CHAPTER I.

The American Spirit in Literature

By Bliss Perry

A Chronicle of Great Interpreters

Volume 34 of the

Chronicles of America Series

∴

Allen Johnson, Editor

Assistant Editors

Gerhard R. Lomer

Charles W. Jefferys

Abraham Lincoln Edition

New Haven: Yale University Press

Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.

London: Humphrey Milford

Oxford University Press

1918

Copyright, 1918

by Yale University Press

CONTENTS

Chapter Chapter title Page

Introduction

I. The Pioneers 1

II. The First Colonial Literature 25

III. The Third and Fourth Generation 43

IV. The Revolution 66

V. The Knickerbocker Group 86

VI. The Transcendentalists 109

VII. Romance, Poetry, and History 143

VIII. Poe and Whitman 187

IX. Union and Liberty 206

X. A New Nation 234

Bibliographical Note 269

Index 273

THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE

∴

CHAPTER I.

The Pioneers

The United States of America has been from the beginning in a perpetual

change. The physical and mental restlessness of the American and the

temporary nature of many of his arrangements are largely due to the

experimental character of the exploration and development of this

continent. The new energies released by the settlement of the colonies

were indeed guided by stern determination, wise forethought, and

inventive skill; but no one has ever really known the outcome of the

experiment. It is a story of faith, of

Effort, and expectation, and desire,

And something evermore about to be.

An Alexander Hamilton may urge with passionate force the adoption of the

Constitution, without any firm conviction as to its permanence. The most

clear-sighted American of the Civil War period recognized this element

of uncertainty in our American adventure when he declared: "We are now

testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so

dedicated, can long endure." More than fifty years have passed since

that war rearmed the binding force of the Constitution and apparently

sealed the perpetuity of the Union. Yet the gigantic economic and social

changes now in progress are serving to show that the United States has

its full share of the anxieties which beset all human institutions in

this daily altering world.

"We are but strangers in an inn, but passengers in a ship," said Roger

Williams. This sense of the transiency of human effort, the perishable

nature of human institutions, was quick in the consciousness of the

gentleman adventurers and sober Puritan citizens who emigrated from

England to the New World. It had been a familiar note in the poetry of

that Elizabethan period which had followed with such breathless interest

the exploration of America. It was a conception which could be shared

alike by a saint like John Cotton or a soldier of fortune like John

Smith. Men are tent-dwellers. Today they settle here, and tomorrow they

have struck camp and are gone. We are strangers and sojourners, as all

our fathers were.

This instinct of the camper has stamped itself upon American life and

thought. Venturesomeness, physical and moral daring, resourcefulness in

emergencies, indifference to negligible details, wastefulness of

materials, boundless hope and confidence in the morrow, are

characteristics of the American. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say

that the "good American" has been he who has most resembled a good

camper. He has had robust health--unless or until he has abused it,--a

tolerant disposition, and an ability to apply his fingers or his brain

to many unrelated and unexpected tasks. He is disposed to blaze his own

trail. He has a touch of prodigality, and, withal, a knack of keeping

his tent or his affairs in better order than they seem. Above all, he

has been ever ready to break camp when he feels the impulse to wander.

He likes to be "foot-loose." If he does not build his roads as solidly

as the Roman roads were built, nor his houses like the English houses,

it is because he feels that he is here today and gone tomorrow. If he

has squandered the physical resources of his neighborhood, cutting the

forests recklessly, exhausting the soil, surrendering water power and

minerals into a few far-clutching fingers, he has done it because he

expects, like Voltaire's Signor Pococurante, "to have a new garden

tomorrow, built on a nobler plan." When New York State grew too crowded

for Cooper's Leather-Stocking, he shouldered his pack, whistled to his

dog, glanced at the sun, and struck a bee-line for the Mississippi.

Nothing could be more typical of the first three hundred years of

American history.

The traits of the pioneer have thus been the characteristic traits of

the American in action. The memories of successive generations have

tended to stress these qualities to the neglect of others. Everyone who

has enjoyed the free life of the woods will confess that his own

judgment upon his casual summer associates turns, quite naturally and

almost exclusively, upon their characteristics as woodsmen. Out of the

woods, these gentlemen may be more or less admirable divines, pedants,

men of affairs; but the verdict of their companions in the forest is

based chiefly upon the single question of their adaptability to the

environment of the camp. Are they quick of eye and foot, skillful with

rod and gun, cheerful on rainy days, ready to do a little more than

their share of drudgery? If so, memory holds them.

Some such unconscious selection as this has been at work in the

classification of our representative men. The building of the nation and

the literary expression of its purpose and ideals are tasks which have

called forth the strength of a great variety of individuals. Some of

these men have proved to be peculiarly fitted for a specific service,

irrespective of the question of their general intellectual powers, or

their rank as judged by the standard of European performance in the same

field. Thus the battle of New Orleans, in European eyes a mere bit of

frontier fighting, made Andrew Jackson a "hero" as indubitably as if he

had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It gave him the Presidency.

The analogy holds in literature. Certain expressions of American

sentiment or conviction have served to summarize or to clarify the

spirit of the nation. The authors of these productions have frequently

won the recognition and affection of their contemporaries by means of

prose and verse quite unsuited to sustain the test of severe critical

standards. Neither Longfellow's Excelsior nor Poe's Bells nor Whittier's

Maud Muller is among the best poems of the three writers in question,

yet there was something in each of these productions which caught the

fancy of a whole American generation. It expressed one phase of the

national mind in a given historical period.

The historian of literature is bound to take account of this question of

literary vogue, as it is highly significant of the temper of successive

generations in any country. But it is of peculiar interest to the

student of the literature produced in the United States. Is this

literature "American," or is it "English literature in America," as

Professor Wendell and other scholars have preferred to call it? I should

be one of the last to minimize the enormous influence of England upon

the mind and the writing of all the English-speaking countries of the

globe. Yet it will be one of the purposes of the present book to

indicate the existence here, even in colonial times, of a point of view

differing from that of the mother country, and destined to differ

increasingly with the lapse of time. Since the formation of our Federal

Union, in particular, the books produced in the United States have

tended to exhibit certain characteristics which differentiate them from

the books produced in other English-speaking countries. We must beware,

of course, of what the late Charles Francis Adams once called the

"filiopietistic" fallacy. The "American" qualities of our literature

must be judged in connection with its conformity to universal standards

of excellence. Tested by any universal standard, The Scarlet Letter is a

notable romance. It has won a secure place among the literature written

by men of English blood and speech. Yet to overlook the peculiarly local

or provincial characteristics of this remarkable story is to miss the

secret of its inspiration. It could have been written only by a New

Englander, in the atmosphere of a certain epoch.

Our task, then, in this rapid review of the chief interpreters of the

American spirit in literature, is a twofold one. We are primarily

concerned with a procession of men, each of whom is interesting as an

individual and as a writer. But we cannot watch the individuals long

without perceiving the general direction of their march, the ideas that

animate them, the common hopes and loyalties that make up the life of

their spirit. To become aware of these general tendencies is to

understand the "American" note in our national writing.

Our historians have taught us that the history of the United States is

an evolution towards political unity. The separatist, particularist

movements are gradually thrust to one side. In literary history,

likewise, we best remember those authors who fall into line with what we

now perceive to have been the course of our literary development. The

erratic men and women, the "sports" of the great experiment, are

ultimately neglected by the critics, unless, like the leaders of

political insurrections, those writing men and women have raised a

notable standard of revolt. No doubt the apparently unique literary

specimens, if clearly understood in their origins and surroundings,

would be found rooted in the general laws of literary evolution. But

these laws are not easy to codify and we must avoid the temptation to

discover, in any particular period, more of unity than there actually

was. And we must always remember that there will be beautiful prose and

verse unrelated to the main national tendencies save as "the literature

of escape." We owe this lesson to the genius of Edgar Allan Poe.

Let us test these principles by applying them to the earliest colonists.

The first book written on the soil of what is now the United States was

Captain John Smith's True Relation of the planting of the Virginia

colony in 1607. It was published in London in 1608. The Captain was a

typical Elizabethan adventurer, with a gift, like so many of his class,

for picturesque narrative. In what sense, if at all, may his writings on

American topics be classified as "American" literary productions? It is

clear that his experiences in the New World were only one phase of the

variegated life of this English soldier of fortune. But the American

imagination has persistently claimed him as representing something

peculiarly ours, namely, a kind of pioneer hardihood, resourcefulness,

leadership, which was essential to the exploration and conquest of the

wilderness. Most of Smith's companions were unfitted for the ordeal

which he survived. They perished miserably in the "starving time." But

he was of the stuff from which triumphant immigrants have ever been

made, and it is our recognition of the presence of these qualities in

the Captain which makes us think of his books dealing with America as if

they were "American books." There are other narratives by colonists

temporarily residing in the Virginia plantations which gratify our

historical curiosity, but which we no more consider a part of American

literature than the books written by Stevenson, Kipling, and Wells

during their casual visits to this country. But Captain Smith's True

Relation impresses us, like Mark Twain's Roughing It, with being somehow

true to type. In each of these books the possible unveracities in detail

are a confirmation of their representative American character.

In other words, we have unconsciously formulated, in the course of

centuries, a general concept of "the pioneer." Novelists, poets, and

historians have elaborated this conception. Nothing is more inevitable

than our reaching back to the beginning of the seventeenth century and

endeavoring to select, among the thousands of Englishmen who emigrated

or even thought of emigrating to this country, those who possessed the

genuine heart and sinew of the permanent settler.

Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have thought of emigrating

hither in 1637. If he had joined his friends John Cotton and Roger

Williams in New England, who can doubt that the personal characteristics

of "my brave Oliver" would today be identified with the "American"

qualities which we discover in 1637 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay?

And what an American settler Cromwell would have made!

If we turn from physical and moral daring to the field of theological

and political speculation, it is easy today to select, among the

writings of the earliest colonists, certain radical utterances which

seem to presage the very temper of the late eighteenth century. Pastor

John Robinson's farewell address to the Pilgrims at Leyden in 1620

contained the famous words: "The Lord has more truth yet to break forth

out of His holy Word. I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the

reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion.... Luther and

Calvin were great and shining lights in their times, yet they penetrated

not into the whole counsel of God." Now John Robinson, like Oliver

Cromwell, never set foot on American soil, but he is identified, none

the less, with the spirit of American liberalism in religion.

In political discussion, the early emergence of that type of

independence familiar to the decade 1765-75 is equally striking. In a

letter written in 1818, John Adams insisted that "the principles and

feelings which produced the Revolution ought to be traced back for two

hundred years, and sought in the history of the country from the first

plantations in America." "I have always laughed," he declared in an

earlier letter, "at the affectation of representing American

independence as a novel idea, as a modern discovery, as a late

invention. The idea of it as a possible thing, as a probable event, nay

as a necessary and unavoidable measure, in case Great Britain should

assume an unconstitutional authority over us, has been familiar to

Americans from the first settlement of the country."

There is, then, a predisposition, a latent or potential Americanism

which existed long before the United States came into being. Now that

our political unity has become a fact, the predisposition is certain to

be regarded by our own and by future generations as evidence of a state

of mind which made our separate national life inevitable. Yet to Thomas

Hutchinson, a sound historian and honest man, the last Royal Governor of

Massachusetts, a separate national life seemed in 1770 an unspeakable

error and calamity.

The seventeenth-century colonists were predominantly English, in blood,

in traditions, and in impulses. Whether we look at Virginia or Plymouth

or at the other colonies that were planted in swift succession along the

seaboard, it is clear that we are dealing primarily with men of the

English race. Most of them would have declared, with as much emphasis as

Francis Hopkinson a century later, "We of America are in all respects

Englishmen." Professor Edward Channing thinks that it took a century of

exposure to colonial conditions to force the English in America away

from the traditions and ideals of those who continued to live in the old

land. But the student of literature must keep constantly in mind that

these English colonizers represented no single type of the national

character. There were many men of many minds even within the contracted

cabin of the Mayflower. The "sifted wheat" was by no means all of the

same variety.

For Old England was never more torn by divergent thought and subversive

act than in the period between the death of Elizabeth in 1603 and the

Revolution of 1688. In this distracted time who could say what was

really "English"? Was it James the First or Raleigh? Archbishop Laud or

John Cotton? Charles the First or Cromwell? Charles the Second or

William Penn? Was it Churchman, Presbyterian, Independent, Separatist,

Quaker? One is tempted to say that the title of Ben Jonson's comedy

Every Man in his Humour became the standard of action for two whole

generations of Englishmen, and that there is no common denominator for

emigrants of such varied pattern as Smith and Sandys of Virginia, Morton

of Merrymount, John Winthrop, "Sir" Christopher Gardiner and Anne

Hutchinson of Boston, and Roger Williams of Providence. They seem as

miscellaneous as "Kitchener's Army."

It is true that we can make certain distinctions. Virginia, as has often

been said, was more like a continuation of English society, while New

England represented a digression from English society. There were then,

as now, "stand-patters" and "progressives." It was the second class who,

while retaining very conservative notions about property, developed a

fearless intellectual radicalism which has written itself into the

history of the United States. But to the student of early American

literature all such generalizations are of limited value. He is dealing

with individual men, not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead" as such. He has

learned from recent historians to distrust any such facile

classification of the first colonists. He knows by this time that there

were aristocrats in Massachusetts and commoners in Virginia; that the

Pilgrims of Plymouth were more tolerant than the Puritans of Boston, and

that Rhode Island was more tolerant than either. Yet useful as these

general statements may be, the interpreter of men of letters must always

go back of the racial type or the social system to the individual

person. He recognizes, as a truth for him, that theory of creative

evolution which holds that in the ascending progress of the race each

thinking person becomes a species by himself.

While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial

instincts and traditions of the first colonists were overwhelmingly

English, and that their political and ethical views were the product of

a turbulent and distraught time, it is even more important to note how

the physical situation of the colonists affected their intellectual and

moral, as well as their political problems. Among the emigrants from

England, as we have seen, there were great varieties of social status,

religious opinion, individual motive. But at least they all possessed

the physical courage and moral hardihood to risk the dangerous voyage,

the fearful hardships, and the vast uncertainties of the new life. To go

out at all, under the pressure of any motive, was to meet triumphantly a

searching test. It was in truth a "sifting," and though a few

picturesque rascals had the courage to go into exile while a few saints

may have been deterred, it is a truism to say that the pioneers were

made up of brave men and braver women.

It cannot be asserted that their courage was the result of any single,

dominating motive, equally operative in all of the colonies. Mrs.

Hemans's familiar line about seeking "freedom to worship God" was

measurably true of the Pilgrims of Plymouth, about whom she was writing.

But the far more important Puritan emigration to Massachusetts under

Winthrop aimed not so much at "freedom" as at the establishment of a

theocracy according to the Scriptures. These men straightway denied

freedom of worship, not only to newcomers who sought to join them, but

to those members of their own company who developed independent ways of

thinking. The list of motives for emigration ran the whole gamut, from

missionary fervor for converting the savages, down through a commendable

desire for gain, to the perhaps no less praiseworthy wish to escape a

debtor's prison or the pillory. A few of the colonists were rich. Some

were beggars or indentured servants. Most of them belonged to the middle

class. John Harvard was the son of a butcher; Thomas Shepard, the son of

a grocer; Roger Williams, the son of a tailor. But all three were

university bred and were natural leaders of men.

Once arrived in the wilderness, the pioneer life common to all of the

colonists began instantly to exert its slow, irresistible pressure upon

their minds and to mould them into certain ways of thinking and feeling.

Without some perception of these modes of thought and emotion a

knowledge of the spirit of our literature is impossible. Take, for

instance, the mere physical situation of the first colonists, encamped

on the very beach of the wide ocean with an illimitable forest in their

rear. Their provisions were scanty. They grew watchful of the strange

soil, of the new skies, of the unknown climate. Even upon the voyage

over, John Winthrop thought that "the declination of the pole star was

much, even to the view, beneath that it is in England," and that "the

new moon, when it first appeared, was much smaller than at any time he

had seen it in England." Here was a man evidently using his eyes with a

new interest in natural phenomena. Under these changed skies the mind

began gradually to change also.

At first the colonists felt themselves an outpost of Europe, a forlorn

hope of the Protestant Reformation. "We shall be as a city upon a hill,"

said Winthrop. "The eyes of all people are upon us." Their creed was

Calvinism, then in its third generation of dominion and a European

doctrine which was not merely theological but social and political. The

emigrant Englishmen were soon to discover that it contained a doctrine

of human rights based upon human needs. At the beginning of their novel

experience they were doubtless unaware of any alteration in their

theories. But they were facing a new situation, and that new situation

became an immense factor in their unconscious growth. Their intellectual

and moral problems shifted, as a boat shifts her ballast when the wind

blows from a new quarter. The John Cotton preaching in a shed in the new

Boston had come to "suffer a sea-change" from the John Cotton who had

been rector of St. Botolph's splendid church in Lincolnshire. The

"church without a bishop" and the "state without a king" became a

different church and state from the old, however loyally the ancient

forms and phrases were retained.

If the political problems of equality which were latent in Calvinism now

began to take on a different meaning under the democratic conditions of

pioneer life, the inner, spiritual problems of that amazing creed were

intensified. "Fallen" human nature remained the same, whether in the

crowded cosmopolitan streets of Holland and London, or upon the desolate

shores of Cape Cod. But the moral strain of the old insoluble conflict

between "fixed fate" and "free will" was heightened by the physical

loneliness of the colonists. Each soul must fight its own unaided,

unending battle. In that moral solitude, as in the physical solitude of

the settlers upon the far northwestern prairies of a later epoch, many a

mind snapped. Unnatural tension was succeeded by unnatural crimes. But

for the stronger intellects New England Calvinism became a potent

spiritual gymnastic, where, as in the Swedish system of bodily training,

one lifts imaginary and ever-increasing weights with imaginary and

ever-increasing effort, flexor and extensor muscles pulling against one

another, driven by the will. Calvinism bred athletes as well as maniacs.

The new situation, again, turned many of the theoretical speculations of

the colonists into practical issues. Here, for example, was the Indian.

Was he truly a child of God, possessing a soul, and, if so, had he

partaken of the sin of Adam? These questions perplexed the saintly Eliot

and the generous Roger Williams. But before many years the query as to

whether a Pequot warrior had a soul became suddenly less important than

the practical question as to whether the Pequot should be allowed any

further chances of taking the white man's scalp. On this last issue the

colonists were unanimous in the negative.

It would be easy to multiply such instances of a gradual change of view.

But beneath all the changes and all the varieties of individual behavior

in the various colonies that began to dot the seaboard, certain

qualities demanded by the new surroundings are felt in colonial life and

in colonial writings. One of these is the instinct for order, or at

least that degree of order essential to the existence of a camp. It was

not in vain that John Smith sought to correct the early laxness at

Jamestown by the stern edict: "He that will not work, neither shall he

eat." Dutch and Quaker colonies taught the same inexorable maxim of

thrift. Soon there was work enough for all, at good wages, but the

lesson had been taught. It gave Franklin's Poor Richard mottoes their

flavor of homely, experienced truth.

Order in daily life led straight to political order, just as the

equality and resourcefulness of the frontier, stimulated by isolation

from Europe, led to political independence. The pioneer learned to make

things for himself instead of sending to London for them, and by and by

he grew as impatient of waiting for a political edict from London as he

would become in waiting for a London plough. "This year," wrote one

colonist, "ye will go to complain to the Parliament, and the next year

they will send to see how it is, and the third year the government is

changed." The time was coming when no more complaints would be sent.

One of the most startling instances of this colonial instinct for

self-government is the case of Thomas Hooker. Trained in Emmanuel

College of the old Cambridge, he arrived in the new Cambridge in 1633.

He grew restless under its theocratic government, being, it was said, "a

person who when he was doing his Master's work would put a king into his

pocket." So he led the famous migration of 1636 from Massachusetts to

Hartford, and there helped to create a federation of independent towns

which made their own constitution without mentioning any king, and

became one of the corner-stones of American democracy. In May, 1638,

Hooker declared in a sermon before the General Court "that the choice of

public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance," and

"that they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is

in their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and

place into which they call them." The reason of this is: "Because the

foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the

people." This high discourse antedates the famous pamphlets on liberty

by Milton. It is a half-century earlier than Locke's Treatise on

Government, a century and a quarter earlier than Rousseau's Contrat

Social, and it precedes by one hundred and thirty-eight years the

American Declaration of Independence.

But the slightest acquaintance with colonial writings will reveal the

fact that such political radicalism as Thomas Hooker's was accompanied

by an equally striking conservatism in other directions. One of these

conservative traits was the pioneer's respect for property, and

particularly for the land cleared by his own toil. Gladstone once spoke

of possession of the soil as the most important and most operative of

all social facts. Free-footed as the pioneer colonist was, he was

disinclined to part with his land without a substantial price for it.

The land at his disposal was practically illimitable, but he showed a

very English tenacity in safeguarding his hold upon his own portion.

Very English, likewise, was his attachment to the old country as "home."

The lighter and the more serious writings of the colonists are alike in

their respect for the past. In the New England settlements, although not

at first in Virginia, there was respect for learning and for an educated

clergy. The colonists revered the Bible. They maintained a stubborn

regard for the Common Law of England. Even amid all the excitement of a

successful rebellion from the mother country, this Common Law still held

the Americans to the experience of the inescapable past.

Indeed, as the reader of today lifts his eyes from the pages of the

books written in America during the seventeenth century, and tries to

meditate upon the general difference between them and the English books

written during the same period, he will be aware of the firmness with

which the conservative forces held on this side of the Atlantic. It was

only one hundred years from the Great Armada of 1588 to the flight of

James Second, the last of the Stuart Kings. With that Revolution of 1688

the struggles characteristic of the seventeenth century in England came

to an end. A new working basis is found for thought, politics, society,

literature. But while those vast changes had been shaking England, two

generations of American colonists had cleared their forests, fought the

savages, organized their townships and their trade, put money in their

purses, and lived, though as yet hardly suspecting it, a life that was

beginning to differentiate them from the men of the Old World. We must

now glance at the various aspects of this isolated life of theirs, as it

is revealed in their books.