well-ordered and trenchantly expressed, he desperately sought to acquire
a convincing prose style. In 1717 James, Franklin's elder brother,
returned from serving a printer's apprenticeship in London. James had
known and been attracted to Augustan England, the England of the
_Tatler_, _Spectator_, and _Guardian_. Familiar is Franklin's narrative
of how he patterned his fledgling style on the pages of the _Spectator_
papers, and learned to satisfy his father--and himself. Like the
neoclassicists, Franklin learned to write by imitation, by respectfully
subordinating himself to those he recognized as masters, and not, like
the romanticists, by expressing his own ego in revolt against convention
and conformity to traditional standards. The group who supplied copy for
James's _New England Courant_, we are told, were trying to write like
the _Spectator_. "The very look of an ordinary first page of the
_Courant_ is like that of the _Spectator_ page."[i-125] In the _Dogood
Papers_ (1722) and the _Busy-Body_ series (1728) Franklin's writings
show a literal indebtedness to the style and even substance of the
_Spectator_.[i-126] If, after the _Busy-Body_ essays, Franklin's
writings bear little resemblance to the elegance and glow of the
_Spectator_, he did learn from it a long-remembered lesson in
orderliness. From the _Spectator_ he may have learned to temper wit with
morality and morality with wit; he may have learned the neoclassic
objection to the "unhappy Force of an Imagination, unguided by the Check
of Reason and Judgment";[i-127] he may have acquired his distrust of
foreign phrases when English ones were as good, or better, insisting on
the use of native English undefiled. It is interesting but perhaps
futile to conjecture to what degree Franklin at this time, on reading
_Spectator_ No. 160, "On Geniuses" (warning against a servile imitation
of ancient authors, a warning which anticipates the cult of original
geniuses of later decades), would have been predisposed against ancient
literature and languages. If the _Spectator_ was partially responsible
for his pleasantries at the expense of Greek in _Dogood Paper_ No. IV,
his attitude toward the ancients is more ostensibly the result of his
later preoccupation with the sciences,[i-128] and of contact with
representatives of the deistic time-spirit whose faith in progress led
them to underrate the past.
When Franklin went to live in London in 1724-1726, and became familiar
with such men of science as Dr. Henry Pemberton and others, he must have
become aware of ideals of prose style not a little unlike those
practised by the preachers of his Boston. In Boston he had heard (and in
the polemical works in his father's library, read) sermons couched in a
style satirized in _Hudibras_ as a "Babylonish dialect ... of patched
and piebald languages" (ll. 93 ff.). Sensing the disparity between the
seventeenth-century prose styles and the empirical, logical, and
orderly method of science, the Royal Society not long after its
inception inaugurated a campaign for a clarity akin to the pattern urged
by Hobbes: "The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, _Reason_ is
the Pace, Encrease of _Science_ the _way_; and the benefit of man-kind
the _end_. And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous
words, are like _ignes fatui_; and reasoning upon them, is wandering
among innumerable absurdities."[i-129] Summarizing the intent of the
stylistic reformations instituted by the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat
urged writers "to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and
swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and
shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number
of words ... a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive
expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as
near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the
language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits,
or Scholars."[i-130] It is asserted that the program of the Royal
Society "called for stylistic reform as loudly as for reformation in
philosophy. Moreover, this attitude was in the public mind indissolubly
associated with the Society."[i-131] It is only reasonable to infer that
Franklin (as a member of the Royal Society and as founder of the
American Philosophical Society) was alive to the movement toward
"undefiled plainness" which had for half a century been gathering
momentum.[i-132]
Even as Cartesianism[i-133] in France is said to have fostered logic and
lucidity of detail, and that which is universally valid and recognized
by all men, and that art which is aloof to the non-human world, so in
England may Newtonianism (which overthrew Cartesianism) have conditioned
writers to develop a uniform style, purged of tenuous rhetorical
devices. An age characterized by a worship of reason, which was supposed
to be identical in all men, an age deferring to the general mind of man,
would be hostile to the rhetorical caprices of those expressing their
private, idiosyncratic enthusiasms. If the neoclassic apotheosis of
simplicity and freedom from intricacy was the result of a "rationalistic
anti-intellectualism,"[i-134] expressed in terms of hostility to
belabored proof of ideas known to the general will, then it would seem
that one of the factors sturdily conditioning this hostility was
Newtonian science. Admitting that _reason_ leads to uniformitarianism,
one may recall that the processes of science are discoverable by reason,
and that such a cosmologist as Newton illustrated mathematically and
empirically a system, grand in its lucidity, and capable of being
apprehended by all through reason. If the deistic fear of "enthusiasm"
in religion--the individual will prevailing against the _consensus
gentium_--parallels, according to Professor Lovejoy, the neoclassic fear
of feeling and the unrestrained play of imagination in art, then
Newtonian science, as it reinforced deism, was no negligible factor in
discrediting enthusiasm, and hence indirectly militating against
originality, emotion, and the unchecked imagination. Is it not
conceivable that the Newtonian[i-135] cosmology, popularized by a vast
discipleship, challenged the scientists and men of letters alike to
achieve a corresponding order, clarity, and simplicity in poetry and
prose?
After Franklin's return from London, he reinforced his Addison-like
style with the rhetorical implications of science and Newtonianism: in
his _Preface_ (1729) to the _Pennsylvania Gazette_ he observed that an
editor ought to possess a "great Easiness and Command of Writing and
Relating Things clearly and intelligibly, and in few Words."[i-136] Good
writing, in Franklin's opinion, "should proceed regularly from things
known to things unknown [surely the method of all inductive reasoning
and science] distinctly and clearly without confusion. The words used
should be the most expressive that the language affords, provided that
they are the most generally understood. Nothing should be expressed in
two words that can be as well expressed in one; that is, no synonyms
should be used, or very rarely, but the whole should be as short as
possible, consistent with clearness; the words should be so placed as to
be agreeable to the ear in reading; summarily it should be smooth,
clear, and short, for the contrary qualities are displeasing."[i-137]
Like the members of the Royal Society, Franklin would bring the words of
written discourse "as near as possible to the spoken."[i-138] In 1753 he
observed: "If my Hypothesis [concerning waterspouts] is not the Truth
itself it is [at] least as naked: For I have not with some of our
learned Moderns, disguis'd my Nonsense in Greek, cloth'd it in Algebra
or adorn'd it with Fluxions. You have it in puris naturalibus."[i-139]
He briefly summarized his rhetorical ideal, in a letter to Hume: "In
writings intended for persuasion and for general information, one
cannot be too clear; and every expression in the least obscure is a
fault."[i-140]
Unlike Jefferson, "no friend to what is called _purism_, but a zealous
one" to neology, Franklin had an inveterate antipathy toward the use of
colloquialisms, provincialisms, and extravagant innovations.[i-141] In
another letter to Hume, he hoped that "we shall always in America make
the best English of this Island [Britain] our standard."[i-142] If he
did not hold the typical eighteenth-century view that "English must be
subjected to a process of classical regularizing,"[i-143] neither did
he, with his friend Joseph Priestley, espouse the idea of correctness,
dependent only on usage. In general, he seems to have had a tendency
toward purism; it is not unlikely that as a youth he was influenced by
Swift's _Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the
English Tongue_.[i-144] Striving for correctness, and the avoidance of
"affected Words or high-flown Phrases"[i-145] he approximated the
_curiosa felicitas_ of the neoclassicists.[i-146]
A solid neoclassicist[i-147] in style. Franklin accepted the canon of
imitation as it was imperfectly understood in the eighteenth century. To
the extent, however, that the models were conceived of as approximating
the _consensus gentium_, fragments illustrating universal reason, there
may be little disparity between neoclassic imitation and Aristotle's use
of the term in the sense of imitating a higher ethical reality. His own
life, Franklin thought, (with the exception of a few "errata") was "fit
to be imitated."[i-148] A. H. Smyth notes, perhaps extravagantly,
"Nothing but the 'Autobiography' of Benvenuto Cellini, or the
'Confessions' of Rousseau, can enter into competition with it."[i-149]
This may suggest a clue to the durable nature of Franklin's life-tale.
Cellini, it is true, was tremendously alive to Benvenuto, even as Michel
de Montaigne was interested in his own whims, but neither Cellini, nor
Montaigne, nor Franklin, could have penned the _Confessions_, the thesis
of which is that if Rousseau is not better than other men at least he is
different. Cellini, Montaigne, and Franklin, on the other hand, while
allowing us to see their fancies and singular biases, tended to
emphasize those qualities which they held in common with their age,
nation, and even the continuity of mankind. Montaigne, it will be
remembered, sought to express _la connaissance de l'homme en général_.
With no aspirations to become an original genius, Franklin, both in his
prose style and his yearning for perfection, sought the guidance of
models, which he conceived as embodying universal reason. Had he been a
writer of epics[i-150] he would with Pope have acquired "from ancient
rules a just esteem"--when the rules were, in his mind, "according to
nature."
Likewise Franklin is representative of the Enlightenment in his
description of the province of the imagination. It is an axiom that "the
belief that the imagination ought to be kept in check by reason,
pervades the critical literature of the first half of the eighteenth
century."[i-151] Franklin observes that poetasters above all need
instruction on how to govern "Fancy [Imagination] with
Judgement."[i-152] He implies that imagination is a power lending an air
of unreality to a creation, often like "the Effect of some melancholy
Humour."[i-153] He feared that the unchecked fancy would vitiate his
ideals of simplicity and correctness, and a sober and practical
argument.
Posing as no original genius independent of the wisdom of the
ages,[i-154] confessing that "from a child" he "was fond of reading" and
that as a youth "reading was the only amusement" he allowed himself,
Franklin was not backward in cataloguing many of the authors who helped
to motivate his thought. He seems to have been acquainted with portions
of Plato, Aesop, Pliny, Xenophon, Herodotus, Epictetus, Vergil, Horace,
Tacitus, Seneca, Sallust, Cicero, Tully, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Bacon,
Dryden, Tillotson, Rabelais,[i-155] Bunyan, Fénelon, Chevalier de
Ramsay,[i-156] Pythagoras, Waller, Defoe, Addison and Steele, William
Temple, Pope, Swift, Voltaire, Boyle, Algernon Sidney, Trenchard and
Gordon,[i-157] Young, Mandeville, Locke, Shaftesbury, Collins,
Bolingbroke, Richardson, Whiston, Watts, Thomson, Burke, Cowper, Darwin,
Rowe, Rapin, Herschel, Paley, Lord Kames, Adam Smith, Hume, Robertson,
Lavoisier, Buffon, Dupont de Nemours, Whitefield, Pemberton, Blackmore,
John Ray, Petty, Turgot, Priestley, Paine, Mirabeau, Quesnay, Raynal,
Morellet, and Condorcet, to suggest only the more prominent.[i-158] Such
a catalogue tends to discredit the all too common idea that the
untutored tradesman was torpid to the information and wisdom found in
books.
If his prose style shows none of the delicate rhythms and haunting
imagery of the prose born of the romantic movement, it is nevertheless
far from pedestrian. If it seems devoid of imaginative splendor, it is
not lacking in force and persuasion.[i-159] After one has noted
Franklin's canon of simplicity and order, his insistence on
correctness, his assumed role as _Censor Morum_, his acceptance of the
doctrine of imitation and the use of imagination guided by reason, one
returns to the question of the degree to which the ideals of rhetoric
fostered by the men of science may have helped to motivate Franklin's
prose style, and to what degree his acceptance of deism augmented by
Newtonianism may have furnished him with a rationale which lent sanction
to his demand for a simple style.
Sir Humphrey Davy found in Franklin's scientific papers a language lucid
and decorous, "almost as worthy of admiration as the doctrine"[i-160]
they contain. S. G. Fisher buoyantly maintained that Franklin's "is the
most effective literary style ever used by an American." After reading
Franklin's paper on stoves he was "inclined to lay down the principle
that the test of literary genius is the ability to be fascinating about
stoves."[i-161] Whether he writes soberly (albeit tempered by Gallic
fancy) of the mutability of life, as in _The Ephemera_, or of
sophisticated social amenities, as in the letters to Madame Brillon and
Madame Helvétius, or in his memoirs, in which solid fact follows solid
fact, sifted by the years of good fortune, Franklin's style never loses
its compelling charm and vigor. If he never wrote (or uttered) less than
was demanded by the nature of his subject, neither would he have
disgusted the Clerk of Oxenford who
Nought o word spak he more than was nede.
He was no formal literary critic such as Boileau, Lessing, or Coleridge,
and no acknowledged arbiter of taste, such as Dr. Johnson. Yet Franklin,
in voluminous practice, enjoying tremendous international vogue, proved
that his theories bore the acid test of effectiveness. Indirectly he
challenged his readers to honor principles of rhetoric which could so
trenchantly serve the demands of his catholic pen, and make him one of
the most widely read of all Americans.
IV. FRANKLIN AS PRINTER AND JOURNALIST
Franklin was a printer chiefly because of two proclivities which were
basic in his personality from childhood to old age--a bent toward
practical mechanics ("handiness") and a fondness for reading
(bookishness). Further, he was a journalist and publisher chiefly
because he was a printer.
A thorough printer is both an artisan and an artist; he has both the
manual dexterity of a good workman and the aesthetic appreciation of the
amateur of beauty. Franklin always took pride in his ability to handle
the printer's tools, from the time when, at the age of twelve, he became
"a useful hand"[i-162] in the print shop of his brother James, until the
very end of his life. One of the pleasantest anecdotes of the old
printer is that which tells of his visit to the famous Didot printing
establishment in Paris, when he stepped up to a press, and motioning the
printer aside, himself took possession of the machine and printed off
several sheets. Then the American ambassador smiled at the gaping
printers and said, "Do not be astonished, Sirs, it is my former
business."[i-163]
Even in his boyhood, it was a pleasure to Franklin "to see good workmen
handle their tools," and he tells in his autobiography how much this
feeling for tools meant to him throughout his life.[i-164] His flair for
invention, though founded on this same "handiness," was not always
directed toward the production of tools; but in the two fields of
"philosophical" experimentation and the printing trade, his dexterity
and cleverness in making needful instruments and devices were
invaluable.
Partly because of the fact that printers' supplies must be imported from
England, and partly because of his natural tool-mindedness, Franklin
manufactured more of his own supplies than any other American commercial
printer before or since. He cast type, made paper molds, mixed inks,
made contributions to press building, did engraving, forwarded
experiments in stereotyping, and worked at logotypy. Long after he had
retired from the printing business. Franklin continued to influence
developments in that field. It is a common saying among printers that
one never forgets the smell of printer's ink. Franklin kept touch with
his former business through various partnerships, through correspondence
with printer friends, through the establishment of a private press in
his home at Passy during his ambassadorship to France, and through his
personal supervision of the education of his grandson in "the art
preservative of arts." "I am too old to follow printing again myself,"
he wrote to a friend, "but, loving the business, I have brought up my
grandson Benjamin to it, and have built and furnished a printing-house
for him, which he now manages under my eye."[i-165]
As to just how adept Franklin was on the distinctively aesthetic side of
printing, critics must differ. It has been customary to assume that the
output of his shop was far superior to that of the several other
printing houses in the colonies.[i-166] Such broad generalizations are
misleading, however; and it is certainly possible to find Parks and
even Bradford imprints which compare favorably enough with some of
Franklin's. In typography, the phase of printing which affords the
widest aesthetic scope, Franklin was by no means a genius. William
Parks, of Annapolis and later of Williamsburg, was at least Franklin's
peer during the seventeen-thirties and 'forties in the artistic
arrangement of type; and William Goddard, who practiced the art a little
later in several of the colonies, was his superior. Yet Franklin was an
outstanding printer in a region blessed with few good presses. The
difference between him and most of the other colonial printers may be
stated thus: Franklin maintained a high average of workmanlike (though
not inspired) performance, while his contemporaries were inclined to be
slovenly, inaccurate, and generally careless.
In the later years of his life Franklin gave no little attention to fine
printing, though as a dilettante rather than as a commercial printer. In
France he was friendly with François Ambroise Didot, the greatest French
printer of his times, and put his grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache to
school in Didot's establishment. With Pierre Simon Fournier, who ranked
next to Didot among French printers, Franklin corresponded from time to
time. In England the American printer maintained touch with prominent
practitioners of his craft from the time of his first visit abroad until
his death. Samuel Palmer, Franklin's first London employer, was but a
mediocre printer; but John Watts, to whose house the young American went
after a year at Palmer's, stood much higher in his vocation.[i-167] Both
Watts and Palmer were patrons of William Caslon, from whom Franklin
later bought type. But John Baskerville, Caslon's rival, was the founder
whom Franklin did most to encourage and to bring to the attention of
discriminating printers. The English printer with whom Franklin was upon
the terms of greatest intimacy--and that for many years--was William
Strahan, member of Parliament, King's Printer, and a successful
publisher. Strahan was a man of parts, a great letter writer, and a
friend of David Hume and Samuel Johnson. The latter referred to the
Strahan shop as "the greatest printing house in London."[i-168] Another
correspondent was John Walter, logotyper, press builder, and founder of
the London _Times_.[i-169] In all his letters to his printer friends,
Franklin shows not only a lively interest in improvements and inventions
for the trade, but also an increasing interest in the artistic side of
printing and type-founding.
The "bookish inclination" which Franklin credits in the _Autobiography_
with being the quality that decided his father to make a printer of him,
appertained to the trade because printers were commonly publishers and
sellers of books and pamphlets, and often editors and publishers of
newspapers. How the young Franklin satisfied his literary urge in the
print shop of his brother James is a familiar story, and his theories of
writing are traced in another section of this Introduction. The
contribution to literature which he made as a publisher of original
books is negligible, but he did his part both as publisher and
bookseller to spread that bookishness to which he felt that he owed much
of his own success. Like all publishers before and since, he was forced
by his customers to issue books of a lower sort than he could fully
approve in order to float editions of more desirable works: he tells
plaintively of his public's preference for "Robin Hood's Songs" over the
Psalms of his beloved Watts.[i-170] In still another way, Franklin
promoted the bookishness of his community: he founded the first of
American circulating libraries, and he built up for himself one of the
largest private libraries in the country.[i-171]
Journalism was a common by-product of the printing trade. When Franklin
and Meredith took over Keimer's _The Universal Instructor in all Arts
and Sciences: and Pennsylvania Gazette_ in 1729, there were six other
newspapers being published in the colonies--three in Boston and one each
in New York, Philadelphia, and Annapolis. The Williamsburg press had a
newspaper a few years later, but the other two printing towns in the
colonies had to wait some thirty years for journalistic ventures--a
newspaper in New London and a magazine in Woodbridge.[i-172]
The fundamental question to be asked in analyzing a newspaper may be
stated thus: What is the editorial conception of the primary function of
the press? Franklin had received his early newspaper training on his
brother's _New England Courant_, which frankly acknowledged
entertainment as its primary function and relegated news to a minor
place. Of his contemporaries in 1729, the oldest, the _Boston
News-Letter_, held the publication of news to be its sole function;
while the _Boston Gazette_, the _New York Gazette_, and the _Maryland
Gazette_ took much the same attitude. In the main, they were rather
dreary reprints of stale European news. Bradford's _American Weekly
Mercury_, in Philadelphia, gave somewhat more attention to local news;
but with the exception of the Franklin-Breintnal _Busy-Body_ papers,
contributed in 1728-1729 in order to bring Keimer to his knees, the
_Mercury_ gave very little attention to the entertainment function. Only
the _New England Weekly Journal_, carrying on something of the tradition
of the old _Courant_, dealt largely in entertainment as well as in news.
This bi-functional policy was the one adopted by Franklin's
_Pennsylvania Gazette_, which was always readable and amusing at the
same time that it was newsy.
Of the editorial or opinion-forming function of newspapers there was
little evidence in Franklin's paper,[i-173] at least in the field of
politics. The obvious reason was the active governmental censorship. It
remained for John Peter Zenger to introduce that function into colonial
journalism in the _New York Weekly Journal_ in 1733: his struggle for
the freedom of the press is well known.[i-174] But the _Pennsylvania
Gazette_ never became in any degree a political organ while Franklin
edited it; and his first political pronouncement was published not in
his paper but in a pamphlet, _Plain Truth_, issued just before his
retirement from editorial duties.