IN the days when Connecticut counted in the national councils; when it
had _men_ in the patriot armies, in Washington’s Cabinet, in the Senate
of the United States—men like Israel Putnam, Roger Sherman, Oliver
Wolcott, Oliver Ellsworth,—in those same days there was a premature but
interesting literary movement in our little commonwealth. A band of
young graduates of Yale, some of them tutors in the college, or in
residence for their Master’s degree, formed themselves into a school for
the cultivation of letters. I speak advisedly in calling them a school:
they were a group of personal friends, united in sympathy by similar
tastes and principles; and they had in common certain definite,
coherent, and conscious aims. These were, first, to liberalize and
modernize the rigidly scholastic curriculum of the college by the
introduction of more elegant studies: the _belles lettres_, the _literae
humaniores_. Such was the plea of John Trumbull in his Master’s oration,
“An Essay on the Use and Advantages of the Fine Arts,” delivered at
Commencement, 1770; and in his satire, “The Progress of Dulness,” he had
his hit at the dry and dead routine of college learning. Secondly, these
young men resolved to supply the new republic with a body of poetry on a
scale commensurate with the bigness of American scenery and the vast
destinies of the nation: epics resonant as Niagara, and Pindaric odes
lofty as our native mountains. And finally, when, at the close of the
Revolutionary War, the members of the group found themselves reunited
for a few years at Hartford, they set themselves to combat, with the
weapon of satire, the influences towards lawlessness and separatism
which were delaying the adoption of the Constitution.
My earliest knowledge of this literary coterie was derived from an
article in _The Atlantic Monthly_ for February, 1865, “The Pleiades of
Connecticut.” The “Pleiades,” to wit, were John Trumbull, Timothy
Dwight, David Humphreys, Lemuel Hopkins, Richard Alsop, and Theodore
Dwight. The tone of the article was ironic. “Connecticut is pleasant,”
it said, “with wooded hills and a beautiful river; plenteous with
tobacco and cheese; fruitful of merchants, missionaries, peddlers, and
single women,—but there are no poets known to exist there . . . the
brisk little democratic state has turned its brains upon its machinery
. . . the enterprising natives can turn out any article on which a
profit can be made—except poetry.”
Massachusetts has always been somewhat condescending towards
Connecticut’s literary pretensions. Yet all through that very volume of
the _Atlantic_, from which I quote, run Mrs. Stowe’s “Chimney Corner”
papers and Donald Mitchell’s novel, “Doctor Johns”; with here and there
a story by Rose Terry and a poem by Henry Brownell. Nay, in an article
entitled “Our Battle Laureate,” in the May number of the magazine, the
“Autocrat” himself, who would always have his fling at Connecticut
theology and Connecticut spelling and pronunciation (“Webster’s
provincials,” forsooth! though _pater ipse_, the Rev. Abiel, had been a
Connecticut orthodox parson, a Yale graduate, and a son-in-law of
President Stiles),—the “Autocrat,” I say, takes off his hat to my old
East Hartford neighbor, Henry Howard Brownell.
He begins by citing the paper which I have been citing: “How came the
Muses to settle in Connecticut? . . . But the seed of the Muses has run
out. No more Pleiades in Hartford . . .”; and answers that, if the
author of the article asks Nathanael’s question, putting Hartford for
Nazareth, he can refer him to Brownell’s “Lyrics of a Day.” “If Drayton
had fought at Agincourt, if Campbell had held a sabre at Hohenlinden, if
Scott had been in the saddle with Marmion, if Tennyson had charged with
the six hundred at Balaclava, each of these poets might possibly have
pictured what he said as faithfully and as fearfully as Mr. Brownell has
painted the sea fights in which he took part as a combatant.”
Many years later, when preparing a chapter on the literature of the
county for the “Memorial History of Hartford,” I came to close quarters
with the sweet influence of the Pleiades. I am one of the few
men—perhaps I am the only man—now living who have read the whole of
Joel Barlow’s “Columbiad.” “Is old Joel Barlow yet alive?” asks
Hawthorne’s crazy correspondent. “Unconscionable man! . . . And _does_
he meditate an epic on the war between Mexico and Texas, with machinery
contrived on the principle of the steam engine?” I also “perused” (good
old verb—the right word for the deed!) Dwight’s “Greenfield Hill”—a
meritorious action,—but I cannot pretend to have read his “Conquest of
Canaän” (the diaeresis is his, not mine), an epic in eleven books and in
heroic couplets. I dipped into it only far enough to note that the poet
had contrived to introduce a history of our Revolutionary War, by way of
episode, among the wars of Israel.
It must be acknowledged that this patriotic enterprise of creating a
national literature by _tour de force_, was undertaken when Minerva was
unwilling. These were able and eminent men: scholars, diplomatists,
legislators. Among their number were a judge of the Connecticut Supreme
Court, a college president, foreign ministers and ambassadors, a
distinguished physician, an officer of the Revolutionary army, intimate
friends of Washington and Jefferson. But, as poetry, a few little pieces
of the New Jersey poet, Philip Freneau,—“The Indian Student,” “The
Indian Burying Ground,” “To a Honey Bee,” “The Wild Honeysuckle,” and
“The Battle of Eutaw Springs,”—are worth all the epic and Pindaric
strains of the Connecticut bards. Yet “still the shore a brave attempt
resounds.” For they had few misgivings and a truly missionary zeal. They
formed the first Mutual Admiration Society in our literary annals.
Here gallant Humphreys charm’d the list’ning throng.
Sweetly he sang, amid the clang of arms,
His numbers smooth, replete with winning charms.
In him there shone a great and godlike mind,
The poet’s wreath around the laurel twined.
This was while Colonel Humphreys was in the army—one of Washington’s
aides. But when he resigned his commission,—hark! ’tis Barlow sings:—
See Humphreys glorious from the field retire,
Sheathe the glad sword and string the sounding lyre.
O’er fallen friends, with all the strength of woe,
His heartfelt sighs in moving numbers flow.
His country’s wrongs, her duties, dangers, praise,
Fire his full soul, and animate his lays.
Humphreys, in turn, in his poem “On the Future Glory of the United
States of America,” calls upon his learned friends to string _their_
lyres and rouse their countrymen against the Barbary corsairs who were
holding American seamen in captivity:—
Why sleep’st thou, Barlow, child of genius? Why
See’st thou, blest Dwight, our land in sadness lie?
And where is Trumbull, earliest boast of fame?
’Tis yours, ye bards, to wake the smothered flame.
To you, my dearest friends, the task belongs
To rouse your country with heroic songs.
Yes, to be sure, where _is_ Trumbull, earliest boast of fame? He came
from Watertown (now a seat of learning), a cousin of Governor
Trumbull—“Brother Jonathan”—and a second cousin of Colonel John
Trumbull, the historical painter, whose battle pieces repose in the Yale
Art Gallery. Cleverness runs in the Trumbull blood. There was, for
example, J. Hammond Trumbull (abbreviated by lisping infancy to “J.
Hambull”) in the last generation, a great sagamore—O a very big
Indian,—reputed the only man in the country who could read Eliot’s
Algonquin Bible. I make no mention of later Trumbulls known in letters
and art. But as for our worthy, John Trumbull, the poet, it is well
known and has been often told how he passed the college entrance
examination at the age of seven, but forebore to matriculate till a more
reasonable season, graduating in 1767 and serving two years as a tutor
along with his friend Dwight; afterwards studying law at Boston in the
office of John Adams, practising at New Haven and Hartford, filling
legislative and judicial positions, and dying at Detroit in 1831.
Trumbull was the satirist of the group. As a young man at Yale, he
amused his leisure by contributing to the newspapers essays in the
manner of “The Spectator” (“The Meddler,” “The Correspondent,” and the
like); and verse satires after the fashion of Prior and Pope. There is
nothing very new about the Jack Dapperwits, Dick Hairbrains, Tom
Brainlesses, Miss Harriet Simpers, and Isabella Sprightlys of these
compositions. The very names will recall to the experienced reader the
stock figures of the countless Addisonian imitations which sicklied o’er
the minor literature of the eighteenth century. But Trumbull’s
masterpiece was “M’Fingal,” a Hudibrastic satire on the Tories, printed
in part at Philadelphia in 1776, and in complete shape at Hartford in
1782, “by Hudson and Goodwin near the Great Bridge.” “M’Fingal” was the
most popular poem of the Revolution. It went through more than thirty
editions in America and England. In 1864 it was edited with elaborate
historical notes by Benson J. Lossing, author of “Pictorial Field-Book
of the Revolution.” A reprint is mentioned as late as 1881. An edition,
in two volumes, of Trumbull’s poetical works was issued in 1820.
Timothy Dwight pronounced “M’Fingal” superior to “Hudibras.” The Marquis
de Chastellux, who had fought with Lafayette for the independence of the
colonies; who had been amused when at Windham, says my authority, by
Governor Jonathan Trumbull’s “pompous manner in transacting the most
trifling public business”; and who translated into French Colonel
Humphreys’s poetical “Address to the Armies of the United States of
America,”—Chastellux wrote to Trumbull _à propos_ of his burlesque: “I
believe that you have rifled every flower which that kind of poetry
could offer. . . . I prefer it to every work of the kind,—even
‘Hudibras.’” And Moses Coit Tyler, whose four large volumes on our
colonial and revolutionary literature are, for the most part, a much ado
about nothing, waxes dithyrambic on this theme. He speaks, for example,
of “the vast and prolonged impression it has made upon the American
people.” But surely all this is very uncritical. All that is really
alive of “M’Fingal” are a few smart couplets usually attributed to
“Hudibras,” such as—
No man e’er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law.
“M’Fingal” is one of the most successful of the innumerable imitations
of “Hudibras”; still it is an imitation, and, as such, inferior to its
original. But apart from that, Trumbull was far from having Butler’s
astonishing resources of wit and learning, tedious as they often are
from their mere excess. Nor is the Yankee sharpness of “M’Fingal” so
potent a spirit as the harsh, bitter contempt of Butler, almost as
inventive of insult as the _saeva indignatio_ of Swift. Yet “M’Fingal”
still keeps a measure of historical importance, reflecting, in its
cracked and distorted mirror of caricature, the features of a stormy
time: the turbulent town meetings, the liberty poles and bonfires of the
patriots; with the tar-and-feathering of Tories, and their stolen
gatherings in cellars or other holes and corners.
After peace was declared, a number of these young writers came together
again in Hartford, where they formed a sort of literary club with weekly
meetings—“The Hartford Wits,” who for a few years made the little
provincial capital the intellectual metropolis of the country. Trumbull
had settled at Hartford in the practice of the law in 1781. Joel Barlow,
who had hastily qualified for a chaplaincy in a Massachusetts brigade by
a six weeks’ course of theology, and had served more or less
sporadically through the war, came to Hartford in the year following and
started a newspaper. David Humphreys, Yale 1771, illustrious founder of
the Brothers in Unity Society, and importer of merino sheep, had
enlisted in 1776 in a Connecticut militia regiment then on duty in New
York. He had been on the staff of General Putnam, whose life he
afterwards wrote; had been Washington’s aide and a frequent inmate at
Mount Vernon from 1780 to 1783; then abroad (1784–1786), as secretary to
the commission for making commercial treaties with the nations of
Europe. (The commissioners were Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson.) On
returning to his native Derby in 1786, he had been sent to the
legislature at Hartford, and now found himself associated with Trumbull,
who had entered upon his Yale tutorship in 1771, the year of Humphreys’s
graduation; and with Barlow, who had taken his B.A. degree in 1778.
These three Pleiades drew to themselves other stars of lesser magnitude,
the most remarkable of whom was Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, a native of
Waterbury, but since 1784 a practising physician at Hartford and one of
the founders of the Connecticut Medical Society. Hopkins was an
eccentric humorist, and is oddly described by Samuel Goodrich—“Peter
Parley”—as “long and lank, walking with spreading arms and straddling
legs.” “His nose was long, lean, and flexible,” adds Goodrich,—a
description which suggests rather the proboscis of the elephant, or at
least of the tapir, than a feature of the human countenance.
Other lights in this constellation were Richard Alsop, from Middletown,
who was now keeping a bookstore at Hartford, and Theodore Dwight,
brother to Timothy and brother-in-law to Alsop, and later the secretary
and historian of the famous Hartford Convention of 1814, which came near
to carrying New England into secession. We might reckon as an eighth
Pleiad, Dr. Elihu H. Smith, then residing at Wethersfield, who published
in 1793 our first poetic miscellany, printed—of all places in the
world—at Litchfield, “mine own romantic town”: seat of the earliest
American law school, and emitter of this earliest American anthology. If
you should happen to find in your garret a dusty copy of this
collection, “American Poems, Original and Selected,” by Elihu H. Smith,
hold on to it. It is worth money, and will be worth more.
The Hartford Wits contributed to local papers, such as the _New Haven
Gazette_ and the _Connecticut Courant_, a series of political lampoons:
“The Anarchiad,” “The Echo,” and “The Political Greenhouse,” a sort of
Yankee “Dunciad,” “Rolliad,” and “Anti-Jacobin.” They were staunch
Federalists, friends of a close union and a strong central government;
and used their pens in support of the administrations of Washington and
Adams, and to ridicule Jefferson and the Democrats. It was a time of
great confusion and unrest: of Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, and
the irredeemable paper currency in Rhode Island. In Connecticut,
Democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of five years’ pay to
the officers of the disbanded army. “The Echo” and “The Political
Greenhouse” were published in book form in 1807; “The Anarchiad” not
till 1861, by Thomas H. Pease, New Haven, with notes and introduction by
Luther G. Riggs. I am not going to quote these satires. They amused
their own generation and doubtless did good. “The Echo” had the honor of
being quoted in Congress by an angry Virginian, to prove that
Connecticut was trying to draw the country into a war with France. It
caught up cleverly the humors of the day, now travestying a speech of
Jefferson, now turning into burlesque a Boston town meeting. A local
flavor is given by allusions to Connecticut traditions: Captain Kidd,
the Blue Laws, the Windham Frogs, the Hebron pump, the Wethersfield
onion gardens. But the sparkle has gone out of it. There is a perishable
element in political satire. I find it difficult to interest young
people nowadays even in the “Biglow Papers,” which are so much superior,
in every way, to “M’Fingal” or “The Anarchiad.”
Timothy Dwight would probably have rested his title to literary fame on
his five volumes of theology and the eleven books of his “Conquest of
Canaän.” But the epic is unread and unreadable, while theological
systems need constant restatement in an age of changing beliefs. There
is one excellent hymn by Dwight in the collections,—“I love thy
kingdom, Lord.” His war song, “Columbia, Columbia, in glory arise,” was
once admired, but has faded. I have found it possible to take a mild
interest in the long poem, “Greenfield Hill,” a partly idyllic and
partly moral didactic piece, emanating from the country parish, three
miles from the Sound, in the town of Fairfield, where Dwight was pastor
from 1783 to 1795. The poem has one peculiar feature: each of its seven
parts was to have imitated the manner of some one British poet. Part One
is in the blank verse and the style of Thomson’s “Seasons”; Part Two in
the heroic couplets and the diction of Goldsmith’s “Traveller” and
“Deserted Village.” For lack of time this design was not systematically
carried out, but the reader is reminded now of Prior, then of Cowper,
and again of Crabbe. The nature descriptions and the pictures of rural
life are not untruthful, though somewhat tame and conventional. The
praise of modest competence is sung, and the wholesome simplicity of
American life, under the equal distribution of wealth, as contrasted
with the luxury and corruption of European cities. Social questions are
discussed, such as, “The state of negro slavery in Connecticut”; and
“What is not, and what is, a social female visit.” Narrative episodes
give variety to the descriptive and reflective portions: the burning of
Fairfield in 1779 by the British under Governor Tryon; the destruction
of the remnants of the Pequod Indians in a swamp three miles west of the
town. It is distressing to have the Yankee farmer called “the swain,”
and his wife and daughter “the fair,” in regular eighteenth century
style; and Long Island, which is always in sight and frequently
apostrophized, personified as “Longa.”
Then on the borders of this sapphire plain
Shall growing beauties grace my fair domain
* * * * *
Gay groves exult: Chinesian gardens glow,
And bright reflections paint the wave below.