massachusetts. He had withdrawn on account
of ill health, but later had served the state so well that he was
granted six hundred acres as a reward, and had lived on there until his
return to England at the age of seventy. He believed fiercely in the
righteousness of the Puritan doctrines and in the wickedness of any
departure from them; and his book was a valiant protest against any
relaxation on the part of the faithful. It was written with reference
to conditions in England, but it was composed after fifteen years'
residence in America, and showed his unrest at conditions in the new
country as well as in the old.
The book is a strange compound. In thought it is a piece of
dyed-in-the-wool old fogyism, but in form and literary style it is
vigorous, jaunty, and amusing. The full title is "The Simple Cobler of
Aggawam in America; willing to help Mend his Native Country, lamentably
tattered, both in the upper-Leather and sole, with all the honest
stitches he can take. And as willing never to be paid for his work by
Old English wonted pay. It is his Trade to patch all the year long,
gratis. Therefore I Pray Gentlemen keep your Purses." He feared all
innovations, but most of all the doctrine that men should enjoy liberty
of conscience. "Let all the wits under the Heavens lay their heads
together and find an Assertion worse than this [and] I will Petition
to be chosen the universal Ideot of the World." "Since I knew what
to fear, my timorous heart hath dreaded three things: a blazing Star
appearing in the Air; a State Comet, I mean a favourite, rising in a
kingdom; a new Opinion spreading in Religion." The second section of
the book is devoted to fashions of dress, an evergreen subject for the
satirist. Ward's attitude toward woman as an inferior creature was
almost as primitive as that of the cave man, and apparently he would
have liked it better if the "bullymong drossock" had dressed with
the simplicity of a cave woman. As it was he felt that the lady of
fashion was "the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of the quarter
of a cypher, the epitome of Nothing"; and he had equal contempt for
tailors who "spend their lives in making fidle-cases for futulous
Women's phansies; which are the very pettitoes of Infirmity, the
giblets of perquisquilian toyes." The remainder of the work is given
to a discussion of affairs of English state, written with the same
aggressive positiveness. The most interesting bit of it is the portion
which proclaims his belief in savage oppression of the Irish, summing
up the essence of the wrong-headed stupidity which has made the history
of Ireland so lamentable a story even to the present time. What the
old gentleman wrote is striking at points, because it seems so timely.
But Ward was never up to date, in the sense of being prophetic. When
he said things that apply to the twentieth century, they apply either
because, like the question of extravagance in dress, the topic is a
persistent trait in human nature or because, like the Irish problem,
matters which should long ago have been settled have been allowed for
centuries to confuse and complicate life. Yet Ward wrote with odd and
striking effectiveness; and his book is far more than the "curiosity"
which many critics have agreed to call it, for it is one of the best
surviving records of the Puritan attempt to maintain a strangle hold on
human thought.
The belief in the righteousness of persecuting dissenters was the
particular ground for attack by a younger and equally vigorous man,
Roger Williams (1604-1683). Williams, before he was forty years
old, had been thrown out of two church establishments--first in
Protestant England and then in Puritan Massachusetts. He represented
what Macaulay termed the very "dissidence of dissent." And now, in a
long and laborious argument lasting from 1644 to 1652, he fought out
the issue with the Reverend John Cotton. Only by the most generous
interpretation can the lengthening chain of this printed controversy
be considered as literature, yet it has the same right to inclusion as
the English disquisitions of Wyclif, Jeremy Taylor, and John Wesley.
An English prisoner in Newgate, assailing persecution for cause of
conscience, had been answered by John Cotton. Then followed Williams's
"The Bloody Tenent of Persecution for cause of Conscience, discussed
in a Conference between Truth and Peace" (1644); Cotton's reply "The
Bloody Tenent washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb" (1647);
and Williams's rejoinder, "The Bloody Tenent yet More Bloody: by Mr.
Cottons endeavor to wash it white in the Blood of the Lambe" (1652).
The whole process of argument by both the reverend gentlemen was to
set their literal English minds to work at analyzing and expounding
Biblical passages which were full of oriental richness of imagery.
It was, all things considered, rather less reasonable than it would
be for the chancellors of the British and German empires to base an
argument about the freedom of the seas upon definite citations from the
"Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam.
The chief grounds of offense in the sinful unorthodoxy of Roger
Williams were that he asserted two things which have become axioms
to-day, and two more which will be admitted by every thoughtful and
honest person. The first two were that religion should not be professed
by those who did not believe it in their hearts, and that the power of
the magistrates extended only to the bodies and the property of the
subjects and not to their religious convictions. The second two were
that America belonged to the Indians and not to the king of England,
and that the established church was necessarily corrupt. By this last
he meant simply that any human organization that is given complete
authority, and need not fear either competition or overthrow by public
opinion, is certain to decay from within. It was the idea beneath
Tennyson's lines
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Yet these opinions, preached and practiced by Williams, resulted in
his being expelled from the community. The attempt was made to send
him back to England, but he managed to get a permanent foothold in
Rhode Island, where he opposed the still more liberal Quakers almost as
violently as the churchmen of old and new England had opposed him. To
his credit be it said, however, that he did not invoke the law against
them. In action as well as in belief he marked the progress of liberal
thought.
BOOK LIST
=_General References_=
EGGLESTON, EDWARD. The Transit of Civilization.
FISKE, JOHN. Beginnings of New England. Chaps. ii, iii.
HART, A. B. American History told by Contemporaries. Vol. I, pp.
200-272, 313-393.
RICHARDSON, C. F. American Literature. Chaps. i-iii.
TYLER, M. C. History of American Literature. Colonial Period. Vol. I,
chaps. i-ix.
WENDELL, BARRETT. A Literary History of America. Bk. I, chaps. i-iv.
=_Individual Authors_=
CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH. A True Relation (London, 1608); A Map of
Virginia, with a Description of the Country (Oxford, 1612); A
Description of New England (London, 1616).
=Available Editions=
FORCE. Historical Tracts, Vol. II, Nos. 1 and 2. 1883.
_Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., Ser.3, Vol. VI_.
=Collections=
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 1-18.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 1-8, 33-43.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. I,
pp. 3-17.
Narratives of Early Virginia. L. G. Tyler, editor. 1907.
Sailors Narratives. G. P. Winship, editor. 1905.
WILLIAM BRADFORD. History of Plimouth Plantation. First published in
_Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., Ser. 4, Vol. III_.
=Available Editions=
Charles Deane, editor. 1896.
W. T. Davis, editor. 1912.
=Collections=
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 27-44.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. I,
pp. 93-130.
THOMAS MORTON. New English Canaan, or New Canaan. Amsterdam, 1637.
=Available Editions=
FORCE. Historical Tracts, Vol. II, No. 5. 1883. C. F. Adams,
editor.
_Prince Historical Society Publications._ 1888. C. F. Adams,
editor.
=Collections=
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 60-72.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 28-30.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. I,
pp. 147-156.
NATHANIEL WARD. The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America. London, 1647.
=Available Editions=
FORCE. Historical Tracts, Vol. III, No. 8. 1906.
Ipswich Historical Society of Ipswich, Mass. _Publications_.
=Biography=
A Memoir of Nathaniel Ward. J. W. Dean. 1868.
=Collections=
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 112-124.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 18-20.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. I,
pp. 147-156.
ROGER WILLIAMS. Works. Edited by members of the Narragansett Club.
Providence, 1866-1874. 6 vols. Contains likewise J. Cotton's
contributions to the controversy with Williams, together with a
bibliography of Williams's works.
=Available Edition=
Letters from 1632 to 1675. _Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., Ser. 4, Vol.
VI_.
=Biography and Criticism=
CARPENTER, E. J. Roger Williams; a Study of the Life, etc.
_Grafton History Series_. 1909.
MASSON, DAVID. Life of John Milton, Vols. II, III.
STRAUS, OSCAR S. Roger Williams, the Pioneer of Religious
Liberty. 1894.
=Collections=
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 94-111.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 32-38.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. I,
pp. 246-253.
=_Literary Treatment of the Period_=
=Drama=
BARKER, J. N. The Indian Princess; an Operatic Melodrama (1808),
in _Representative Plays by American Dramatists_ (edited by
M.J. Moses), Vol. I. 1918.
CUSTIS, G. W. P. Pocahontas, or The Settlers of Virginia; a
National Drama (1830), in _Representative American Plays_
(edited by A.H. Quinn). 1917.
=Essays=
EMERSON, R. W. Discourse at Concord, 200th Anniversary. Works,
Vol. XI.
LOWELL, J. R. New England Two Centuries Ago. Works, Vol. II.
WHITTIER, J. G. A Chapter of History, in _Literary Recreations
and Miscellanies_.
=Fiction=
AUSTIN, MRS. J. G. Standish of Standish.
AUSTIN, MRS. J. G. Betty Alden (sequel).
AUSTIN, MRS. J. G. David Alden's Daughter.
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL. The Gray Champion and The Maypole of Merry
Mount, in _Twice-Told Tales_.
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL. Young Goodman Brown, in _Mosses from an
Old Manse_.
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL. The Scarlet Letter.
JOHNSTON, MARY. By Order of the Company.
JOHNSTON, MARY. The Old Dominion.
MOTLEY, J. L. Merry Mount.
=Poetry=
Poems of American History (edited by B.E. Stevenson), pp. 36-56.
American History by American poets (edited by N.U. Wallington).
Vol. I, pp. 39-92.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read the "New English Canaan," Bk. III, with a view to deciding how far
Morton's evident prejudice discredited his account of the Puritans;
examine it again for its specifically literary qualities.
Read from Bradford's "History of Plimouth Plantation" for the admirable
traits of Puritanism and see, also, if you find grounds for any of
Morton's strictures.
Read the Hawthorne selections in the Book List--Literary Treatment
of the Period--and decide how far he may have sympathized with the
attitude of Morton in the "New English Canaan."
Read from "The Simple Cobler of Aggawam" for any evidence of Nathaniel
Ward's residence in America; decide on the degree to which the work is
English and the degree to which it is colonial.
Compare the attitude toward Ireland of Nathaniel Ward in this work and
of Jonathan Swift in his "Modest Proposal."
Make comparisons in diction from a corresponding number of pages in
"The Simple Cobler" and in Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus."
CHAPTER II
THE EARLIEST VERSE
Although it is generally said of the Puritans that they were actually
hostile to all the arts, there is abundant proof that they had a
liking for verse and a widespread inclination to try their hands at
it. They wrote memorial verses of the most intricate and ingenious
sorts, sometimes carving them in stone as epitaphs. There is less verse
sprinkled through the unregenerate Morton's "Canaan" than there is in
the intolerant Ward's "Cobler." The old conservative never wrote more
wisely than in this so-called "song":
They seldom lose the field, but often win,
Who end their Warres, before their Warres begin.
Their Cause is oft the worse, that first begin,
And they may lose the field, the field that win.
In Civil Warres 'twixt Subjects and their King,
There is no conquest got, by conquering.
Warre ill begun, the onely way to mend,
Is t'end the Warre before the Warre do end.
They that will end ill Warres, must have the skill,
To make an end by Rule, and not by Will.
In ending Warres 'tween Subjects and their Kings,
Great things are sav'd by losing little things.
The first whole volume in English printed in the Western Hemisphere
(printing of Spanish books in Mexico had long preceded) was "The Bay
Psalm Book," Cambridge, 1640. This represented a conscientious attempt
to put into the service of worship a literal translation of the Psalms.
The worst passages are all too frequently cited as evidence of the
inability of the Puritans to compose or appreciate good verse. And this
in spite of the often-quoted and charmingly written prose comment in
the editors' preface:
If therefore the verses are not alwayes so smooth and elegant as
some may desire or expect; let them consider that God's Altar needs
not our pollishings: Ex. 20. for wee have respected rather a plaine
translation, then to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any
paraphrase, and soe have attended Conscience rather than Elegance,
fidelity rather then poetry, in translating the hebrew words into
english language, and David's poetry into english meetre; that soe
wee may sing in Sion the Lords songs of prayse according to his owne
will; untill hee take us from hence and wipe away all our teares, &
bid us enter into our masters joye to sing eternall Halleluliahs.
Some historians, moreover, seem to derive satisfaction from quoting
passages from Michael Wigglesworth's (1631-1705) "Day of Doom" as
added proof that the Puritans were never able to write verse that was
beautiful or even graceful. It must be admitted that this grave and
pretentious piece of work was hardly more lovely than the name of the
author. Wigglesworth was a devoted Puritan who came to America at the
age of seven; graduated from Harvard College; qualified to practice
medicine; and then became a preacher, serving, with intermissions of
ill health, as pastor in Malden, Massachusetts, from 1657 until his
death in 1705. He was a gentle, kindly minister, unfailing in his care
for both the bodies and the souls of his parishioners.
He had the "lurking propensity" for verse-writing which was common
among the men of his time, but instead of venting it merely in the
composing of acrostics, anagrams, and epitaphs, he dedicated it to the
Lord in the writing of a sort of rimed sermon on the subject of the Day
of Judgment. The full title reads, "The Day of Doom or, a Description
Of the Great and Last Judgment with a short discourse about Eternity.
Eccles. 12. 14. For God shall bring every work into judgment with
every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil." It
was printed, probably in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1662. The poem
is composed of two hundred and twenty-four eight-line stanzas. After
an invocation and the announcement of the day of doom, the dead come
from their graves before the throne of Christ. There the "sheep" who
have been chosen for salvation are placed on the right, and the wicked
"goats" come in groups to hear the judge's verdict. These include
hypocrites, civil, honest men, those who died in youth before they were
converted, those who were misled by the example of the good, those who
did not understand the Bible, those who feared martyrdom more than
hell-torment, those who thought salvation was hopeless, and, finally,
those who died as babes. All are sternly answered from the throne, and
all are swept off to a common eternal doom except the infants, for whom
is reserved "the easiest room in hell."
Two facts should be remembered in criticizing "The Day of Doom" as
poetry. The first is that Wigglesworth wrote it consciously as a
teacher and preacher and not as a poet. In his introduction he said:
Reader, I am a fool
And have adventurèd
To play the fool this once for Christ,
The more his fame to spread.
If this my foolishness
Help thee to be more wise,
I have attainèd what I seek,
And what I only prize.
The second point is that in writing a rimed sermon for Christian
worshipers he had a model supplied him in the popular "Bay Psalm Book,"
which had appeared some twenty years before and which was familiar to
all the people who were likely to be his readers. The translators of
the 121st Psalm wrote, for example:
1 I to the hills lift up mine eyes,
from whence shall come mine aid
2 Mine help doth from Jehovah come,
which heav'n and earth hath made.
And Wigglesworth took up the strain with
No heart so bold, but now grows cold,
and almost dead with fear;
No eye so dry but now can cry,
and pour out many a tear.
To any modern reader the use of this light-footed meter for so grave
a subject seems utterly ill-considered, and the whole idea of the day
of doom as he presented it seems so unnatural as to be amusing. But
Wigglesworth was trying to write a rimed summary of what everybody
thought, in a meter with which everybody was familiar, and he was
unqualifiedly successful. A final verdict on Michael Wigglesworth is
often superciliously pronounced on the basis of this one poem, or,
if any further attention is conceded him, the worst of his remaining
output is produced for evidence that he and all Puritan preachers were
clumsy and prosaic verse-writers.
Yet in the never-quoted lines immediately following "The Day of
Doom"--a poem without a title, on the vanity of human wishes--Michael
Wigglesworth gave proofs of human kindliness and of poetic power. In
these earnest lines Wigglesworth showed a mastery of fluent verse, a
control of poetic imagery, and a gentle yearning for the souls' welfare
of his parishioners which is the utterance of the pastor rather than
of the theologian. For a moment God ceases to be angry, Christ stands
pleading without the gate, and the good pastor utters a poem upon the
neglected theme "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you":
Fear your great Maker with a child-like awe,
Believe his Grace, love and obey his Law.
This is the total work of man, and this
Will crown you here with Peace and there with Bliss.
"The Day of Doom," however, was far more popular than the better poetry
that Wigglesworth wrote at other times. It was the most popular book
of the century in America. People memorized its easy, jingling meter
just as they might have memorized ballads or, at a later day, Mother
Goose rimes; and the grim description became "the solace," as Lowell
says, "of every fireside, the flicker of the pine-knots by which
it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to its premonitions
of eternal combustion." The popularity of "The Day of Doom" shows
that in the very years when the Royalists were returning to power in
England the Puritans were greatly in the majority in New England. The
reaction marked by Morton, Ward, and Roger Williams was only beginning.
Moreover, if it had been the only "poetry" of the period, we should
have to admit that the Puritans were almost hopelessly unpoetical.
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) proves the contrary, and in doing so she
proves how the love of beauty can manage to bloom under the bleakest
skies. Her talent was assuredly a "flower in a crannied wall." She
was born in England in 1612 and was married at the age of sixteen, as
girls often were in those days, to a man several years older, Simon
Bradstreet. In 1630 she came to Massachusetts with her husband and
her father. Both became eminent in the affairs of the colony. In the
family they were doubtless sober and probably dull. Mrs. Bradstreet
kept house under pioneer conditions in one place after another, and
when still less than forty years old had become the mother of eight
children. Yet somewhere in the rare moments of her crowded days--and
one can imagine how far apart those moments must have been--she put
into verse "a compleat Discourse and Description of The Four Elements,
Constitutions, Ages of Man, Seasons of the Year; Together with an exact
Epitome of the four Monarchies, viz., the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian,
Roman" [this means _five_ long poems, and not two]; "also a dialogue
between Old England and New concerning the late troubles; with divers
other pleasant and serious poems." All these she wrote without apparent
thought of publication, for the purely artistic reason that she enjoyed
doing so; and in 1650--halfway between "The Bay Psalm Book" and "The
Day of Doom"--they were taken over to London by a friend, and there put
into print as the work of "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America."
Poetry was more than a diversion for Anne Bradstreet; it must have been
a passion. As a girl she had been allowed to read in the library of
the Puritan Earl of Lincoln, over whose estate her father was steward.
And here she had fallen under the spell of the lesser poets of her
age, naturally not the dramatists, whom the Puritans opposed. So,
after their fashion, and particularly in the fashion of a Frenchman,
Du Bartas, whose works were popular in an English translation, she
wrote her quaint "quarternions," or poems on the four elements, the
four seasons, the four ages, and the four "humours," and capped them
all with the four monarchies. These are interesting to the modern
reader only as examples of how the human mind used to work. Chaucer
had juggled with the same materials; Ben Jonson had been fascinated
with them. It was a literary tradition to develop them one by one, to
set them in debate against each other, and to interweave them into
corresponding groups: childhood, water, winter, phlegm; youth, air,
spring, blood; manhood, fire, summer, choler; and old age, earth,
autumn, melancholy.
Yet her chief claim on our interest is founded on the shorter poems,
in which she took least pride. In these she showed her real command
of word and measure to express poetic thought. Her "Contemplations,"
for example, is as poetic in thought as Bryant's "Thanatopsis," or
as Lanier's "The Marshes of Glynn," to which it stands in suggestive
contrast (see pp. 161 and 357). The former two are on the idea that
nature endures but man passes away. This was never long absent from the
Puritan mind, but when it came to the ordinary Puritan it was likely to
be cast into homely and prosaic verse, as in the epitaph:
The path of death it must be trod
By them that wish to walk with God.
Anne Bradstreet, taking the same observation, wrote with noble dignity:
O Time the fatal wrack of mortal things,
That draws oblivions curtain over kings,
Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,
Their names without a Record are forgot,
Their parts, their ports, their pomp's all laid in th' dust
Nor wit, nor gold, nor buildings, scape time's rust;
But he whose name is grav'd in the white stone[1]
Shall last and shine when all of these are gone.
[1] Rev. ii, 17.
Yet as a strictly Puritan poetess she did only one part of her work.
She was even more interesting as an early champion of her sex. She did
not go so far as to assert equality of the sexes; that was too far in
advance of the age for her imagination. But she did contend that women
should be given credit for whatever was worth "small praise." This
appears again and again in her shorter poems.
Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are
Men have precedency and still excell,
It is but vain unjustly to wage warre;
Men can do best, and women know it well;
Preheminence in all and each is yours;
Yet grant some small acknowledgment of ours.
Naturally she was full of pride in the achievements of Queen Elizabeth,
a pride which she expressed in a fine song "In Honour of that High and
Mighty Princess":
From all the Kings on earth she won the prize.
Nor say I more then duly is her due,
Millions will testifie that this is true.
She hath wip'd off th' aspersion of her Sex,
That women wisdom lack to play the Rex:
Spains Monarch, sayes not so, nor yet his host:
She taught them better manners, to their cost.
The Salique law, in force now had not been,
If France had ever hop'd for such a Queen.
But can you Doctors now this point dispute,
She's Argument enough to make you mute.
Since first the sun did run his nere run race,
And earth had once a year, a new old face,
Since time was time, and man unmanly man,
Come shew me such a _Phoenix_ if you can?
Then follows a recital of Elizabeth's proudest triumphs, and assertions
of how far she surpassed Tomris, Dido, Cleopatra, Zenobya, and the
conclusion:
Now say, have women worth? or have they none?
Or had they some, but with our Queen is't gone?
Nay Masculines, you have thus taxt us long,
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.
Let such as say our Sex is void of Reason,
Know tis a Slander now, but once was Treason.
Anne Bradstreet foreshadowed the "woman's movement" of to-day by two
full centuries, and thus showed how even the daughter of one Puritan
governor of Massachusetts and the wife of another could be thinking and
aspiring far in advance of her times.
BOOK LIST
=_General References_=
OTIS, W. B. American Verse, 1625-1807. 1909. (A full and valuable
bibliography appended.)
TUCKER, S. M. In chap. ix of Cambridge History of American
Literature, Vol. I, Bk. I.
TYLER, M. C. A History of American Literature. Colonial Period
(1607-1765), Vol. I, chaps. x, xi. 1878.
=_Individual Authors_=
The Bay Psalm Book. The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated
into English Metre, etc. 1640.
=Available Editions=
A Reprint, 1862.
Facsimile Reprint for the New England Society in the City of New
York, 1903.
=Collections=
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 73-81.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 16-18.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. I,
pp. 211-216.
MICHAEL WIGGLESWORTH. The Day of Doom; or, a Description of the
Great and Last Judgment, etc. (1662). Meat out of the Eater:
or, Meditations concerning the necessity, end and usefulness of
Afflictions unto God's Children, etc. (1670). God's Controversy
with New England (1662). Vanity of Vanities (appended to 3d
edition of The Day of Doom).
=Available Editions=
The Day of Doom, 1867.
God's Controversy with New England. _Proceedings of the Mass.
Hist. Soc._, 1871.
=Biography=
Memoir of Michael Wigglesworth. J. W. Dean. 1871. See also M.
W.,* earliest poet among Harvard graduates. _Proceedings of
the Mass. Hist. Soc._, 1895.
=Collections=
BOYNTON, PERCY H. American Poetry, pp. 18-23, 598-600.
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 163-177.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 57-59.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. II,
pp. 3-19.
ANNE BRADSTREET. The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America, or
Several Poems, compiled with great Variety of Wit and Learning,
full of Delight--by a Gentlewoman in those parts. 1650.
=Available Editions=
The Club of Odd Volumes, 1897.
The Works of Anne Bradstreet, in Prose and Verse. J. H. Ellis,
editor. 1867. This contains a valuable memoir.
The Works of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, together with her prose
remains, and with an introduction by Charles Eliot Norton.
=Biography and Criticism=
CAMPBELL, HELEN. Anne Bradstreet and her Time. 1891.
TYLER, M. C. American Literature. Colonial Period, Vol. I, chap.
x.
=Collections=
BOYNTON, PERCY H. American Poetry, pp. 1-8, 594-598.
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 146-164.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 47-52.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. I,
pp. 311-315.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Confirm the comparison of meters in the "Bay Psalm Book" and "The Day
of Doom."
* * * * *
Read the opening and closing passages in "The Day of Doom" (Boynton,
"American Poetry," pp. 18-21) for the genuinely poetic material.
Compare with Milton's use of the same material in "Paradise Lost," Bk.
I.
* * * * *
Read Anne Bradstreet's verses to Queen Elizabeth, the Prologue to the
long poems, the rimed epistles to her husband, and the tributary poems
of Nathaniel Ward and others (Boynton, "American Poetry," pp. 1-13
passim) for the difference--even with her liberalism--between her point
of view and that of the modern woman.
* * * * *
Read "Contemplations" and a passage of equal length from "The Faerie
Queene" for likenesses and differences in versification.
* * * * *
Compare the ideas of God and of nature in "Contemplations" (of the
later seventeenth century), "Thanatopsis" (of the early nineteenth), and
"The Marshes of Glynn" (of the later nineteenth) and note how far they
are personal to Anne Bradstreet, Bryant, and Lanier and how far they
represent the spirit of their respective periods.
CHAPTER III
THE TRANSITION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
As the end of the seventeenth century approached, the Puritans were
still in an overwhelming majority in New England, but the hold of the
churchmen on the government of the colonies was, nevertheless, being
slowly and reluctantly relaxed. Government in America has always, in
its broad aspects, reflected the will of the people. If legislators
and legislation have been vicious, it has been because the majority of
the people have not cared enough about it to see that good men were
chosen. If stupid and blundering laws have been passed, it has been
because the people were not wide awake enough to analyze them. On the
other hand old laws, unadjusted to modern conditions, have often become
"dead letters" because the majority did not wish to have them enforced,
even though they were on the statute books; and new and progressive
legislation has been imposed on reluctant lawmakers by the pressure
of public opinion. Now the Puritan uprising in England had been a
democratic movement by a people who wanted to have a hand in their own
government. It was a religious movement, because in England Church
and State are one and because the oppression in religious matters had
been particularly offensive. And in England it had been on the whole
successful in spite of the restoration of kingship in 1660, for from
that time on the arbitrary power of king and council were steadily and
increasingly curbed. As a consequence there was a parallel movement
in the democracy across the sea. American colonists with a highly
developed sense of justice resented a bad royal governor like Andros,
and were able to force his withdrawal; and they resented unreasonable
domination by the clergy, and were independent enough to shake it
off. Between 1690 and 1700 Harvard College became for the first time
something more than a training school for preachers; the right to vote
in Boston was made to depend on moral character and property ownership
instead of on membership in the church; and in the midst of the Salem
witchcraft hysteria judges and grand-jurymen caught their balance and
refused any longer to act as cat's-paws of the clergy. The passage to
the eighteenth century was therefore a time of transition in common
thinking; and the record of the change is clearly discernible in the
literary writings of the old-line conservatives Cotton and Increase
Mather, in the Diary of Samuel Sewall, who was able to see the light
and to change slowly with his generation, and in the Journal of Sarah
Kemble Knight, who represented the silent unorthodoxy of hundreds of
other well-behaved and respectable people.
The Mathers, Increase (1639-1723) and Cotton (1663-1728), were the
second and third of a succession of four members of one family who
were so popular and influential as to deserve the nickname which is
sometimes given them of the "Mather Dynasty." These two were both born
in America, educated in Boston and at Harvard, and made church leaders
while still young men. In age they were only twenty-four years apart,
and from 1682 to 1723 they worked together to uphold and increase the
power of the church in New England. Because of their prominence as
preachers they inherited the "good will" which had belonged to their
greatest predecessors, and by their own industry, learning, eloquence,
and general vigor they added to their ecclesiastical fortunes like
skillful business men. Their congregations were large and respectfully
attentive; scores of their sermons were reprinted by request; on
all public occasions and in all public discussions they were at the
forefront. They were great popular favorites, and in the end they
suffered the fate of many another popular favorite. For the deference
which was given to them year after year made them vain and domineering;
they talked too much and too long and too confidently, and they made
the mistakes of judgment which men who talk all the time are bound to
make. When Increase Mather lost the presidency of Harvard in 1701 they
both acted like spoiled children; their prestige was already on the
wane, for when the reaction had followed the witchcraft delusion, to
which they had fanned the flames, the caution which they had advised
was forgotten, and the encouragement which they had given was held
up against them. To the ends of their lives, in 1723 and 1728, they
were proudly unrelenting, but their last years were embittered by the
knowledge that their power was departed from them.
The bulk of their authorship was prodigious, even though most of
it was in the form of pamphlets or booklets, for it amounted in
the case of Increase to about one hundred and fifty titles, and in
the case of Cotton to nearly four hundred. But they are chiefly
remembered for three books: "An Essay for the recording of Illustrious
Providences," by the elder; and "The Wonders of the Invisible World"
and the "Magnalia Christi Americana: Or the Ecclesiastical History of
New-England," by the younger. The first two of these are unintended
explanations to the twentieth-century reader as to how a whole
community could ever have been swept into the Salem witchcraft excesses
of 1692. Any educated man who should advance the theories to-day which
were soberly expounded by these two really learned men would be held up
to scorn and very possibly be made subject of a sanity investigation.
Yet two hundred years ago the world was ignorant of the commonplaces
of science. Popular superstition therefore ran riot; and the belief
that God would interpose in the affairs of daily individual life, and
that a personal devil was walking up and down the earth seeking whom
he might devour, added to the confusion. Medicine in those days was
hardly a science even in the broadest sense of the word. Physicians
depended for honest effects on a few simple herb remedies and on
powerful emetics and the letting of blood. The populace believed in
curatives which still are resorted to only by children and the most
ignorant of grown-ups--like anointing implements with which they had
been injured, in order to heal cuts and bruises, or like being touched
by the monarch as a remedy for scrofula, the "king's evil." Sir Kenelm
Digby, a well-known subject of Charles II, reported that he overcame a
persistent illness by having the fumes of camomile poured into his ear.
The same sort of speculation prevailed in all the other sciences; and
side by side with it superstition flourished. Between 1560 and 1600 in
the little kingdom of Scotland, which had a population no larger than
that of Massachusetts to-day, there were eight thousand executions for
witchcraft,--an average of nearly four a week; and James I, who was
Scotland's gift to England, was the author of a work on demonology.
What the New Englanders, and among them the Mathers, believed was,
therefore, not unusual at the time. In fact the Mathers were both
somewhat less credulous than their fellows, but they only substituted
one superstition for another. Their way of casting off the old and
vulgar beliefs which were pagan in origin was to contend that these
vain and foolish ideas were put into Christian minds by Satan and his
emissaries. Said Increase Mather in his "Illustrious Providences":
Some also have believed that if they should cast Lead into the Water,
then _Saturn_ would discover to them the thing they inquired after.
It is not _Saturn_ but _Satan_ that maketh the discovery, when
anything is in such a way revealed. And of this sort is the foolish
Sorcery of those Women that put the white of an Egg into a Glass of
Water, so that they may be able to divine of what Occupation their
future husbands shall be. It were much better to remain ignorant
than thus to consult with the Devil. These kind of practices appear
at first blush to be Diabolical; so that I shall not multiply Words
in evincing the evil of them. It is noted that _the Children of
Israel did secretly those things that are not right against the Lord
their God_ 2 King. 17. 9. I am told there are some who do secretly
practice such Abominations as these last mentioned, unto whom the
Lord in mercy give deep and unfeigned Repentance and pardon for their
grievous Sin.
These preachers thus turned superstition into an enemy of the true
religion, as it assuredly is; but they regarded it not as the fruit
of ignorance, to be remedied by education and intelligence, but as a
device of Satan which could be offset by preaching and prayer. The
two books are cut from the same cloth, so that an indication of the
contents of the one just mentioned will give an idea of them both.
The chapter headings run as follows: Of Remarkable Sea Deliverances;
Preservations; Lightening; Philosophical Meditations; Things
Preternatural [voices of invisible speakers and doings of mysterious
mischief-makers]; That there are Daemons and Possessed Persons [three
main arguments: (1) Scripture forbade witchcraft, therefore there must
be such a thing; (2) experience has made it manifest; (3) convicted
maldoers have confessed it]; Apparitions; Conscience; Deaf and Dumb
Persons; Tempests; Earthquakes; and Judgments. As a whole the book is a
collection of curious anecdotes taken on almost any hearsay, but almost
all at second or third hand. They resemble some of the most popular of
the atrocity stories which have been told during every war that history
chronicles, but which no investigator has been able to run down in
any single instance. In point of superstition the Mathers, to repeat,
should be considered in two lights: compared with educated men of the
twentieth century they were almost incredibly primitive in what they
were willing to believe, but considered with reference to their own
generation they fought the wiles of the devil as soldiers of the Lord.
The most ambitious work that either produced was Cotton Mather's
"Magnalia," a history of the Church in New England. This was a bulky
two-volume effort, divided into seven parts, or books. As a matter
of fact it was really a general history of the region by a man who
regarded the existence of New England as identical with the existence
of the Church. In this basic assumption as well as in many of his
details Cotton Mather revealed himself as a hopeless conservative of
his day--hopeless because it was already evident to all but him and his
kind that the State was shaking off the control of the Church leaders.
One can get a fair idea of the bias of the book from the opening
paragraph:
It is the Opinion of some, though 'tis _but_ an _Opinion_, and
_but_ of _some_ Learned Men, That when the Sacred Oracles of Heaven
assure us, _The Things under the Earth_ are some of those, _whose
Knees are to bow in the Name of Jesus_, by those _Things_ are meant
the Inhabitants of _America_, who are Antipodes to those of the
other _Hemispheres_. I would not quote any words of _Lactantius_,
though there are _some_ to countenance this Interpretation, because
of their being so _Ungeographical_: nor would I go to strengthen
the Interpretation by reciting the Words of the _Indians_ to the
first _White Invaders_ of their Territories, _We hear you are come
from under the World, to take our World from us._ But granting the
_uncertainty_ of such an Exposition, I shall yet give the Church of
God a certain account of these _Things_, which in _America_ have
been Believing and Adoring the glorious _Name_ of Jesus; and of that
Country in America, where those _Things_ have been attended with
Circumstances most remarkable.
The "Magnalia" is really an attempt at a general history of New England
from 1620 to 1698, containing classified material on the governors,
magistrates, and preachers, a history of Harvard, a collection of
reports of church transactions, an account of the Indian Wars, and "A
Faithful Record of many Illustrious Wonderful Providences." Yet for
historical data it is almost as unreliable as the libelous "New English
Canaan" of Thomas Morton. For Morton was no more eager to turn the
facts to the discredit of the Puritans than Mather was to interpret
them to the glory of the Church; and the consequence was that neither
could be absolutely trusted. The historians have abandoned Mather as a
safe authority. His sin has found him out, even though he committed it
in the name of the Lord.
The man in this period in whom complete faith can be put is Samuel
Sewall, who did not profess to be an author except in an incidental
way. He lived from 1652 to 1730 and kept a very full diary from 1673
to 1729. This was written with no thought of publication, and actually
was not printed until a hundred and fifty years later, when it was
given to the world by the Massachusetts Historical Society. In American
literature Sewall's Diary occupies a place almost exactly parallel to
that of John Evelyn's in English letters. Their lives and their long
diaries covered about the same years, and they held corresponding
positions in the communities. Both were educated men--Sewall was a
graduate of Harvard--and both were highly respected and trusted.
Sewall held a minor position at Harvard connected with the library,
was prominent in church affairs, and was a judge, officiating at the
time of the Salem witchcraft trials. An informal journal written
without prejudice, by such a man as he, gives material of the greatest
value for a picture of the times. It is material of course and not
the picture itself, for it lacks anything in the way of composition,
just as do the facts of ordinary daily life in the order of their
occurrence. But out of it two main threads of interest may be unwoven.
One is the sober but not unrelieved background of the times, itself a
composite of various strands. Religion was its strongest fiber. Few
weeks pass in which there is no record of sermon, fast, christening,
wedding, funeral, or special celebration. These were among the chief
social happenings of the calendar. Funerals as well as more festive
occasions were accompanied with gifts of gloves and rings; refreshments
were ample if not lavish; and the bill for strong drinks was always a
heavy item, for it must be remembered that prohibition is of recent
origin, and that among the Puritans self-control made drunkenness as
infrequent as drinking was common. Against frivolity too they set their
minds; and Sewall's Diary gives a protest at "tricks" and dancing and
May festivals, and even Christmas and Easter, which were triply hated
because they had their origins in pagan tradition and had come to the
present through the Church of Rome and the Church of England. Yet the
objections to these practices and festivals show that they were real
disturbances in Sewall's Boston, as were the roistering of sailors and
other strangers in town.
The other and more important thread is the revelation of the inner
mind of a flesh-and-blood colonial American. It takes patient reading
to recreate the real man; but he is here in these pages, with all the
inconsistencies that make up life out of story-books. He was all in all
a fine, devout, broad-gauge man--and this is what any biographer would
tell of him--with a moderate supply of littleness and petty vanity,
which the biographer would be almost certain to suppress. And he was
in himself a record of the public opinion of his generation. He wrote
two other things besides his Diary. One is a theological treatise which
was as uninspired as the quoted paragraph from Mather's "Magnalia,"
and on much the same theme. It shows him to be an apparently hopeless
old fogy. The other is a pamphlet called "The Selling of Joseph,"
which was probably the first antislavery utterance printed in America,
and implies that Samuel Sewall was centuries ahead of the times.
There is at second glance nothing perplexing in this contradiction.
Sewall was a normal man who stood between the oldest-fashioned and the
newest-fashioned thinkers. Sometimes he leaned backward, and sometimes
forward; but on the whole he was inclined to advance. Of this he gave
one famous proof. Five years after the Salem trials he had the honesty
to admit to himself that he had been all wrong in his judgment, and the
courage to make a public confession of his repentance. He chose one of
the hardest ways of doing it. Among the "curious punishments of bygone
days," one was the humiliation of disreputable persons by forcing
them to sit at the foot of the church pulpit while the minister read
a public reproof. On Fast Day, 1697, Samuel Sewall of his own choice
posted a bill which could be read by any who would, and, giving a copy
of it to the Reverend Mr. Willard, stood up at the reading before the
congregation. The method of atoning for his mistake proves that he was
still a devout and faithful Puritan worshiper, but the fact that he did
so at all shows that he could confess errors, even when they had been
committed in behalf of the Church. The Mathers could neither have seen
nor acknowledged such mistakes. They were too cocksure of being always
right. So life passed on, leaving them by the wayside; and Samuel
Sewall was with the quiet majority who sadly left them behind.
A third representative of the attitudes of mind at the changing of the
centuries was a genial woman, Mrs. Sarah Kemble Knight (1666-1727).
She was not in any sense a public figure, like the preachers and
the judge just mentioned, nor did she pursue the habit of writing a
continued diary like Sewall's. Most emphatically she was not given
to the unwholesome recording, like many other women in her day, of
"itineraries of daily religious progress, aggravated by overwork,
indigestion, and a gospel of gloom." But there was one itinerary which
she did record for her own satisfaction and which was published more
than a century later, in 1825,--her "Journal of a Journey from Boston
to New York in 1704." At this time a vigorous woman of thirty-eight,
a wife and a mother, she set out alone on the ten-day journey, taking
such guides as she could engage from one stage to the next. The
hardships were considerable and the discomforts and inconveniences
very great; and the striking fact about them is that she bore up under
them in a good-humored, matter-of-fact, sort of twentieth-century
way. An accident was an accident and not a visitation from on high; a
disagreeable or churlish or even a dishonest person was somebody to
be put up with and not to be moralized on as unscriptural. The worst
innkeeper she encountered was a man to avoid in the future rather than
a man to convert; she did not seem shocked by a drunken quarrel late
one night, but she was annoyed, because she wanted to go to sleep.
She was at times positively frivolous and irreverent in her allusions.
Crossing a river one day she was very near to being tipped over.
The canoe was very small and shallow, so that when we were in [it]
seemed ready to take in water, which greatly terrified me, and caused
me to be very circumspect, sitting with my hands fast on each side,
my eyes steady, not daring so much as to lodge my tongue a hair's
breadth more on one side of my mouth than t' other, nor so much as to
think on Lot's wife; for a wry thought would have overset our wherry.
Her jests about the name of the innkeeper, Mr. Devil, would have landed
her in the stocks had she made them publicly in Boston.
The post encouraged me by saying we should be well accommodated at
Mr. Devil's, a few miles further; but I questioned whether we ought
to go to the Devil to be helped out of affliction. However, like the
rest of the deluded souls that post to the infernal den, we made all
possible speed to this Devil's habitation; where, alighting in good
assurance of good accommodations, we were going in.
The accommodations turned out to be anything but good; and she left her
host with a sigh of relief, and the thought "He differed only in this
from the old fellow in t' other country--he let us depart," following
the observation with a rimed warning for subsequent travelers to avoid
this earthly hell. These are quoted not because they are admirable or
worthy of imitation but because they give an indication of what was
going on under one very respectable bonnet when Mrs. Knight was sitting
decorously in her Boston pew. She was a highly respected woman in the
Puritan community. She was accustomed to its ways. There is no word of
motherly regret that she was away from her little daughter on Christmas
Day, for Christmas was not a festal day in her calendar. Of the people
who were coming into manhood and womanhood when Sarah Kemble Knight
was born, Hawthorne wrote in "The Scarlet Letter": "The generation
next to the early immigrants wore the blackest shade of Puritanism,
and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent
years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the
forgotten art of gayety."
It was men like the author of the "Magnalia" who had darkened the
national visage, but women here and there, like the writer of this
Journal, who had already returning gleams of gayety. Of the three
people whom we have taken as types of New-England thought at this
period, Cotton Mather may fairly be regarded as representing the
faith of a declining theology, Samuel Sewall the hope of a broader
and more generous civic attitude, and Mrs. Knight as the flicker of
charity or warm-hearted and genial fellow-feeling which had been almost
extinguished in the seventeenth century.
BOOK LIST
=_General References_=
CHAMBERLAIN, N. H. Samuel Sewall and the World he Lived in. 1897.
COBB, S. H. Rise of Religious Liberty in America. 1902.
DEXTER, HENRY M. The Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred
Years as Seen in its Literature. With a bibliographical
appendix. 1880. (An excellent history, and indispensable for its
bibliographical information.)
EARLE, ALICE MORSE. Child Life in Colonial Days. 1904.
EARLE, ALICE MORSE. Curious Punishments of Bygone Days. 1896 and 1907.
EARLE, ALICE MORSE. Customs and Fashions in Old New England. 1893.
EARLE, ALICE MORSE. Home Life in Colonial Days. 1898.
EARLE, ALICE MORSE. Stage-Coach and Tavern Days. 1900.
FISKE, JOHN. New France and New England, chap. v.
MASSON, DAVID. Life of John Milton. 1859-1880. 6 vols. (Valuable for
the English backgrounds of Puritanism.)
RICHARDSON, C. F. American Literature, chap. iv.
TYLER, M. C. A History of American Literature. Colonial Period. Vol.
I, chaps. xii, xiii.
WALKER, W. Ten New England Leaders. 1901.
WENDELL, BARRETT. Literary History of America, Bk. I, chap. V. 1901.
=_Individual Authors_=
INCREASE MATHER. An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious
Providences. 1684.
=Available Edition=
With introductory preface by George Offor. London, 1890.
=Collections=
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 199-216.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, p. 59.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. A Library of American Literature, Vol.
II, pp. 75-106.
COTTON MATHER. The Wonders of the Invisible World. 1693.
Magnalia Christi Americana: or, The Ecclesiastical History of
New England, 1620-1698. 1702.
=Available Editions=
Magnalia. With notes, translations, and life. 1853. The Wonders,
etc. Reprints, Cambridge, 1861, 1862. */
=Biography and Criticism=
MARVIN, Rev. A. P. The Life and Times of Cotton Mather. 1892.
PARRINGTON, V. L. Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol.
I, Bk. I, in chap iii.
SPRAGUE, W. B. Annals of the American Pulpit, Vol. I, pp.
189-195. 1857.
TYLER, M. C. History of American Literature. Colonial Period.
Vol. I, chaps. xii, xiii.
=Collections=
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 217-237.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 59-66.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. II,
pp. 114-166.
SAMUEL SEWALL. Diary from 1673 to 1729. The only edition is
_Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., Ser. 5, Vols. VI-VIII_.
=Collections=
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 238-251.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. II,
pp. 188-200.
=History and Criticism=
CHAMBERLAIN, N. H. (See General References.)
TYLER, M. C. (See General References.)
SARAH KEMBLE KNIGHT. Journals of Madame Knight. From the
original manuscripts written in 1704. T. Dwight, editor. 1825.
=Available Editions=
A Reprint, Albany, 1865.
A Reprint, Norwich, Conn., 1901.
=Collection=
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol. II,
pp. 248-264.
=History and Criticism=
TYLER, M. C. (See General References.)
_Literary Treatment of the Period_
=Drama=
BARKER, J. N. Superstition, a Tragedy (1824), in _Representative
American Plays_ (edited by A. H. Quinn). 1917.
LONGFELLOW, H. W. The New England Tragedies.
WILKINS, MARY E. Giles Corey, Yeoman.
=Essays=
LOWELL, J. R. Witchcraft. Works, Vol. V.
WHITTIER, J. G. Charms and Fairy Faith, and Magicians and Witch
Folk in _Literary Recreations and Miscellanies_.
=Fiction=
AUSTIN, MRS. J. G. A Nameless Nobleman.
AUSTIN, MRS. J. G. Dr. Le Baron and his Daughter (sequel).
COOPER, J. F. The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish.
SIMMS, W. GILMORE. The Yemassee.
WILKINS, MARY E. The Heart's Highway.
=Poetry=
Poems of American History (edited by B. E. Stevenson), pp. 71-97.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read the introduction to the "Magnalia" or a chapter from "Illustrious
Providences," or "The Wonders of the Invisible World," for evidence
of superstition based on Scriptural authority and of vulgar, or folk,
superstition.
* * * * *
In the _Nation_ of August 17, 1918, pp. 173-175, there is an article
in review of five new books under the title "Spirit Communication."
Establish the differences and the likenesses between the modern
attitude and the attitude of the seventeenth century toward "the
invisible world."
* * * * *
Read Fitz-Greene Halleck's "Connecticut," stanzas xiii-xxvi, and
Whittier's "The Double-Headed Snake of Newbury," ll. 71-85, as well as
Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (see p. 129 in this volume), for
typical literary expressions of aversion to Cotton Mather.
* * * * *
The best method of approaching Samuel Sewall's Diary is to read some
fifty pages--preferably between 1680 and 1710--for the references to a
definite topic. This may best be selected from promising suggestions in
the first few pages of reading. If none appears, look for any of the
following or others like them: Sunday observance; funerals, weddings,
and christenings; the pastor and his people; holidays; parents
and children; self-analysis; religious discipline; law and order.
Comparisons on a given topic with the entries for the same period in
Evelyn or for an equal number of pages in Pepys are fruitful.
* * * * *
A similar approach may be made to Mrs. Knight's compact and consecutive
Journal. Her humor, irreverence, tolerance, independence, timidity, or
her use of exaggeration, mock-heroics, Scriptural allusion, personal
description, social analysis, are rich in their possibilities.
* * * * *
Read in Andrew Macphail's "Essays in Puritanism" the essay on John
Winthrop, and then the exchange of opinions between Messrs. White and
Hackett in the _New Republic_, May 17, 1919. Do either or both throw
light on the chief characters discussed in this chapter?
CHAPTER IV
JONATHAN EDWARDS AND BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
The danger in drawing conclusions about a whole century, as we have
been doing, is that the facts may be forced to seem far simpler than
they were. It should be kept in mind that these are only certain broad
currents of thought, tendencies which were obscured by all sorts of
cross waves and chop seas. And it should be mentioned that the Puritan
with the greatest mind of them all, Jonathan Edwards, was only a year
old when Mrs. Knight made her journey to New York, and that to the end
of his life, in 1758, he struggled in vain to keep alive the logic of
the old religious doctrines.
He was born in 1703 with a rich heritage from the learned aristocracy.
As a youth he showed extraordinary precocity, which appeared in his
early excursions into philosophy and natural science and developed
further in the unfulfilled promise of religious radicalism.
From my childhood up, my mind had been full of objections against
the doctrine of God's sovereignty, in choosing whom he would to
eternal life, and rejecting whom he pleased; leaving them eternally
to perish, and be everlastingly tormented in hell. It used to appear
like a horrible doctrine to me. But I remember the time very well,
when I seemed to be convinced, and fully satisfied, as to this
sovereignty of God.... I have often, since that first conviction,
had quite another kind of sense of God's sovereignty than I had
then. I have often since had not only a conviction, but a delightful
conviction. The doctrine has very often appeared exceedingly
pleasant, bright, and sweet. Absolute sovereignty is what I love to
ascribe to God. But my first conviction was not so.
[Illustration: POINTS OF LITERARY INTEREST IN NEW ENGLAND]
The first instance that I remember of that sort of inward, sweet
delight in God and divine things that I have lived much in since, was
on reading those words, 1 Tim. i. 17, _Now unto the King eternal,
immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever
and ever, Amen._ As I read the words, there came into my soul, and
was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the
Divine Being....
Not long after I first began to experience these things, I gave an
account to my father of some things that had passed in my mind. I was
pretty much affected by the discourse we had together; and when the
discourse was ended, I walked abroad alone, in a solitary place in my
father's pasture, for contemplation. And as I was walking there, and
looking up on the sky and clouds, there came into my mind so sweet a
sense of the glorious _majesty_ and _grace_ of God, that I know not
how to express. I seemed to see them both in a sweet conjunction;
majesty and meekness joined together; it was a sweet and gentle, and
holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; an awful sweetness; a
high, and great, and holy gentleness.
The striking fact about Edwards's later development, however, is
that he passed entirely from poetic mysticism to a championship of
the theology of Calvin. His great period of influence was during
his pastorate in Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1727 to 1750, and
during his following six years at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He was
a preacher of extraordinary power--the more extraordinary because his
command of audiences was obtained by the sheer quality of his discourse
and not, as in the case of John Cotton and the Mathers, by pulpit
presence or flights of eloquence. His sermons were at once irresistible
in their logic (provided his auditors were willing to start with his
assumptions) and, at the same time, irresistibly cogent in their
simple, concrete methods of illustration. His most famous discourse,
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," is a complete illustration
of his method. Notwithstanding his sincerity and his talents as a
preacher his ministerial experience was ended with a tragic downfall.
His parishioners could not endure the rigor of his teachings, agreeing
perversely with Dr. Johnson's later dictum on his "Freedom of the
Will"--that all theory might be for it but all experience was against
it. During his residence in Stockbridge he continued with the writing
of discourses which philosophers have agreed at once to applaud and
reject. He died in 1758 shortly after his inauguration as president of
the College of New Jersey.
His failure lay in the fact that his religion was a religion of logic
rather than of faith. It was based on what learned men had theorized
out from the Bible, and in a great many cases from the least important
passages of the Bible, and it sternly rejected what many other equally
learned men had found in the same book. Moreover, it was concerned
with life on earth chiefly as a prelude to a future life of reward
or punishment. In all the tide of human event which was making the
eighteenth century each year more interesting as a matter of present
living, men could not go on indefinitely looking everywhere but at life
itself. Oliver Wendell Holmes summed up the situation in his "Wonderful
'One-Hoss Shay'" (see p. 305). This is a pleasant story for children,
but a comment on life for grown-ups; and to the grown-ups Holmes
addressed his concluding couplet:
End of the wonderful one-hoss shay:
_Logic_ is _logic_. That's all I say.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) is the man who reflected better and
earlier than other Americans the complete change from the Puritan point
of view--reflecting it so unqualifiedly that he must be understood as
an extreme case and not a typical one. In education and character he
offered a succession of contrasts to the leaders of seventeenth-century
New England. He did not come of a cultured family; he was not a college
man; he did not enter any of the learned professions--ministry, law, or
teaching; he was not an active supporter of the church; he did not live
in the New England where he was born. In fact he was one of the first
to act on the much-quoted principle, "Boston is a very good place--to
come from."
Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, the youngest son of a
tallow-chandler and the fifteenth of seventeen children. He was
industrious and bookish as a boy, and before he was seventeen years
old he had trained himself to write in the fashion of the English
essayist Joseph Addison, had been apprenticed in his brother's printing
shop, and had written many articles published in his brother's paper,
_The New England Courant_. In 1723, as the result of troubles with his
brother, he ran away to Philadelphia. From there he went to London
for two years, on the promise of the irresponsible Governor Keith
to set him up in the printing business on his return. The failure
of the governor to keep his word did him no harm in the end, for he
established his own printing house in 1728, and in 1748, at the age of
forty-two, he was able to retire with a moderate fortune. During this
time he had not only succeeded in Philadelphia but had combined with
partners in New York, Newport, Lancaster (Pennsylvania), Charleston
(South Carolina), Kingston, Jamaica, and Antigua.
The activities of his life were so crowded and interwoven that they
may best be summarized under a few simple heads. As a public-spirited
citizen of Philadelphia he organized a debating society, the Junto, in
1727; published _The Pennsylvania Gazette_ in 1729; founded the first
circulating library in America in 1731; conducted _Poor Richard's
Almanac_ from 1732 to 1748; organized the American Philosophical
Society in 1744; and in 1749 founded the academy which developed
into the University of Pennsylvania. As an inventor he perfected the
Franklin stove in 1742 and contrived methods of street paving and
lighting which were widely adopted. As a scientist he proved the
identity of lightning and electricity in 1752, and went on from that to
further investigations which sooner or later brought him election to
the Royal Academy of London and their Copley gold medal, an appointment
as one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of
Sciences, and medals and diplomas from other societies in St.
Petersburg, Madrid, Edinburgh, Padua, and Turin. As a holder of public
trusts and offices he became clerk of the Assembly of Pennsylvania in
1736; postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737; deputy postmaster-general
of the colonies in 1753; commissioner from Pennsylvania to the Albany
Congress in 1754; colonial agent to London from Pennsylvania in
1757 and 1764 and for Massachusetts in 1770; one of the framers of
the Declaration of Independence; minister to the French court from
the United States in 1778; a signer of the Peace Articles in 1783;
president of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1785-1787; and a
framer of the Constitution of the United States. Such a catalogue is
not a thing to be exactly memorized. Its value is like that of an
entry in "Who's Who in America"--it should be referred to when needed.
Yet it is worth reading and rereading as an evidence of the almost
unparalleled variety and usefulness of occupations which filled this
man's life.
Usefulness is, without question, the idea which Franklin most
emphasized in his writings and exemplified in his conduct. In
comparison with the Puritan fathers he was more interested in the
eighteenth century than in eternity, more actively concerned with
Philadelphia and Pennsylvania and the United States of America than
with the mansions prepared above. This attitude of mind was not a
freakish or accidental one; it can be accounted for in the influences
which affected him when he was a boy and in the kind of English and
American thinking which characterized his whole century.
He came of what he himself called an "obscure family," his ancestors
in the near generations having been hard-working, intelligent English
clerks and artisans. They were nonconformists, and independent enough
to take their chances in the new world for the sake of liberty of
conscience. But the lesson that he learned from his parents was rather
more practical than theological and was, perhaps unconsciously,
attested to in the epitaph which he wrote for them. At two points in it
he recorded his belief that God helps them who help themselves, laying
special stress on the degree to which they help themselves:
By constant labor and industry,
With God's blessing,
he says, and again:
Be encouraged to diligence in thy calling
And distrust not Providence.
Cotton Mather, whom Franklin quoted with respect, would have reversed
the ideas in order and importance; but it was Cotton Mather's "Essays
to Do Good" that Franklin quoted, and his ability to draw a practical
inference from some slight event ("Be not too proud," he said, when he
bumped his head against a beam), and not any of his sermons. Franklin's
early reading was almost wholly in the field of what might be called
common-sense literature--discussions of different aspects of daily
life and how to get on in it. He read "Pilgrim's Progress," which
of all religious books is one of the most definite on questions of
earthly conduct. He read a great deal of history and biography: Defoe
"Upon Projects," Locke "Concerning Human Understanding" and "The Art
of Thinking," and Addison on all the common-sense subjects that make
up the contents of the _Spectator_. He read the rimed "Essays" of
Alexander Pope, too, using a quotation from one of them to confirm his
belief in a system of arguing by means of asking questions, which is
known as the "Socratic method."
In a word, he filled his boyish mind with the special kind of writing
which belonged to the first half of the eighteenth century in England,
and this was exactly the kind to be valuable to a youth who was
destined to work his way unaided to prosperity. For this period was a
particularly prosaic and practical one. In the two generations just
gone England had passed through the Puritan uprising against Charles
I, the return of the Stuarts to the throne, and the further rebellion
against James II. Religious enthusiasm had risen to its height in the
middle of the century, but had already waned by the years when John
Milton received only ten pounds for the manuscript of "Paradise Lost."
By the end of the century politics had definitely overthrown religion
as a subject of popular discussion. Little newspapers had sprung
up in surprising numbers, the coffeehouses had provided centers for
conversation, and a common-sense age was settling down to a rather
sordid and common-sense existence. Sometimes under the impulse of a
world movement a few leaders of thought have a great deal to do with
actually molding the character of the period in which they live, but
in less inspiring times the popular writers produce just about "what
the public wants." The period of Franklin's youth was one of the
latter kind, and Addison, Pope, and their followers were writing for
a public who wanted to keep on the surface of life. It was as if the
people had said: "All this religious zeal of the last century only
made England uncomfortable. Just see what confusion it threw us into!
Now we are back about where we were when the trouble started. Let's be
sensible and stick to facts, and stop quarreling with each other." So
the populace, who began reading in greater numbers than ever before,
read the little newspapers; and the various groups of congenial people
talked things over in the coffeehouses; and Addison made it his
ambition to bring "philosophy" (by which he meant a simple theory of
everyday living) down from the clouds and into the field of ordinary
thinking. The plays of Shakespeare would have helped Franklin very
little in the early stages of the printing business; so would the poems
of Milton; but the essays of Addison, Pope, and Defoe made for him what
would be called to-day "excellent vocational reading." And he profited
by it to the limit.
Moreover, if literature helped to make him a good printer, printing was
no less helpful toward making him a good writer. There are few trades
or crafts which demand so high a degree of accuracy. A boy or girl who
achieves a grade of 95 per cent in any study, even in mathematics, is
well above the average; but a typesetter or proofreader who avoids
error in only nineteen out of every twenty operations will have a short
career in any printing house. Most people do not know of the extreme
care which is given to assure correctness in the simplest product
which is put into type. A textbook, for example, after being written,
revised, recopied, and revised is criticized by a special expert and
once more revised before the publisher's editor goes over it word by
word. Then when it goes to the printer it is set up in long strips,
or galleys, from these into pages (still in type), and from these is
cast into plates, and after each of these three operations is read
over with microscopic care by both an editorial proofreader and the
author. During the printing experience a liberal allowance is made to
the author for actual changes from his original copy, but the printer
is held responsible for any slightest departure from the manuscript
that is supplied him. The boy who, like Franklin, has spent some years
in the printing room and the editorial office has received a discipline
which is miles beyond that which can ever be given in any school or
college composition course.[2]
[2] This same discipline was enjoyed--among later American
authors--by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and
Walt Whitman, all of whom were scrupulously careful writers.
To this important training Franklin added a conscious attempt to
develop his own powers. Printing and the love of books led the horse
to water, but his desire for self-expression made him drink. Of this
he tells in an early passage of the "Autobiography." His daily work
had taught him to spell and punctuate correctly, but he was faulty in
choice of words and in "perspicuity," or clearness of construction. So
he took Addison's _Spectator_ as his model, put paragraphs into his own
words, then tried to set them back into the original form, compared
the two products, and made up his mind wherein Addison's versions were
better than his and wherein, as he sometimes thought, his were better
than his teacher's. He also followed up the art of discussion both
in speech and in writing, making it always a point to convince his
opponents without antagonizing them. These things he did, not in order
to become a professional writer but solely in order to utter or write
his ideas to the best effect. "It has ever since," he says, "been a
pleasure to me to see good workmen handle their tools; and it has been
useful to me, having learned so much by it as to be able to do little
jobs myself." Prose writing was simply a tool for him--the most useful
one that he ever mastered and, as he says elsewhere, the principal
means of his advancement.
As long as he was a printer (until he was forty-two years old) he
employed his prose composition in writing copy which was clear and
interesting and therefore salable--chiefly in the _Pennsylvania
Gazette_ and in _Poor Richard's Almanac_; but during and after that
time he put his powers to even greater use as a speaker and as a writer
of articles and pamphlets on affairs of public interest. He was almost
always simple, definite, and practical, for he wrote to the mass of
people with little education. He realized that if he was to bring his
points home to them he must not write "over their heads," and that he
must appeal to their common sense and their self-interest; and he was
invariably good-humored, for he knew that good humor makes more friends
than enemies.
Out of the great mass of Franklin's published writings--and they run
to a dozen large volumes--two deserve special attention as pieces of
American literature: _Poor Richard's Almanac_ and the "Autobiography."
The former of these was a commercial undertaking; it was written to
sell. The almanac, an annual publication of which the calendar was
a very small part, had been popular in England and America for many
generations before Franklin started his own. It preceded the newspaper
and until 1800, or even later, reached a wider public. The second
piece of printing in this country was _Pierce's Almanack_, printed in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1639. Others followed: in Boston, 1676;
in Philadelphia, 1676; in New York, 1697; in Rhode Island, 1728; and
in Virginia, 1731. There had been, however, only one great almanac
editor to precede Franklin in America--Nathaniel Ames, who began
publishing his series in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1726. Besides the
calendar, the astronomical data for the year, and the half-jocular
weather predictions, the chief feature of Ames's was the poetry, very
considerable in bulk, and the "interlined wit and humor," which was
brief and usually rather pointless. Franklin, realizing the fondness
of his generation for the wise sayings of which Alexander Pope was
then the master-hand in the English-speaking world, dropped the poetry
and studied to expand the interlined material of Ames into the chief
contribution of his "Richard Saunders." "I endeavored to make it
both entertaining and useful," he said in the "Autobiography," "and
it accordingly came to be in such demand, that I reaped considerable
profit from it; vending annually near ten thousand. And observing
that it was generally read, scarce any neighborhood in the province
being without it, I considered it as a proper vehicle for conveying
instruction among the common people, who bought scarcely any other
books. I therefore filled all the little spaces, that occurred between
the remarkable days in the Calendar with proverbial sentences, chiefly
such as inculcated industry and frugality, as the means of procuring
wealth, and thereby securing virtue; it being more difficult for a man
in want, to act always honestly, as, to use here one of those proverbs,
_it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright_."
In the Almanac of 1757 he collected the sayings of the last twenty-five
years into a timely essay on "The Way to Wealth," making an old man
deliver a speech filled with quotations from "Poor Richard." This
contained not only sound practical advice for any time but was also
pertinent to a political issue of the moment, and so applied to the
state as well as to all the people in it. It was reprinted by itself
and had an immense circulation in America and abroad, in the original
and in several translations. Very likely since "The Day of Doom," in
1662, nothing had been so influential in the colonies as "The Way to
Wealth," in 1757; and no contrast could better indicate the change
that had taken place between those two dates. Said Father Abraham, the
old speaker:
It would be thought a hard Government that should tax its People
one-tenth Part of their Time, to be employed in its Service. But
_Idleness_ taxes many of us much more, if we reckon all that is spent
in absolute _Sloth_, or doing of nothing, with that which is spent
in idle Employments or Amusements, that amount to nothing. Sloth, by
bringing on Diseases, absolutely shortens Life. _Sloth, like rust,
consumes faster than Labour wears; while the used Key, is always
bright_, as _Poor Richard_ says. _But dost thou love life, then do
not squander Time, for that's the stuff Life is made of_, as _Poor
Richard_ says. How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep,
forgetting that _The sleeping Fox catches no Poultry_, and that
_There will be sleeping enough in the Grave_, as _Poor Richard_ says.
This was the sort of workaday advice that was shouldering the old-time
theology into modest Sabbath-day retirement.
Franklin's "Autobiography" is the greatest of his writings if not
the greatest of all his achievements. "Poor Richard" and "The Way
to Wealth" are full of good common sense, but they belong only to
the "efficiency" school of ideas and morality; they are neither
distinguished in form nor inspiring in content, and they are
chiefly interesting because they so well mirror what was in the
eighteenth-century mind. The "Autobiography" has a larger claim to
attention than these, for by general consent it has come to be regarded
as one of the great classics of literature. Several features have
combined to make it deserve this high place. Simply stated they are
all nothing more than ways of explaining that this book is the simple,
definite, honest life-story of an eminent man, as he recalled it in his
old age.
In the first place, it is simple and uncalculated. It was not composed,
like "Poor Richard," to sell, nor, like many of Franklin's speeches
and pamphlets, to convince by skillful argument. As a matter of fact,
Franklin did not want to write it at all, and consented only when
the insistence of his friends and relatives made it easier to do it
than to leave it undone. Moreover, he dropped it for the thirteen
years from 1771 to 1784, took it up again when wearied, old, and ill,
and left it at his death hardly more than well started, with all the
most celebrated part of his life still to be recounted. It is simple
therefore because it was done with no desire to create an impression
or to be "literary," and is the unadorned narrative of an old man
familiarly told to those who knew him best.
For the same reason it is definite and homely in what he chose to
record. It is the "little, nameless, unremembered" episodes not set
down in more pretentious histories for which the "Autobiography" is
itself best remembered. Some of the details make real the conditions of
living in those simple times--the invention of the stove named after
him, the improvements in street lighting and paving, the organization
of a fire company. Others are typical of human nature in any age,
as his portrait of the croaker, Samuel Mickle, who sadly predicted
Franklin's failure as a printer, or as his jocular account of the
entrance of luxury into his own household.
We have an English proverb that says, _He that would thrive, must
ask his wife_. It was lucky for me that I had one as much disposed
to industry and frugality as myself. She assisted me cheerfully
in my business, folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop,
purchasing old linen rags for the paper-makers, etc., etc. We kept
no idle servants, our table was plain and simple, our furniture of
the cheapest. For instance, my breakfast was a long time bread and
milk (no tea), and I ate it out of a twopenny earthen porringer,
with a pewter spoon. But mark how luxury will enter families, and
make a progress, in spite of principle: being called one morning to
breakfast, I found it in a China bowl, with a spoon of silver! They
had been bought for me without my knowledge by my wife, and had cost
her the enormous sum of three and twenty shillings, for which she
had no other excuse or apology to make, but that she thought _her_
husband deserved a silver spoon and China bowl as well as any of his
neighbors. This was the first appearance of plate and China in our
house, which afterward in a course of years, as our wealth increased,
augmented gradually to several hundred pounds in value.
Many and many of the simplest episodes reveal how shrewd, penetrating,
and, above all, how clear headed he invariably was. Such, for example,
was the hour when he was listening to the great evangelist, Whitefield,
and while all his other auditors were being thrilled by the speaker's
eloquence, Franklin was backing away from him step by step, in order
to estimate how far his voice would carry, and thus to verify the
newspaper accounts of his having preached to twenty-five thousand
people in the fields. Franklin went away full of admiration for the
preacher's voice, but with no word of comment on his sermon. He went
often to hear Whitefield, but always as a very human public speaker and
never as a "divine." A biographer, even one of his associates, could
not have known many of the intimate facts that Franklin included, and
he would almost surely have left out other details as irrelevant or
impertinent. Franklin himself, in contrast, wrote the things which
still clung in his old man's memory and which must have been important
in his development, or he would have forgotten them.
Another striking feature of the "Autobiography" is its honesty, for he
did not hesitate to record happenings which revealed defects in his
character--defects which nine out of ten admiring biographers would
have been inclined to omit or even actually to cover up. Franklin knew
that his life had not been all admirable, that many times it had not
been above reproach; but, all things considered, he was willing to let
it stand for what it was. In consequence, if one reads his story as
honestly as Franklin wrote it,--and few people do,--it will appear that
not only was he disorderly and unmethodical but that he was not always
truthful, that he was sometimes unscrupulous in business, and that he
was at times self-indulgent and immoral. In fact too often the editing
of Franklin's life-story seems to have been done on the principle
laid down by Dr. Samuel Johnson about Chesterfield's "Letters to his
Son"--that they should be put into the hands of every young man after
the immorality had been taken out of them. This is not honest teaching
and does not lead to honest habits of study.
The truth is that Franklin was like other people in being a combination
of virtues and defects. He was unlike other people in having
extraordinary talents and virtues and in owning up to his defects. For
the two great "errata" of his life--the use of money intrusted to him
for Mr. Vernon and his unfaithfulness while in London to Miss Read, his
betrothed--he afterward made the fullest possible atonement. In his
glorification of usefulness at every turn he was at once the greatest
expounder and the greatest example of his century. He made a religion
of usefulness, putting it into a simple creed which gives less heed to
the spirit of worship than many of us need, but far more to the spirit
of service than most of us follow:
It is expressed in these words, viz.:
That there is one God, who made all things.
That he governs the world by his providence.
That he ought to be worshipped by adoration, prayer and thanksgiving.
But that the most acceptable service of God is doing good to man.
That the soul is immortal.
And that God will certainly reward virtue and punish vice, either
here or hereafter.
In the third of these articles Franklin recommended a worship which he
did not practice, but in the fourth he presented a doctrine of service
of which his life was a remarkable fulfillment. In his theory of life
Franklin seemed to make no claims for the finer emotions, but in his
actual citizenship in all its public aspects he was so far above the
average man as to serve as a pretty safe "working model" for this and
coming generations.
If he had not written this uncompleted life-story we should not know
the man as intimately as we do, for to read the "Autobiography" is to
read Franklin himself.
Since the "Autobiography" brings the story of Franklin only up to 1757,
it gives no hint of the Revolutionary struggle in which as negotiator
and diplomat he was hardly less important than was Washington as
military leader. The America presented in these pages is loyal and
contented. The rising voices of discomfort from 1765 to 1775, of doubt
during the next year, and of decision for revolt in 1776 were all
echoed and often led by Franklin in his political writings. Moreover,
it is of especial significance in these days to recall another fact
unrecorded in his own story--that he was the first American to
represent his nation among other nations, and that in his feeling for
America as a member of the great world-family he was a hundred years
and more ahead of his countrymen. The new marshaling of forces in 1917
which brought about the celebration of the Fourth of July in London and
the arrival of allied American troops in Paris recalled from hour to
hour the name of Franklin as our first great international figure.
BOOK LIST
=_General References_=
BROOKS, VAN WYCK. America's Coming of Age, chap. i. 1915.
DUNNING, A. E. Congregationalists in America. 1894.
FISKE, JOHN. New France and New England, chap. vi. 1902.
WALKER. W. History of the Congregational Churches in the United
States. 1894.
=_Individual Authors_=
JONATHAN EDWARDS. There have been at least twenty-two editions and
printings of Edwards's collected work. The most accessible is that
in four volumes which appeared originally in 1843 and has been
reprinted nine times, the last in 1881. In these volumes the most
important pages are in Vol. I, pp. 1-27 (biographical), and in
Vol. IV (sermons).
=Biography and Criticism=
DWIGHT, TIMOTHY. Travels in New England and New York (1822),
Vol. IV, pp. 323 ff.
HOLMES, O. W. Pages from an Old Volume of Life. 1891.
JAMES, WILLIAM. The Varieties of Religious Experience. 1902.
MACPHAIL, ANDREW. Essays in Puritanism. 1905.
SANBORN, F. B. _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, Vol. XVII,
No. 4. October, 1883.
STEPHEN, LESLIE. _Littell's Living Age_, Vol. V (_ser. 5_), No.
1546. Jan. 24, 1874.
WALKER, WILLISTON. Ten New England Leaders. 1901.
WARD, W. H. _The Independent_, Vol. LV, No. 2861. Oct. 1, 1903.
WOODBRIDGE, F. J. E. _Philosoph. Rev._, Vol. XIII, No. 4. July,
1904. _The Congregationalist and Christian World_, Edwards
number, Vol. LXXXVIII, No. 40. Oct. 3, 1903.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. There are eleven editions of Franklin's collected
works in English, French, and German, dating from 1773 to 1905.
The best of these is the one compiled and edited by John Bigelow.
1889. 10 vols. Poor Richard Improved, 1757. This was later issued
as Father Abraham's Speech, over 150 editions and reprints of
which are recorded. Autobiography. First issued in Paris, 1791.
Best recent editions: John Bigelow, editor, 1874; H. E. Scudder,
editor, _Riverside Literature Series_, 1886; William MacDonald,
editor, _Temple Autobiography Series_, 1905; William MacDonald,
editor, _Everyman's Library_, 1908.
=History and Biography=
BRUCE, W. C. Benjamin Franklin Self-Revealed: A Biographical and
Critical Study based mainly on his own Writings. 1918. 2 vols.
FORD, P. L. The Many-Sided Franklin. 1899.
HALE, E. E. and E. E., Jr. Franklin in France; from original
documents most of which are now published for the first time.
1887-1888. 2 vols.
MCMASTER, J. B. Benjamin Franklin (_A.M.L. Series_). 1887.
MCMASTER, J. B. Franklin in France. _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. LX.
September, 1887.
SHERMAN, STUART P. Cambridge History of American Literature,
Vol. I, chap. vi.
SWIFT, LINDSAY. Catalogue of works relating to Benjamin Franklin
in the Boston Public Library. 1883.
COLONIAL ALMANACS
KITTREDGE, G. L. The Old Farmer and his Almanack. 1904.
COLONIAL JOURNALISM
COOK, E. C. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I,
chap. vii.
HUDSON, F. Journalism in the United States, 1690-1872. 1873.
THOMAS, I. History of Printing in America. 1871.
=_Literary Treatment of the Period_=
=Fiction=
COOPER, J. F. Satanstoe.
COOPER, J. F. The Chainbearer.
COOPER, J. F. The Deerslayer.
COOPER, J. F. The Redskins.
THACKERAY, W. M. The Virginians.
=Poetry=
Poems of American History (edited by B. E. Stevenson),
pp. 99-125
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Few modern readers can regard the sermons of Jonathan Edwards as
anything but documents of historical interest. It is quite worth study
to read at first-hand one or two sermons about which so many careless
generalizations have been made. The chief points of interest are the
theology as it stands in his own living words, and his rhetorical
method, which is an admirable exercise of forensic discourse.
* * * * *
Read Harriet Beecher Stowe's "The Minister's Wooing" and "Oldtown
Folks" (especially chap. ) for a faithful portrait of one of Edwards's
chief successors (see pp. 305-308).
* * * * *
Read Franklin's "Autobiography" for its revelation of personal
characteristics: his continued emphasis on usefulness; his refusal to
allow his emotions to carry him away (whether anger, love, religious
fervor, or desire for revenge); his willingness to act unscrupulously
for what he felt was a good end; his self-analysis (in other places
than the passage on the virtues); his public spirit.
* * * * *
Read Franklin's "Autobiography" for its literary characteristics:
his emulation of Addison's style (compare passages of this and
the _Spectator_); his respect for Pope and his likeness in use of
apothegms; his similarity to Chesterfield in point of view and use of
homely detail. Contrast Franklin's style with Irving's or Cooper's.
CHAPTER V
CRÈVECOEUR, THE "AMERICAN FARMER"
By 1750 the thirteen colonies had all been long established, and the
straggling community on the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Georgia
had an individuality of its own. The America-to-be was at once young
and old. There were old towns, old churches, old homes, old families.
There was an aristocracy with memories that went back to England, but
with roots firmly planted in American soil. Yet, withal, the country
was so vast and the people on it so few that there was unlimited
chance for the energetic man of real ability. It was a new land of
untold opportunities; all its apparent maturity was the maturity of a
well-born young gentleman who has just become of age and whose real
career is all before him. The old age of the Old World was something
very different, for it was based chiefly on the control of the land--of
the actual soil and stream and forest. Edmund Burke in 1775 said in
his "Speech on Conciliation of the American Colonies" that if the
attempt were made to restrict the population of the colonies the
people could swarm over the mountain ranges and resettle there in a
vast plain _five hundred miles square_. However fair the estimate was
to the land in actual English possession, that statement was about
as far as the imagination of an Englishman accustomed to smaller
dimensions could then go, or as big a figure as he could dare to hope
his fellow-members of Parliament would believe; for in those days, as
to-day, there were not in England or France five square miles of land
out of ownership, and very little that was not in the possession of
a few great proprietors. As the control of government was largely in
the same hands, the great mass of the people could neither freely
enjoy the fruits of their own labor, which were pitilessly reduced by
rents and taxes, nor make any effective peaceful protest in behalf of
political change. The American Revolution was the voice of the colonies
protesting against the possible repetition of such conditions on this
side the water, and the French Revolution was the harsh voice of a
downtrodden people calling for redress.
No man could better appreciate the promise of life in America than one
who had felt the oppression of the old conditions and had then enjoyed
the freedom of the new ones. In the same years when the wiser leaders
in the colonies were viewing with alarm the aggressive and mistaken
policies of George III and his ministers, a young Frenchman, educated
in England, came over to this country, settled and prospered on his own
land, and was so delighted with his life as a farmer and a citizen that
he could not refrain from making a record of his happy circumstances.
This was Michel Guillaume St. John de Crèvecoeur, and his book was
the "Letters from an American Farmer," published in London in 1782,
though written almost entirely before the outbreak of the Revolution.
It is made up of twelve so-called letters addressed to an imaginary
English friend. Two of these are about his direct experience on his own
acres in the middle colonies; five are on the people and the country
in northern colonies, as he found them in Marthas Vineyard, Nantucket,
and Cape Cod; one is drawn from observations in South Carolina; and the
other four are less related to definite places, three being on nature
themes, and one--the most important of all--on the ever-new question,
"What is an American?"
With industry and frugality hardly less than Franklin's, Crèvecoeur
had also a certain power of poetic imagination and fresh enthusiasm.
He was writing from a kind of earthly paradise. Seen against the
background of unhappy France, the rights to own, to earn, and to have
a voice in governing himself seemed almost too good to be true. He had
no misconceptions about the hard labor which was necessary to make
a farm productive; but he enjoyed work because he knew that he could
enjoy the fruits of it, and he enjoyed it all the more because he knew
that in making an ear of corn grow where none had grown before he was
the best kind of pioneer. To his sorrow he knew much about the ugliness
of an old civilization; it was with the zest of a youthful lover that
he wrote about the beauty of this new country's inexperience.
He felt a perfect satisfaction in his own state of mind and body.
Although he was a newcomer, he had a sense of belonging to the district
as complete as Emerson, with two centuries of ancestry, was later
to have; and, with a pride equal to Emerson's in "Hamatreya," could
"affirm, my actions smack of the soil." With his baby boy ingeniously
rigged before him on the plow, he reckoned the increase of his fields,
herds, flocks,--even his hives,--and acknowledged his inferiority "only
to the Emperor of China, ploughing as an example to his kingdom." Then,
looking beyond his own little acreage, he hinted at future industries.
He was tilling the surface; there must be further treasures below. He
and his neighbors were weaving the natural wool; some chemist must
make and prepare colors. Commerce must follow on the heels of abundant
production; "the avenues of trade are infinite." And in time the
deep vast of the West, about which men had yet such feeble and timid
fancies, must be explored and subjugated in its turn.
Here we have, in some measure, regained the ancient dignity of our
species: our laws are simple and just; we are a race of cultivators;
our cultivation is unrestrained, and therefore everything is
prosperous and flourishing. For my part I had rather admire the ample
barn of one of our opulent farmers, who himself felled the first
tree in his plantation, and was first founder of his settlement,
than study the dimension of the temple of Ceres. I had rather record
the progressive steps of this industrious farmer, throughout all the
stages of his labor and other operations, than examine how modern
Italian convents can be supported without doing anything but singing
and praying.
Moreover, above all the material resources of field, forest, and
mountain, he was glad for the human stream which was flowing into
America to fertilize them. The thrifty people who were shrewd and bold
enough to come over from Great Britain and northern Europe were to
profit by nature's gifts, and in the experience were to be welded "into
one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared." If it
is fair to say that the history of immigration to America falls into
three general periods, Crèvecoeur was writing about the very midst
of the middle period, from 1675 to 1875. First had been a half century
when only the strongest spirit of adventure or the strongest desire
for freedom could impel men to attempt the conquest of an untried
world. Every Englishman who came over and every American born here was
conscious of the need of more hands to work, and all were eager for
more Englishmen, and yet more, to help in the gigantic undertaking. In
the last forty years, with the taking up of all the available land and
the manning of the industries, the millions who have flooded in, not
alone from England or Great Britain but mainly from southern Europe and
the near East, have arrived as new mouths to feed. The problem has been
not so much how they could help America as how America could take care
of them; and with their arrival a feeling of perplexity and alarm has
arisen such as was expressed in 1892 by Thomas Bailey Aldrich in his
"Unguarded Gates":
... Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild motley throng--
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav,
Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn;
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
Those, tiger passions here to stretch their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues are loud,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? ...
Have a care
Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn
And trampled in the dust....
But Crèvecoeur was living between these two periods. The first conquest
of the Eastern woods and fields had been made. America was known to be
a land of plenty, and as yet there was more than plenty for all the
newcomers from England and the neighboring countries of northern Europe.
There seemed to be no limit to its resources. And so he wrote:
What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither a European,
nor the descendant of a European: hence that strange mixture of
blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out
to you a family, whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife
was Dutch, whose son married a Frenchwoman, and whose present four
sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American,
who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners,
receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the
new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an
American by being received in the broad lap of our great "alma
mater." Here individuals are melted into a new race of men, whose
labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.
Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them
that great mass of arts, sciences, vigor and industry, which began
long since in the East. They will finish the great circle.
There was an artistic strain in this man who could so easily kindle
with enthusiasm and who could express his enthusiasms with such
rhythmic eloquence. The special subjects on which he could best vent
his poetic powers were found in his passages and his occasional whole
chapters on nature themes--in particular the letters on "John Bartram,
Botanist," and "The Snakes and the Humming Bird." In these it is
impossible not to feel the resemblances between this early naturalist
and his successor, Thoreau (see pp. 222-229). While neither was a
scientist in the strict sense of the word, neither was content to
dismiss nature subjects with mere words of general appreciation. Both
were interested enough to observe in detail and to record with some
exactness the ways of plants, flowers, birds, and insects; but both
were at their best when they were giving way to the real zest they had
in the enjoyment of the out of doors.
Who can listen unmoved to the sweet love-tales of our robins, told
from tree to tree, or to the shrill cat-birds? The sublime accents
of the thrush, from on high, always retard my steps, that I may
listen to the delicious music.... The astonishing art which all birds
display in the construction of their nests, ill-provided as we may
suppose them with proper tools, their neatness, their convenience,
always make me ashamed of the slovenliness of our houses. Their love
to their dame, their incessant, careful attention, and the peculiar
songs they address to her while she tediously incubates their eggs,
remind me of my duty, could I ever forget it. Their affection to
their helpless little ones is a lovely precept; and, in short, the
whole economy of what we call the brute creation, is admirable in
every circumstance; and vain man, though adorned with the additional
gift of reason, might learn from the perfection of instinct, how to
regulate the follies, and how to temper the errors, which this second
gift often makes him commit.... I have often blushed within myself,
and been greatly astonished, when I have compared the unerring path
they all follow,--all just, all proper, all wise, up to the necessary
degree of perfection--with the coarse, the imperfect, systems of men.
For generations the beauties of nature had held small place in English
literature, because the English men of letters were a completely
citified set of writers; and they had received little attention in
America, partly because England gave American writers no reminder and
partly because nature in America had been chiefly something to struggle
with.
So enthusiastic was Crèvecoeur over conditions in America, and so
certain was he that they never would be disturbed in any unfortunate
way, that the twentieth-century reader looks over his pre-Revolution
pages with a kind of wistful impatience. About many aspects of the
material development of the country Crèvecoeur was keenly prophetic.
Throughout eleven of the letters, evidently written before 1775, he
continued in an exalted and confident mood. Whether he was presenting
the "provincial situations, manners and customs" of Nantucket and
Marthas Vineyard, or of the central Atlantic, or of the Southern
colonies, his senses and his judgment were equally satisfied. Industry
prevailed. The wilderness was being converted into towns, farms, and
highways. "A pleasing uniformity of decent competence" was a rule of
the democracy. The indulgent laws were fair to the laborer and the
voter. He seemed to feel that the era of prosperity would last till
the end of the world. His vision of the future was the vision of a man
perched in the small end of an infinite horn of plenty, with a vista
unclouded by the hint of any limit to the supply or of any possible
conflict between gluttony and hunger.
In fact, along the whole coast there was only one practice which
deserved the name of a problem, and that was the institution of
slavery. Against this, which existed both North and South, Crèvecoeur
protested just as Samuel Sewall and John Woolman had done before him,
and as Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow in Connecticut and William
Pinkney and other lawmakers and abolitionists in Maryland and Virginia
were to do soon after him. Yet, however sincere he was, he regarded
slavery only as an external blemish rather than as a national danger.
It was a mistake, but not a menace. It was typical of the America
of the future that Crèvecoeur should have had so unquestioning a
confidence in the prospect. The belief in a "manifest destiny" for
America, which is finely inspiring for all who will work to bring
about a glorious future, has been demoralizing to millions who have
used a lazy belief in it to excuse them from feeling or exercising any
responsibility.
With the twelfth letter came a total change of key. It was evidently
written long after all the others, after the outburst of war, perhaps
after his New Jersey property had been burned, possibly even during
his return voyage to France in the autumn of 1780. As a naturalized
subject of King George, when well on in middle life he had been
forced to choose between his sworn allegiance and the interests of
his fellow-colonists. He sympathized with the American cause, though
he did not enlist. And then in the years that followed he learned
(the perennial lesson of war time) of the "vanity of human wishes."
Unhappily for the moral of the tale, the latter part of his life was
far from heroic. In the concluding letter, written quite after the
fashion of the most sentimental and unreal eighteenth-century nature
lovers, Crèvecoeur decided to abandon the struggle in the war zone
and to take up life anew with his family among the Indians in the West.
He would forswear all talk of politics, "contemplate nature in her
most wild and ample extent," and formulate among his adopted neighbors
a new system of happiness. As a matter of fact, however, his retreat
was even more complete than this; for he returned permanently to the
Continent, lived contentedly in Paris, London, and Munich, married his
daughter to a French count, wrote volumes on Pennsylvania and New York,
and memorialized his career as a farmer by inditing a paper on potato
culture.
Although such a turn of events resulted in very much of an anticlimax,
this fact should not make one forget the prophetic quality in his
"Letters," nor should his failure to predict every aspect of modern
life throw any shadow on the clearness with which he foretold some of
the most important of them. It is true, of course, that he did not
appreciate how tragic were to be the fruits of slavery; that he saw
immigration only as a desirable supply of labor to a continent which
could never be overpopulated; that, writing before the earliest chapter
of the factory era, he did not dream of the industrial complexities of
the present. But when he said that the American, sprung from Europe but
here adopted into a new nation, "ought therefore to love this country
much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born,"
he was saying something that has been repeated with new conviction
ten thousand times since the outbreak of the Great War. And when he
declared that "the American is a new man, who acts upon new principles"
he was foreshadowing national policies which the world has been slow
to understand. The possibility of a nation's being too proud to fight
at the first provocation, and the subordination of national interest
to the interest of mankind--this is the language of the new principles
that Crèvecoeur was invoking. It is nearly a century and a half
since he tried to answer the question "What is an American?" Much has
happened since then. Internally the country has developed to the extent
of his farthest dreams, and in the world-family, after five great wars,
it has become one of the greatest of the powers, fulfilling so much of
his predictions that one speculates in all humility on what may be the
next steps "for that new race of men whose labours and posterity will
one day cause great changes in the world."
BOOK LIST
=_Individual Author_=
MICHEL GUILLAUME ST. JEAN DE CRÈVECOEUR. Letters from an American
Farmer. Written for the information of a friend in England. Edited
by J. Hector St. John. 1782.
=Available Editions=
Letters from an American Farmer. Ludwig Lewisohn, editor. With
prefatory note by W. P. Trent. 1904.
W. B. Blake, editor. In _Everyman's Library_.
=Biography and Criticism=
BOYNTON, PERCY H. A Colonial Farmer's Letters. _New Republic_,
June 19, 1915.
MITCHELL, JULIA POST. St. Jean de Crèvecoeur. 1916.
TYLER, M. C. Literary History of the American Revolution
(1765-1783), Vol. II, chap. xxvii. 1897.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read the characterization of the American colonies in Burke's "Speech
on Conciliation."
Read the letter entitled "What is an American?" and see how far its
generalizations apply to the America of to-day.
Read Zangwill's play "The Melting Pot" in the light of this letter on
"What is an American?"
Read passages which deal with nature for Crèvecoeur's observation on
plant and animal life.
Read the closing essay in comparison with Rousseau's "Émile" for its
romantic idealization of primitive life. Compare this essay with the
picture of frontier life as presented in "The Deerslayer" or "The Last
of the Mohicans." Note the resemblances to Châteaubriand's "René."
Read the opening chapters or divisions of Thoreau's "Walden" and
compare with the Crèvecoeur "Letters" in point of the contrasting
views on property, labor, and citizenship.
Read Mary Antin's "The Promised Land" for the differences in the
America to which Crèvecoeur came and the America which she found.
CHAPTER VI
THE POETRY OF THE REVOLUTION AND PHILIP FRENEAU
With the Revolutionary War there was naturally a great output of
printed matter. Controversial pamphlets, state papers, diaries,
letters, and journals, plays (with prologues and epilogues), songs,
ballads and satires, all swelled the total. No one can fully understand
the Revolution or the period after it who does not read extensively in
this material; yet, taken in its length and breadth, the prose and most
of the verse are important as history rather than as literature. Out of
the numerous company of writers who were producing while Franklin was
an aging man and while Crèvecoeur was an American farmer, one, Philip
Freneau, may be considered as chief representative, and two others,
Francis Hopkinson and John Trumbull, deserve a briefer comment.
Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791), the Philadelphian, was well
characterized in a much-quoted letter from John Adams to his wife in
August, 1776:
At this shop I met Mr. Francis Hopkinson, late a mandamus councillor
of New Jersey, now a member of the Continental Congress, who ... was
liberally educated, and is a painter and a poet.... He is one of your
pretty little, curious, ingenious men.... He is genteel and well-bred
and is very social. I wish I had leisure and tranquillity of mind
to amuse myself with those elegant and ingenious arts of painting,
sculpture, statuary, architecture and music. But I have not.
Undoubtedly Hopkinson's work savors of the dilettante throughout; yet
part of its historical significance is inherent in this fact, for
Hopkinson is one of the earliest examples of talented versatility in
American life. He had virtues to complement the accomplishments half
enviously cited by John Adams. He was a learned judge, a stalwart
revolutionist, a practical man of affairs, and a humorist.
His collected writings in three volumes were done in the best manner
of eighteenth-century England. Five sixths of them are essays,
written not in series, but quite of the _Spectator_ type. Three prose
satires--"A Pretty Story" (1774), "A Prophecy" (1776), and "The New
Roof" (1778)--are as important a trio as any written by one man in the
Revolutionary days. The other sixth--his verse--belonged no less to the
polite literature of the period. There are Miltonic imitations, songs,
sentiments, hymns, a fable, and a piece of advice to a young lady.
There are occasional poems, including birthday and wedding greetings,
dramatic prologues and epilogues, elegies, and rimed epitaphs. Verses
of these kinds, if they were all Hopkinson had written, would indicate
a hopeless subservience to prevailing English fashions. But Hopkinson
was nobody's vassal. When he wrote
My generous heart disdains
The slave of love to be,
I scorn his servile chains,
And boast my liberty,
he might as truly have asserted his refusal to submit to any sort of
trammels except at his own option. Into a few imitation ballads he
poured the new wine of Revolutionary sentiment, one of which, "The
Battle of the Kegs," with its mocking jollity, put good cheer in all
colonial hearts in the times that tried men's souls. It was his jaunty
self-control, the quality of heroism without its pompous mannerisms,
that set Hopkinson off in contrast with his fellows. He was almost the
least pretentious of them all, yet few were more effective.
John Trumbull (1750-1831), most talented of the "Hartford Wits," tried
his hand, like Hopkinson, at the conventional poetical subjects, but,
unlike him, the bulk of his verse was contained in two long satirical
essays: "The Progress of Dulness" (1772 and 1773) and "M'Fingal" (1776
and 1782). Apparently he had no further ambition for himself or other
American poets than to
bid their lays with lofty Milton vie;
Or wake from nature's themes the moral song,
And shine with Pope, with Thompson and with Young.
This land her Swift and Addison shall view,
The former honors equalled by the new;
Here shall some Shakspeare charm the rising age,
And hold in magic chains the listening stage;
A second Watts shall strike the heavenly lyre,
And other muses other bards inspire.
Nevertheless, in these two satires he wrote first from a provincial and
then from an early national point of view. "The Progress of Dulness"
is a disquisition on how not to bring up children. He chose for his
examples Tom Brainless, Dick Hairbrain, and Harriet Simper. He put the
boys through college (Trumbull was a graduate of Yale), making one a
dull preacher and the other a rake. Harriet, the American counterpart
of Biddy Tipkin in Steele's "Tender Husband" or Arabella in Mrs.
Lennox's "The Female Quixote," is fed on flattery, social ambition, and
the romantic fiction of the hour (see p. 103), becomes a coquette and a
jilt, and, thrown over by Dick, sinks into obscurity as the faded wife
of Parson Tom. This was homemade satire, democratic in its choice and
treatment of character, and clearly located in and about New Haven,
Connecticut.
So also, and much more aggressively, was the rimed political
document "M'Fingal," an immensely popular diatribe at the Tory of
the Revolution--his attitude, his general demeanor, and his methods
of argument. It recounts the events of a day in a New England town
which was torn by the dissensions between the rival factions in the
opening days of the conflict, and describes in detail the ways in
which this particularly offensive Tory was driven to cover. The modern
reader must bring to it a good deal of student interest if he expects
to complete the reading and understand it, even with the aid of
Trumbull's copious footnotes. For the moment it was a skillful piece
of journalistic writing. Trumbull knew how to appeal to the prejudices
of his sympathizers (for controversial war writing confirms rather
than convinces); he knew how to draw on their limited store of general
knowledge; and he knew how to lead them on with a due employment of
literary ingenuities like puns, multiple rimes, and word elisions,
and a judicious resort to rough jocosity and vituperation. "M'Fingal"
was war literature with all its defects of passion, uncandor, and
speciousness, but the score or more of editions through which it ran
before 1800 are evidence that it reached the low mark at which it was
aimed. If it had the faults of its kind, so in later years did "Uncle
Tom's Cabin" and "Mr. Britling sees it Through."
This most representative poet of the Revolutionary period was Philip
Freneau, who lived from 1752 to 1832 and who was active in authorship
for forty-five years, from 1770 on. He was a graduate of Princeton
College in 1771, gained a sudden reputation as a political satirist in
1775, and lived a strangely varied life from then till well into the
nineteenth century. For three years he lived in Santa Cruz and Bermuda.
In 1779 he sailed to the Azores, and for a six-year period at a later
time he was engaged in Atlantic coast trade. From 1784 to 1807 he went
the circle in five stages as editor, seaman, editor, farmer, and seaman
again. Everything he did he seems to have done hard, and nothing held
him long. It is a kind of life which does not seem surprising in a
man who has often been called "Poet of the Revolution," for he wrote
as vigorously as he sailed or farmed or edited, and he plowed his
political satires quite as deep and straight as he plowed the seas and
the furrows of his fields. After his bitter experience of three months
on a British prison ship, he blazed out with a savage flame of verse
which has carried the horrors of this particular form of war brutality
down the centuries to greet the "atrocities" of the present. When
the editors of rival papers and rival parties annoyed him he scourged
them with a savageness of attack which was notable even in a day when
journalism knew no restraint and recognized no proprieties. Freneau had
at least one title to the friendship of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who loved
"a good hater."
This vehement side of his life resulted in a generous amount of war
poetry which would be remembered--or forgotten--with the best of the
rest of its kind if it were all that he had written. In a brief survey
like the present chapter it can therefore serve the double purpose of
illustrating the verse of the Revolution and of representing a less
important aspect of his whole work. In this respect it is comparable
to the Civil-War and antislavery poetry of Whittier. Sometimes this
verse is full of scorn, as in "The Midnight Consultations," in which
Lord Howe is ridiculed as presiding over a council which arrives at the
following heroic conclusion:
Three weeks--ye gods!--nay, three long years it seems
Since _roast beef_ I have touched, except in dreams,
In sleep, choice dishes to my view repair,
Waking, I gape and champ the empty air,--
* * * * *
On neighbouring isles uncounted cattle stray,
Fat beeves, and swine, an ill-defended prey--
These are fit victims for my noonday dish,
These, if my soldiers act as I would wish,
In one short week should glad your maws and mine;
On mutton we will sup--on roast beef dine.
Sometimes it is full of the hate which war always engenders. Freneau
wrote no more bitterly about the king, Lord North, and the leading
generals in active service against the colonists than did Jonathan
Odell--the foremost Tory satirist--about Washington and his associates.
As the war went on, and the likelihood of American success became
stronger, Freneau's tone softened, as he could well afford to have it,
and in such a product as "The Political Balance" he wrote with nothing
more offensive than the mockery of a rather ungenerous victor. This
poem, characterized by well-maintained humor, is one of the best of
its kind. It represents Jove as one day looking over the book of Fate
and of coming to an incomplete account of Britain, for the Fates had
neglected to reveal the outcome of the war. In order to find out for
himself, he directs Vulcan to make an exact model of the globe, borrows
the scales from Virgo, and plans to foretell the future by setting
the mother country on one side and the States on the other. When,
after many difficulties, the experiment is tried, of course the States
overbalance the little island. Then, to make sure, he adds the foreign
dominions on Britain's side,
But the gods were confounded and struck with surprise,
And Vulcan could hardly believe his own eyes!
For (such was the purpose and guidance of fate)
Her foreign dominions diminish'd her weight--
By which it appeared, to Britain's disaster,
Her foreign possessions were changing their master.
Then as he replac'd them, said Jove with a smile--
"Columbia shall never be rul'd by an isle--
But vapours and darkness around her shall rise,
And tempests conceal her a while from our eyes;
"So locusts in Egypt their squadrons display,
And rising, disfigure the face of the day;
So the moon, at her full, has a frequent eclipse,
And the sun in the ocean diurnally dips.
"Then cease your endeavors, ye vermin of Britain--
(And here, in derision, their island he spit on)
'T is madness to seek what you never can find,
Or think of uniting what nature disjoin'd;
"But still you may flutter awhile with your wings,
And spit out your venom, and brandish your stings,
Your hearts are as black, and as bitter as gall,
A curse to yourselves, and a blot on the Ball."
After the successful completion of the war it was only natural that
Americans in their rejoicing should imagine the glorious future that
awaited their new independence. The more vivid their imaginations were,
the more splendid were the prophecies they indulged in. As we read
over the records of their lofty hopes we are reminded of commencement
oratory; and the likeness is not unreal, for these post-Revolution
poets were in fact very like eager college graduates, diploma in hand,
looking forward to vague but splendid careers. It was in these poems
too that the germs of Fourth of July oratory first took root--the
oratory described by James Fenimore Cooper in his "Home as Found"
(chap. xxi):
There were the usual allusions to Greece and Rome, between the
republics of which and that of this country there exists some such
affinity as is to be found between a horse-chestnut and a chestnut
horse, or that of mere words; and a long catalogue of national
glories that might very well have sufficed for all republics, both
of antiquity and of our own time. But when the orator came to speak
of the American character, and particularly of the intelligence of
the nation, he was most felicitous, and made the largest investments
in popularity. According to his account of the matter, no other
people possessed a tithe of the knowledge, or a hundredth part of the
honesty and virtue of the very community he was addressing; and after
laboring for ten minutes to convince his hearers that they already
knew everything, he wasted several more in trying to persuade them to
undertake further acquisitions of the same nature.
These elephantine poems were written each in several "books," to each
one of which was prefixed an outline which, in the language of the day,
was called "the argument." Here is a part of the outline for Book VII
of Timothy Dwight's "Greenfield Hill" (1794):
Happiness of U. S. contrasted to Eastern Despotism. Universal
Prevalence of Freedom. Unfortified, and therefore safe, state
of U. S. Influence of our state of Society on the Mind. Public
Property employed for the Public Benefit. Penal Administrations
improved by Benevolence. Policy enlarges its scope. Knowledge
promoted. Improvements in Astronomical and other Instruments
of Science. Improvements of the Americans, in Natural
Philosophy--Poetry--Music--and Moral Science. State of the American
Clergy. Manners refined. Artificial Manners condemned. American
Women. Cultivation advanced. Other Nations visit this country, and
learn the nature, and causes, of our happiness. Conclusion.
And here is a part of the argument to Book IX of Joel Barlow's
"Columbiad," in which he demonstrates that the present government of
America is a culmination of all human progress:
... the ancient and modern states of the arts and of society,
Crusades, Commerce, Hanseatic League, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton,
Galileo, Herschel, Descartes, Bacon, Printing Press, Magnetic Needle,
Geographic Discoveries, Federal System in America.
Freneau had shared all this prophetic enthusiasm, and had expressed
it even before the war, partly in an actual commencement poem on "The
Rising Glory of America" and partly in a series of eighteen "Pictures
of Columbus." Just after graduation he had written:
I see, I see
A thousand Kingdoms rais'd, cities and men
Num'rous as sand upon the ocean shore;
Th' Ohio then shall glide by many a town
Of note; and where the Mississippi stream
By forests shaded now runs weeping on,
Nations shall grow, and States not less in fame
Than Greece and Rome of old; we too shall boast
Our Alexanders, Pompeys, heroes, kings,
That in the womb of time yet dormant lye
Waiting the joyful hour of life and light.
After the war, however, he did not rejoin the increasing choir who were
singing this kind of choral. His most interesting bit of prophecy,
which must have seemed to his contemporaries to be a piece of the
airiest fancy, has been amazingly verified more than a century after he
wrote it. This is "The Progress of Balloons," written in the jaunty tone
of "The Political Balance":
The stagemen, whose gallopers scarce have the power
Through the dirt to convey you ten miles in an hour,
When advanc'd to balloons shall so furiously drive
You'll hardly know whether you're dead or alive.
The man who at Boston sets out with the sun,
If the wind should be fair, may be with us at one,
At Gunpowder Ferry drink whiskey at three
And at six be at Edentown, ready for tea.
(The machine shall be order'd, we hardly need say,
To travel in darkness as well as by day)
At Charleston by ten he for sleep shall prepare,
And by twelve the next day be the devil knows where.
* * * * *
If Britain should ever disturb us again,
(As they threaten to do in the next George's reign)
No doubt they will play us a set of new tunes,
And pepper us well from their fighting balloons.
* * * * *
Such wonders as these from balloons shall arise--
And the giants of old that assaulted the skies
With their Ossa on Pelion, shall freely confess
That all they attempted was nothing to this.
This, of course, was newspaper poetry, and Freneau, for long years
of his life, was a newspaper man. Even his lines "To Sir Toby," a
slaveholding sugar-planter in Jamaica, spirited as they are, are in
effect an open letter in protest against human slavery, and they were
printed in the _National Gazette_ in 1792.
The really poetical work of Freneau, however, which entitles him to an
attention greater than that for his fellows, had nothing to do with
political or military events of the day. They were his shorter poems on
American nature and American tradition; and a distinguishing feature
of them was that they were different from the English poetry of the
time, in form as well as in content. As a young man Freneau had set
out on his career by writing after the style of Milton and Dryden and
Pope and their lesser imitators. This was absolutely natural. Until
after the Revolution, America was England; and it was more nearly like
England in speech and in thought than much of Scotland and Ireland
are to-day. All the refinements of America were derived from English
sources; practically all the colonists' reading was from English
authors. But after the Revolution there came a strong reaction of
feeling. We can look to Freneau's own rimes (journalistic ones again)
for an explanation of the new and native quality of his later verse;
they are called "Literary Importation," and they conclude as follows:
It seems we had spirit to humble a throne,
Have genius for science inferior to none,
But hardly encourage a plant of our own:
If a college be planned
'Tis all at a stand
'Till to Europe we send at a shameful expense,
To send us a bookworm to teach us some sense.
Can we never be thought to have learning or grace
Unless it be brought from that horrible place
Where tyranny reigns with her impudent face;
And popes and pretenders
And sly faith-defenders
Have ever been hostile to reason and wit,
Enslaving a world that shall conquer them yet.
'Tis a folly to fret at the picture I draw:
And I say what was said by a Doctor Magraw;
"If they give us their Bishops, they'll give us their law."
How that will agree
With such people as we,
Let us leave to the learned to reflect on awhile,
And say what they think in a handsomer stile.
As a consequence of this feeling that America should be different,
the tendency grew to seek out native subject matter and to cease
conscious imitation of English literary models. For the next half
century American authors were contending, every now and then, that
native themes should occupy their attention, and a good deal of
verse and prose was written with this idea in mind. Most of it was
more conscientious than interesting, for literature, to be genuinely
effective, must be produced not to demonstrate a theory but to express
what is honestly in the author's mind. The first step toward achieving
nationality in American writing was, therefore, to achieve new and
independent habits of national thinking. The Irish mind, for example,
is basically different from the English mind, and Irish literature has
therefore a long and beautiful history of its own, in spite of the fact
that Ireland is near to England and subject to it. But the Australian
is simply a transplanted English-speaking, English-thinking mind, and
Australia has consequently produced no literature of which the world is
yet aware.
Now Freneau was a naturally independent thinker. He was educated and
well read in the best of English and classical literature. But unlike
most of his fellow authors, he was not a city man, nor a teacher,
preacher, or lawyer. His hands were hardened by the steersman's
wheel and the plow, and doubtless much of his verse--or at least the
inspiration for it--came to him on shipboard or in the field rather
than in the library. In the midst of the crowd he was an easy man to
stir up to fighting pitch. All his war verse shows this. Yet when he
was alone and undisturbed he inclined to placid meditation, and he
expressed himself in the simplest ways. As a young man he wrote a
little poem called "Retirement." It is the kind of thing that many
other eighteenth-century poets--confirmed city dwellers--wrote in
moments of temporary world-weariness; but Freneau's life-story shows
that he really meant it:
A cottage I could call my own
Remote from domes of care;
A little garden, wall'd with stone,
The wall with ivy overgrown,
A limpid fountain near,
Would more substantial joys afford,
More real bliss impart
Than all the wealth that misers hoard,
Than vanquish'd worlds, or worlds restor'd--
Mere cankers of the heart!
And there was another poem of his youth which told a secret of his
real character. This was "The Power of Fancy," an imitation of Milton
in its form, but genuinely Freneau's in its sentiment. The best of his
later work is really a compound of these suggestions--poems of fancy
composed in retirement. Thus he wrote on "The Indian Burying Ground,"
interpreting the fact that
The Indian, when from life releas'd,
Again is seated with his friends
And shares again the joyous feast,
instead of being buried recumbent as white men are. And thus he wrote
in "To a Caty-did," "The Wild Honeysuckle," and "On a Honey Bee,"
little lyrics of nature and natural life, which were almost the first
verse written in America based on native subject matter and expressed
in simple, direct, and unpretentious form.
Nathaniel Ames, in one of his early almanacs, recorded soberly:
MAY
Now Winters rage abates, now chearful Hours
Awake the Spring, and Spring awakes the Flowers.
The opening Buds salute the welcome Day,
And Earth relenting, feels the genial Ray.
The Blossoms blow, the Birds on Bushes sing;
And Nature has accomplish'd all the Spring.
This was perfectly conventional and perfectly indefinite; not a single
flower, bud, blossom, bird, or bush is specified. The six lines amount
to a general formula for spring and would apply equally well to
Patagonia, Italy, New England, or northern Siberia. Mr. R. Lewis, who
wrote on "A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis" in 1730, improves on
this:
First born of _Spring_, here the _Pacone_ appears.
Whose golden Root a silver Blossom rears.
In spreading Tufts see there the _Crowfoot_, blue,
On whose green Leaves still shines a globous Dew;
Behold the _Cinque-foil_, with its dazling Dye
Of flaming Yellow, wounds the tender Eye.
But there enclos'd the grassy Wheat is seen
To heal the aching Sight with cheerful Green.
Lewis mentions definite flowers, colors, and characteristics, but
he never misses a chance to tuck in a conventional adjective or
participle, and he is led by them into weaving the extravagant fancy
of an eye made to ache by flaming and dazzling colors, and healed by
the cheerful green of the wheat field. In contrast to these, Freneau's
little nature poems are as exact as the second and as simple as the
subject on which he writes:
In a branch of willow hid
Sings the evening Caty-did:
From the lofty locust bough
Feeding on a drop of dew.
In her suit of green array'd
Hear her singing in the shade,
Caty-did, Caty-did, Caty-did.
Such simplicity as this does not seem at all remarkable to-day, but if
it be compared with the fixed formalities that belonged to almost all
the verse of Freneau's time it will stand out as a remarkable exception.
On account of the two kinds of poetry which Freneau published he has
often been given misleading titles by his admirers. Those who have been
interested in him mainly or exclusively from the historical point of
view have christened him the "Poet of the American Revolution." This
is unfair because of the implication that he gave his best energy to
this and had no other right to distinction. Even as a journalist he was
more than poet of the Revolution, since he wrote on local and timely
themes for many years after its close. This designation does not claim
enough for him. The other title is defective for the opposite reason,
that it claims too much. This is the "Father of American Poetry." Such
a sweeping phrase ought to be avoided resolutely. It is doubly false,
in suggesting that there was no American poetry before he wrote and
that everything since has been derived from him. The facts are that he
had a native poetic gift which would have led to his writing poetry
had there never been a war between the colonies and England, but that
when the war came on he was one of the most effective penmen on his
side; that entrance into the field of public affairs diverted him from
the paths of quiet life; that after the war he continued both kinds of
writing. He never ceased wholly to think and write about "affairs," but
more and more he speculated on the future, dreamed of the picturesque
past, and played with themes of graceful and tender sentiment. He is
very much worth reading as a commentator on his own times, and he is no
less worth reading for the beauty of many poems quite without reference
to the time or place in which they were written.
* * * * *
The long and fruitful colonial period must not be overlooked by any
honest student of American literature, yet it may fairly be regarded
as no more than a preparatory stage. It has the same relationship to
the whole story as do the ancestry, boyhood, and education to the
development of an individual. In the broad and brief survey attempted
in these chapters a few leading facts have been reviewed about the
youth of America: (1) Everything characteristic of the early settlers
was derived directly from England, those in the South representing
the aristocratic traditions of king and court, and those in the
North reflecting the democratic revolt of the Puritans. As a natural
consequence of these differences the writing of books soon waned in
Virginia and the neighboring colonies, but developed consistently in
Massachusetts and New England. (2) The attempt of the Puritans to
force all New Englanders to think the same thoughts and worship in the
same way was unsuccessful from the start, and the most interesting
writers of the seventeenth century reveal the spread of disturbing
influences. The first three chosen as examples are Thomas Morton, the
frank and unscrupulous enemy of the Puritans; Nathaniel Ward, a sturdy
Puritan who was alarmed at the growth of anti-Puritan influences; and
Roger Williams, a deeply religious preacher, who rebelled against the
control of the Church in New England just as he and others had formerly
rebelled in the mother country. (3) Even in the first half century a
good deal of verse was written: sometimes, as in the case of "The Day
of Doom," as a mere rimed statement of Puritan theology; but sometimes,
as in the case of Anne Bradstreet and her followers, as an expression
of real poetic feeling. (4) With the passage to the eighteenth century
the community was clearly slipping from the grasp of the Puritans.
Evidence is ample from three types of colonists: the Mathers, who
were fighting a desperate but losing battle to retain control; Samuel
Sewall, who, although a Puritan, was willing to accept reasonable
changes; and Mrs. Sarah Kemble Knight, who said little at the time,
but in her private journals showed the existence of growing disrespect
for the old habits of thought. (5) Benjamin Franklin, whose work is
more valuable than that of any of his predecessors, is also completely
representative of the complete swing away from religious enthusiasm
to a hard-headed worldliness which was prevailing in England in the
eighteenth century. (6) On the other hand, Crèvecoeur, writing just
before the Revolution, sounded the note of thanksgiving to the Lord
that America was different from the Old World, and emphasized what were
the conditions of life that were worth fighting to save. (7) Finally,
out of all the roster of talented writers during the Revolutionary War,
Freneau was selected as the most gifted poet of the period, both as an
indirect recorder of the conflict and as an author of poetry on native
themes in no way related to the war.
BOOK LIST
=_General References_=
ADAMS, H. B. Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia. 1888.
FISKE, JOHN. The Critical Period of American History. Chap. ii. 1888.
OTIS, WILLIAM BRADLEY. American Verse, 1625-1807. 1909.
PATTERSON, SAMUEL WHITE. The Spirit of the American Revolution as
Revealed in the Poetry of the Period (contains good bibliography).
1915.
RICHARDSON, C. F. American Literature. Chaps. i, vi, viii. 1887.
TUCKER, S. M. In chap. ix of Cambridge History of American
Literature, Vol. I, Bk. I.
TYLER, M. C. The Literary History of the American Revolution, chaps.
ix, xix, xx, xxi, xxvi, xxviii, xxix, xxxi, xxxii. 1897.
VAN TYNE, C. H. The Loyalists in the American Revolution. 1902.
WENDELL, BARRETT. Literary History of America, chaps. vii, viii, ix.
1900.
For spirit of the times read Familiar Letters of John and Abigail
Adams. 1876.
=General Bibliography=
Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 457-467.
=_Individual Authors_=
FRANCIS HOPKINSON. Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings.
1792. 3 vols. The latter half of the third volume contains in
separate paging (1-204) his Poems on Several Subjects. (There has
been no reprinting.)
=Available Edition=
The Old Farm and the New Farm: a Political Allegory (edited by
B. J. Lossing). 1864.
=Biography and Criticism=
HILDEBURN, C. R. A Biographical Sketch of Francis Hopkinson.
1878.
MARBLE, MRS. A. R. Francis Hopkinson, Man of Affairs and
Letters. _New England Magazine_, Vol. XXVII, p. 289.
TYLER, M. C. The Literary History of the American Revolution,
Vol. I, chap. viii, pp. 163-171; chap. xii, pp. 279-292; chap.
xxii, pp. 487-490; and Vol. II, chap. xxx, pp. 130-157.
=Collections=
BOYNTON, PERCY H. American Poetry, pp. 35-42, 604-606.
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 372-383.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 209-219.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol.
III, pp. 236-251.
JOHN TRUMBULL. Poetical Works. 2 vols. Hartford, 1820. Progress of
Dulness. Part I, The Rare Adventures of Tom Brainless, 1772;
Part II, The Life and Character of Dick Hairbrain of Finical
Memory, 1773; Part III, The Adventures of Miss Harriet Simper,
1773. M'Fingal: a Modern Epic Poem. Canto I; or, The Town Meeting
(includes what is now Cantos I and II). 1776. Completed with
Cantos III and IV. 1782.
=Available Edition=
M'Fingal; an Epic Poem (edited by B. J. Lossing). 1860, 1864,
1881.
=Collections=
BOYNTON, PERCY H. American Poetry, pp. 43-57, 58-88, 606-610,
611-614.
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 395-408.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 308-319.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol.
III, pp. 422-429; Vol. IV, pp. 89-92.
PHILIP FRENEAU. Poems. Printed for the Princeton Historical
Association. F. L. Pattee, editor. 1902-1907. 3 vols.
=Available Edition=
Poems of Philip Freneau relating to the American Revolution. E.
A. Duyckinck, editor. 1865.
=Bibliography=
A volume compiled by Victor H. Paltsits. 1903.
=Biography and Criticism=
AUSTIN, MARY S. Philip Freneau, the Poet of the Revolution. 1901.
DELANCEY, E. F. Philip Freneau, the Huguenot Patriot-Poet, etc.
_Proceedings of the Huguenot Soc. of Amer., Vol. II, No. 2._
1891.
FORMAN, SAMUEL E. The Political Activities of Philip Freneau.
_Johns Hopkins University Studies, Ser. 20, Nos. 9, 10._ 1902.
=Collections=
BOYNTON, PERCY H. American Poetry, pp. 89-117, 614-618.
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 431-448.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 327-348.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol.
III, pp. 445-457.
TIMOTHY DWIGHT. There are no recent editions of Dwight. These
appeared originally as follows: The Conquest of Canaan, 1784; The
Triumph of Infidelity, 1788; Greenfield Hill, 1794; Travels in New
England and New York, 1823.
=Biography and Criticism=
DWIGHT, W. T. and S. E. Memoir prefixed to Dwight's Theology. 4
vols.
SPRAGUE, W. B. The Life of Timothy Dwight, in Vol. XIV of
Sparks's _Library of American Biography_.
SPRAGUE, W. B. Annals of the American Pulpit, Vol. II.
TYLER, M. C. Three Men of Letters, pp. 72-127. 1895.
Introduction to the Poems of Philip Freneau (edited by F. L.
Pattee), Vol. I, pp. c, ci. 1902.
=Collections=
BOYNTON, PERCY H. American Poetry, pp. 118-124, 618-621.
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 409-420.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 357-365.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol.
III, pp. 426-429 and 463-483.
JOEL BARLOW. His epic is accessible only in early editions. His
poetical work appeared originally as follows: The Vision of
Columbus, 1787; The Columbiad, 1807; Hasty Pudding, 1847.
=Biography and Criticism=
TODD, C. B. Life and Letters of Joel Barlow. 1886.
TYLER, M. C. Three Men of Letters, pp. 131-180. 1895.
=Collections=
BOYNTON, PERCY H. American Poetry, pp. 125-135, 621-624.
CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 421-430.
DUYCKINCK, E. A. and G. L. Cyclopedia of American Literature,
Vol. I, pp. 391-404.
STEDMAN and HUTCHINSON. Library of American Literature, Vol.
III, pp. 422-429, and Vol. IV, pp. 46-57.
=_Literary Treatment of the Period_=
=Drama=
In _Representative Plays by American Dramatists_ (edited by M.
J. Moses), Vol. I. 1918.
The Group; a Farce, by Mrs. Mercy Warren.
The Battle of Bunker's Hill, by H. H. Brackenridge.
The Fall of British Tyranny; or, American Liberty, by John
Leacock.
The Politician Outwitted, by Samuel Low.
The Contrast, by Royall Tyler.[3]
André, by William Dunlap.[3]
=Fiction=
CHURCHILL, WINSTON. Richard Carvel.
COOPER, J. F. Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston.
COOPER, J. F. The Pilot.
COOPER, J. F. The Spy.
FORD, P. L. Janice Meredith.
HARTE, BRET. Thankful Blossom.
JEWETT, SARAH ORNE. The Tory Lover.
KENNEDY, J. P. Horse Shoe Robinson.
MITCHELL, S. WEIR. Hugh Wynne.
SIMMS, W. GILMORE. The Partisan.
SIMMS, W. GILMORE. The Scout.
=Poetry=
Poems of American History (edited by B. E. Stevenson), pp.
125-265.
American History by American Poets (edited by M. V. Wallington),
Vol. I, pp. 125-293.
[3] Also in _Representative American Plays_ (edited by A. H.
Quinn). 1917.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
In a survey course enough material is presented for Hopkinson,
Trumbull, Dwight, and Barlow in the collections mentioned in the
Book List for this chapter. The only reprint available of Lewis's
interesting "Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis" is in "American
Poetry" (P. H. Boynton, editor), pp. 24-29. These poems are chiefly
significant for the combination of English form and American subject
matter.
* * * * *
Compare Trumbull's comments on the education of girls with the
corresponding passage by Mrs. Malaprop, in Sheridan's "The Rivals," and
with Fitz-Greene Halleck's comments on the education of Fanny, in the
poem of that name (see "American Poetry," pp. 127, 128, and 155, 156).
* * * * *
Compare Dwight's "Farmer's Advice to the Villagers," "Greenfield Hill,"
Pt. VI, with Benjamin Franklin's "The Way to Wealth."
* * * * *
Compare the nationalistic note in the seventh and ninth books of
Barlow's "Vision of Columbus" with that in Timrod's "Ethnogenesis" and
that in Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation." Do the dates of the three
poems suggest a progressive change? (See "American Poetry," pp. 123,
349, and 577.)
* * * * *
Read Freneau's more bitter war satires in comparison with Jonathan
Odell's "Congratulation" and "The American Times," for which see
"American Poetry," pp. 78-83.
* * * * *
Read Freneau's more jovial war satires in comparison with Whittier's
"Letter from a Missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church" ("American
Poetry," p. 255); John R. Thompson's "On to Richmond" ("American
Poetry," p. 325); Edmund C. Stedman's "How Old Brown took Harper's
Ferry" ("American Poetry," p. 317); and Lowell's "Biglow Papers."
* * * * *
Read Freneau's "Pictures of Columbus" in comparison with Lowell's
"Columbus" ("American Poetry," p. 382); Lanier's "Sonnets on Columbus"
("American Poetry," p. 458); and Joaquin Miller's "Columbus" ("American
Poetry," p. 564).
* * * * *
"The Progress of Balloons" derives its title from a whole series of
preceding "progress" poems. Cite others and compare them as you can.
* * * * *
With reference to Freneau's diction in nature passages as compared with
that of Ames and Lewis in the text, read Wordsworth's essay on "Poetic
Diction" prefatory to the lyrical ballads of 1798, with which Freneau
agreed and which he anticipated in certain of his poems.