Initial Studies in American Letters Part 2

Among the political literature which is of perennial interest to the American people are such State doc.u.ments as the Declaration of Independence, the Const.i.tution of the United States, and the messages, inaugural addresses, and other writings of our early presidents.

Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, and the father of the Democratic party, was the author of the Declaration of Independence, whose opening sentences have become commonplaces in the memory of all readers. One sentence in particular has been as a s.h.i.+bboleth, or war-cry, or declaration of faith among Democrats of all shades of opinion: "We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Not so familiar to modern readers is the following, which an English historian of our literature calls "the most eloquent clause of that great doc.u.ment," and "the most interesting suppressed pa.s.sage in American literature." Jefferson was a Southerner, but even at that early day the South had grown sensitive on the subject of slavery, and Jefferson's arraignment of King George for promoting the "peculiar inst.i.tution" was left out from the final draft of the Declaration in deference to Southern members.

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prost.i.tuted his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this execrable commerce. And, that this a.s.semblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us and purchase that liberty of which he deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he obtruded them, and thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people by crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun and other Southern statesman afterward adopted on the subject of slavery was not taken by the men of Jefferson's generation. Another famous Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, himself a slave-holder, in his speech on the militia bill in the House of Representatives, December 10, 1811, said: "I speak from facts when I say that the night-bell never tolls for fire in Richmond that the mother does not hug her infant more closely to her bosom." This was said _apropos_ of the danger of a servile insurrection in the event of a war with England--a war which actually broke out in the year following, but was not attended with the slave-rising which Randolph predicted. Randolph was a thorough-going "State rights" man, and, though opposed to slavery on principle, he cried "Hands off!" to any interference by the general government with the domestic inst.i.tutions of the States. His speeches read better than most of his contemporaries'. They are interesting in their exhibit of a bitter and eccentric individuality, witty, incisive, and expressed in a pungent and familiar style which contrasts refres.h.i.+ngly with the diplomatic language and glittering generalities of most congressional oratory, whose verbiage seems to keep its subject always at arm's-length.

Another noteworthy writing of Jefferson's was his Inaugural Address of March 4, 1801, with its programme of "equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friends.h.i.+p with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights; . . . absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority; . . . the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense; freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the _habeas corpus_, and trial by juries impartially selected."

During his six years' residence in France, as American minister, Jefferson had become indoctrinated with the principles of French democracy. His main service and that of his party--the Democratic, or, as it was then called, the Republican party--to the young republic was in its insistence upon toleration of all beliefs and upon the freedom of the individual from all forms of governmental restraint. Jefferson has some claims to rank as an author in general literature. Educated at William and Mary College in the old Virginia capital, Williamsburg, he became the founder of the University of Virginia, in which he made special provision for the study of Anglo-Saxon, and in which the liberal scheme of instruction and discipline was conformed, in theory, at least, to the "university idea." His _Notes on Virginia_ are not without literary quality, and one description, in particular, has been often quoted--the pa.s.sage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge--in which is this poetically imaginative touch: "The mountain being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and ytumult roaring around, to pa.s.s through the breach and partic.i.p.ate of the calm below."

After the conclusion of peace with England, in 1783, political discussion centered about the Const.i.tution, which in 1788 took the place of the looser Articles of Confederation adopted in 1778. The Const.i.tution as finally ratified was a compromise between two parties--the Federalists, who wanted a strong central government, and the Anti-Federals (afterward called Republicans, or Democrats), who wished to preserve State sovereignty. The debates on the adoption of the Const.i.tution, both in the General Convention of the States, which met at Philadelphia in 1787, and in the separate State conventions called to ratify its action, form a valuable body of comment and ill.u.s.tration upon the instrument itself. One of the most notable of the speeches in opposition was Patrick Henry's address before the Virginia Convention. "That this is a consolidated government," he said, "is demonstrably clear; and the danger of such a government is, to my mind, very striking." The leader of the Federal party was Alexander Hamilton, the ablest constructive intellect among the statesmen of our Revolutionary era, of whom Talleyrand said that he "had never known his equal," whom Guizot cla.s.sed with "the men who have best known the vital principles and fundamental conditions of a government worthy of its name and mission." Hamilton's speech _On the Expediency of Adopting the Federal Const.i.tution_, delivered in the Convention of New York, June 24, 1788, was a masterly statement of the necessity and advantages of the Union. But the most complete exposition of the const.i.tutional philosophy of the Federal party was the series of eighty-five papers ent.i.tled the _Federalist_, printed during the years 1787-88, and mostly in the _Independent Journal_ of New York, over the signature "Publius." These were the work of Hamilton, of John Jay, afterward, chief-justice, and of James Madison, afterward president of the United States. The _Federalist_ papers, though written in a somewhat ponderous diction, are among the great landmarks of American history, and were in themselves a political education to the generation that read them. Hamilton was a brilliant and versatile figure, a persuasive orator, a forcible writer, and as secretary of the treasury under Was.h.i.+ngton the foremost of American financiers. He was killed in a duel by Aaron Burr, at Weehawken, in 1804.

The Federalists were victorious, and under the provisions of the new Const.i.tution George Was.h.i.+ngton was inaugurated first President of the United States, on March 4, 1789. Was.h.i.+ngton's writings have been collected by Jared Sparks. They consist of journals, letters, messages, addresses, and public doc.u.ments, for the most part plain and business-like in manner, and without any literary pretensions. The most elaborate and the best known of them is his _Farewell Address_, issued on his retirement from the presidency in 1796. In the composition of this he was a.s.sisted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. It is wise in substance and dignified, though somewhat stilted in expression. The correspondence of John Adams, second President of the United States, and his _Diary_, kept from 1755-85, should also be mentioned as important sources for a full knowledge of this period.

In the long life-and-death struggle of Great Britain against the French Republic and its successor, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Federalist party in this country naturally sympathized with England, and the Jeffersonian Democracy with France. The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping abstractions of the French Revolution and clung to the conservative notions of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic leanings. On their side they were not slow to accuse their adversaries of French atheism and French Jacobinism. By a singular reversal of the natural order of things, the strength of the Federalist party was in New England, which was socially democratic, while the strength of the Jeffersonians was in the South, whose social structure--owing to the system of slavery--was intensely aristocratic. The War of 1812 with England was so unpopular in New England, by reason of the injury which it threatened to inflict on its commerce, that the Hartford Convention of 1814 was more than suspected of a design to bring about the secession of New England from the Union. A good deal of oratory was called out by the debates on the commercial treaty with Great Britain negotiated by Jay in 1795, by the Alien and Sedition Law of 1798, and by other pieces of Federalist legislation, previous to the downfall of that party and the election of Jefferson to the presidency in 1800.

The best of the Federalist orators during those years was Fisher Ames, of Ma.s.sachusetts, and the best of his orations was, perhaps, his speech on the British treaty in the House of Representatives, April 18, 1796.

The speech was, in great measure, a protest against American chauvinism and the violation of international obligations. "It has been said the world ought to rejoice if Britain was sunk in the sea; if where there are now men and wealth and laws and liberty there was no more than a sand-bank for sea-monsters to fatten on; s.p.a.ce for the storms of the ocean to mingle in conflict. . . . What is patriotism? Is it a narrow affection for the spot where a man was born? Are the very clods where we tread ent.i.tled to this ardent preference because they are greener? . . . I see no exception to the respect that is paid among nations to the law of good faith. . . . It is observed by barbarians--a whiff of tobacco-smoke or a string of beads gives not merely binding force but sanct.i.ty to treaties. Even in Algiers a truce may be bought for money, but, when ratified, even Algiers is too wise or too just to disown and annul its obligation." Ames was a scholar, and his speeches are more finished and thoughtful, more _literary_, in a way, than those of his contemporaries. His eulogiums on Was.h.i.+ngton and Hamilton are elaborate tributes, rather excessive, perhaps, in laudation and in cla.s.sical allusions. In all the oratory of the Revolutionary period there is nothing equal in deep and condensed energy of feeling to the single clause in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."

A prominent figure during and after the War of the Revolution was Thomas Paine, or, as he was somewhat disrespectfully called, "Tom Paine." He was a dissenting minister who, conceiving himself ill-treated by the British government, came to Philadelphia in 1774 and threw himself heart and soul into the colonial cause. His pamphlet, _Common Sense_, issued in 1776, began with the famous words, "These are the times that try men's souls." This was followed by the _Crisis_, a series of political essays advocating independence and the establishment of a republic, published in periodical form, though at irregular intervals. Paine's rough and vigorous advocacy was of great service to the American patriots. His writings were popular and his arguments were of a kind easily understood by plain people, addressing themselves to the common sense, the prejudices and pa.s.sions of unlettered readers. He afterward went to France and took an active part in the popular movement there, crossing swords with Burke in his _Rights of Man_, 1791-92, written in defense of the French Revolution.

He was one of the two foreigners who sat in the Convention; but falling under suspicion during the days of the Terror, he was committed to the prison of the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall of Robespierre July 27, 1794. While in prison he wrote a portion of his best-known work, the _Age of Reason_. This appeared in two parts in 1794 and 1795, the ma.n.u.script of the first part having been intrusted to Joel Barlow, the American poet, who happened to be in Paris when Paine was sent to prison.

The _Age of Reason_ damaged Paine's reputation in America, where the name of "Tom Paine" became a stench in the nostrils of the G.o.dly and a synonym for atheism and blasphemy. His book was denounced from a hundred pulpits, and copies of it were carefully locked away from the sight of "the young," whose religious beliefs it might undermine. It was, in effect, a crude and popular statement of the deistic argument against Christianity. What the cutting logic and persiflage--the _sourire hideux_--of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, with coa.r.s.er materials, essayed to do for the English-speaking populations. Deism was in the air of the time; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Joel Barlow, and other prominent Americans were openly or unavowedly deistic. Free thought, somehow, went along with democratic opinions, and was a part of the liberal movement of the age. Paine was a man without reverence, imagination, or religious feeling. He was no scholar, and he was not troubled by any perception of the deeper and subtler aspects of the questions which he touched. In his examination of the Old and New Testaments he insisted that the Bible was an imposition and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and obscenities.

Supernatural Christianity, with all its mysteries and miracles, was a fraud practiced by priests upon the people, and churches were instruments of oppression in the hands of tyrants. This way of accounting for Christianity would not now be accepted by even the most "advanced" thinkers. The contest between skepticism and revelation has long since s.h.i.+fted to other grounds. Both the philosophy and the temper of the _Age of Reason_ belong to the eighteenth century. But Paine's downright pugnacious method of attack was effective with shrewd, half-educated doubters; and in America well-thumbed copies of his book pa.s.sed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern or store, where the village atheist wrestled in debate with the deacon or the schoolmaster. Paine rested his argument against Christianity upon the familiar grounds of the incredibility of miracles, the falsity of prophecy, the cruelty or immorality of Moses and David and other Old Testament worthies, the disagreement of the evangelists in their gospels, etc. The spirit of his book and his competence as a critic are ill.u.s.trated by his saying of the New Testament: "Any person who could tell a story of an apparition, or of a man's walking, could have made such books, for the story is most wretchedly told. The sum total of a parson's learning is _a-b_, _ab_, and _hic_, _hoec_, _hoc_, and this is more than sufficient to have enabled them, had they lived at the time, to have written all the books of the New Testament."

When we turn from the political and controversial writings of the Revolution to such lighter literature as existed, we find little that would deserve mention in a more crowded period. The few things in this kind that have kept afloat on the current of time--_rari nantes in gurgite vasto_--attract attention rather by reason of their fewness than of any special excellence that they have. During the eighteenth century American literature continued to accommodate itself to changes of taste in the old country. The so-called cla.s.sical or Augustan writers of the reign of Queen Anne replaced other models of style; the _Spectator_ set the fas.h.i.+on of almost all of our lighter prose, from Franklin's _Busybody_ down to the time of Irving, who perpetuated the Addisonian tradition later than any English writer. The influence of Locke, of Dr. Johnson, and of the parliamentary orators has already been mentioned. In poetry the example of Pope was dominant, so that we find, for example, William Livingston, who became governor of New Jersey and a member of the Continental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem on _Philosophic Solitude_ which reproduces the tricks of Pope's ant.i.theses and climaxes with the imagery of the _Rape of the Lock_, and the didactic morality of the _Imitations from Horace_ and the _Moral Essays_:

"Let ardent heroes seek renown to arms, Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms; To s.h.i.+ning palaces let fools resort, And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court.

Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, From noise remote and ignorant of strife, Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau, The lawless masquerade and midnight show; From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars."

The most popular poem of the Revolutionary period was John Trumbull's _McFingal_, published in part at Philadelphia in 1775, and incomplete shape at Hartford in 1782. It went through more than thirty editions in America, and was several times reprinted in England. _McFingal_ was a satire in four cantos, directed against the American loyalists, and modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic poem, _Hudibras_. As Butler's hero sallies forth to put down May games and bear-baitings, so the tory McFingal goes out against the liberty-poles and bonfires of the patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill-entreated, and finally takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at Boston. The poem is written with smartness and vivacity, attains often to drollery and sometimes to genuine humor. It remains one of the best of American political satires, and unquestionably the most successful of the many imitations of _Hudibras_, whose manner it follows so closely that some of its lines, which have pa.s.sed into currency as proverbs, are generally attributed to Butler. For example:

"No man e'er felt the halter draw With good opinion of the law."

Or this:

"For any man with half an eye What stands before him may espy; But optics sharp it needs, I ween, To see what is not to be seen."

Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his own countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the newly adopted flag of the Confederation:

"Inscribed with inconsistent types Of Liberty and thirteen stripes."

Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati, who made such noise in their time as the "Hartford Wits." The other members of the group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith, Theodore Dwight, and Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow had formed a friends.h.i.+p and a kind of literary partners.h.i.+p at Yale, where they were contemporaries of each other and of Timothy Dwight.

During the war they served in the army in various capacities, and at its close they found themselves again together for a few years at Hartford, where they formed a club that met weekly for social and literary purposes. Their presence lent a sort of _eclat_ to the little provincial capital, and their writings made it for a time an intellectual center quite as important as Boston or Philadelphia or New York. The Hartford Wits were stanch Federalists, and used their pens freely in support of the administrations of Was.h.i.+ngton and Adams, and in ridicule of Jefferson and the Democrats. In 1786-87 Trumbull, Hopkins, Barlow, and Humphreys published in the _New Haven Gazette_ a series of satirical papers ent.i.tled the _Anarchiad_, suggested by the English _Rolliad_, and purporting to be extracts from an ancient epic on "the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night." The papers were an effort to correct, by ridicule, the anarchic condition of things which preceded the adoption of the Federal Const.i.tution in 1789. It was a time of great confusion and discontent, when, in parts of the country, Democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of five years' pay by the Continental Congress to the officers of the American army. The _Anarchiad_ was followed by the _Echo_ and the _Political Green House_, written mostly by Alsop and Theodore Dwight, and similar in character and tendency to the earlier series. Time has greatly blunted the edge of these satires, but they were influential in their day, and are an important part of the literature of the old Federalist party.

Humphreys became afterward distinguished in the diplomatic service, and was, successively, emba.s.sador to Portugal and to Spain, whence he introduced into America the breed of merino sheep. He had been on Was.h.i.+ngton's staff during the war, and was several times an inmate of his house at Mount Vernon, where he produced, in 1785, the best-known of his writings, _Mount Vernon_, an ode of a rather mild description, which once had admirers. Joel Barlow cuts a larger figure in contemporary letters. After leaving Hartford, in 1788, he went to France, where he resided for seventeen years, made a fortune in speculations, and became imbued with French principles, writing a song in praise of the guillotine, which gave great scandal to his old friends at home. In 1805 he returned to America and built a fine residence near Was.h.i.+ngton, which he called Kalorama. Barlow's literary fame, in his own generation, rested upon his prodigious epic, the _Columbiad_. The first form of this was the _Vision of Columbus_, published at Hartford in 1787. This he afterward recast and enlarged into the _Columbiad_, issued in Philadelphia in 1807, and dedicated to Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steam-boat. This was by far the most sumptuous piece of book-making that had then been published in America, and was embellished with plates executed by the best London engravers.

The _Columbiad_ was a grandiose performance, and has been the theme of much ridicule by later writers. Hawthorne suggested its being dramatized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery and thunder and lightning; and E. P. Whipple declared that "no critic in the last fifty years had read more than a hundred lines of it." In its ambitiousness and its length it was symptomatic of the spirit of the age which was patriotically determined to create, by _tour de force_, a national literature of a size commensurate with the scale of American nature and the destinies of the republic. As America was bigger than Argos and Troy we ought to have a bigger epic than the _Iliad_.

Accordingly, Barlow makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his prison to a "hill of vision," where he unrolls before his eye a panorama of the history of America, or, as our bards then preferred to call it, Columbia. He shows him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez; the rise and fall of the kingdom of the Incas in Peru; the settlements of the English colonies in North America; the old French and Indian wars; the Revolution, ending with a prophecy of the future greatness of the new-born nation. The machinery of the _Vision_ was borrowed from the 11th and 12th books of _Paradise Lost_. Barlow's verse was the ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope, and his poetic style was distinguished by the vague, glittering imagery and the false sublimity which marked the epic attempts of the Queen Anne poets. Though Barlow was but a masquerader in true heroic he showed himself a true poet in mock heroic. His _Hasty Pudding_, written in Savoy in 1793, and dedicated to Mrs. Was.h.i.+ngton, was thoroughly American, in subject at least, and its humor, though over-elaborate, is good. One couplet in particular has prevailed against oblivion:

"E'en in thy native regions how I blush To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee _Mush_!"

Another Connecticut poet--one of the seven who were fondly named "The Pleiads of Connecticut"--was Timothy Dwight, whose _Conquest of Canaan_, written shortly after his graduation from college, but not published till 1785, was, like the _Columbiad_, an experiment toward the domestication of the epic muse in America. It was written like Barlow's poem, in rhymed couplets, and the patriotic impulse of the time shows oddly in the introduction of our Revolutionary War, by way of episode, among the wars of Israel. _Greenfield Hill_, 1794, was an idyllic and moralizing poem, descriptive of a rural parish in Connecticut of which the author was for a time the pastor. It is not quite without merit; shows plainly the influence of Goldsmith, Thomson, and Beattie, but as a whole is tedious and tame. Byron was amused that there should have been an American poet christened Timothy, and it is to be feared that amus.e.m.e.nt would have been the chief emotion kindled in the breast of the wicked Voltaire had he ever chanced to see the stern dedication to himself of the same poet's _Triumph of Infidelity_, 1788. Much more important than Dwight's poetry was his able _Theology Explained and Defended_, 1794, a restatement, with modifications, of the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards, which was accepted by the Congregational churches of New England as an authoritative exponent of the orthodoxy of the time. His _Travels in New England and New York_, including descriptions of Niagara, the White Mountains, Lake George, the Catskills, and other pa.s.sages of natural scenery, not so familiar then as now, was published posthumously in 1821, was praised by Southey, and is still readable. As President of Yale College from 1795 to 1817 Dwight, by his learning and ability, his sympathy with young men, and the force and dignity of his character, exerted a great influence in the community.

The strong political bias of the time drew into its vortex most of the miscellaneous literature that was produced. A number of ballads, serious and comic, whig and tory, dealing with the battles and other incidents of the long war, enjoyed a wide circulation in the newspapers or were hawked about in printed broadsides. Most of these have no literary merit, and are now mere antiquarian curiosities. A favorite piece on the tory side was the _Cow Chase_, a cleverish parody on _Chevy Chase_, written by the gallant and unfortunate Major Andre, at the expense of "Mad" Anthony Wayne. The national song _Yankee Doodle_ was evolved during the Revolution, and, as is the case with _John Brown's Body_ and many other popular melodies, some obscurity hangs about its origin. The air was an old one, and the words of the chorus seem to have been adapted or corrupted from a Dutch song, and applied in derision to the provincials by the soldiers of the British army as early as 1755. Like many another nickname, the term Yankee Doodle was taken up by the nicknamed and proudly made their own. The stanza,

"Yankee Doodle came to town," etc.,

antedates the war; but the first complete set of words to the tune was the _Yankee's Return from Camp_, which is apparently of the year 1775.

The most popular humorous ballad on the whig side was the _Battle of the Kegs_, founded on a laughable incident of the campaign at Philadelphia. This was written by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadelphian, and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Hopkinson has some t.i.tle to rank as one of the earliest American humorists.

Without the keen wit of _McFingal_, some of his _Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings_, published in 1792, have more geniality and heartiness than Trumbull's satire. His _Letter on Whitewas.h.i.+ng_ is a bit of domestic humor that foretokens the _Danbury News_ man; and his _Modern Learning_, 1784, a burlesque on college examinations, in which a salt-box is described from the point of view of metaphysics, logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, anatomy, surgery, and chemistry, long kept its place in school-readers and other collections. His son, Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the song of _Hail Columbia_, which is saved from insignificance only by the music to which it was married, the then popular air of "The President's March." The words were written in 1798, on the eve of a threatened war with France, and at a time when party spirit ran high. It was sung nightly by crowds in the streets, and for a whole season by a favorite singer at the theater; for by this time there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, and even in puritanic Boston. Much better than _Hail Columbia_ was the _Star-Spangled Banner_, the words of which were composed by Francis Scott Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812. More pretentious than these was the once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., _Adams and Liberty_, recited at an anniversary of the Ma.s.sachusetts Charitable Fire Society.

The sale of this is said to have netted its author over $750, but it is, notwithstanding, a very wooden performance. Paine was a young Harvard graduate, who had married an actress playing at the Old Federal Street Theater, the first play-house opened in Boston, in 1794. His name was originally Thomas, but this was changed for him by the Ma.s.sachusetts Legislature, because he did not wish to be confounded with the author of the _Age of Reason_. "Dim are those names erstwhile in battle loud," and many an old Revolutionary worthy who fought for liberty with sword and pen is now utterly forgotten, or remembered only by some phrase which has become a current quotation. Here and there a line has, by accident, survived to do duty as a motto or inscription, while all its context is buried in oblivion. Few have read any thing more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for example, than the couplet,

"No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, But the whole boundless continent is yours,"

taken from his _Epilogue to Cato_, written in 1778.

Another Revolutionary poet was Philip Freneau--"that rascal Freneau,"

as Was.h.i.+ngton called him, when annoyed by the attacks upon his administration in Freneau's _National Gazette_. He was of Huguenot descent, was a cla.s.s-mate of Madison at Princeton College, was taken prisoner by the British during the war, and when the war was over engaged in journalism, as an ardent supporter of Jefferson and the Democrats. Freneau's patriotic verses and political lampoons are now unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet, by virtue of his _Wild Honeysuckle_, _Indian Burying Ground_, _Indian Student_, and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace and delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French blood,

Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the "poets" hitherto mentioned were nothing but rhymers; but in Freneau we meet with something of beauty and artistic feeling; something which still keeps his verses fresh. In his treatment of Indian themes, in particular, appear for the first time a sense of the picturesque and poetic elements in the character and wild life of the red man, and that pensive sentiment which the fading away of the tribes toward the sunset has left in the wake of their retreating footsteps. In this Freneau antic.i.p.ates Cooper and Longfellow, though his work is slight compared with the _Leatherstocking Tales_ or _Hiawatha_. At the time when the Revolutionary War broke out the population of the colonies was over three millions; Philadelphia had thirty thousand inhabitants, and the frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the sea-board. The Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau fetches his _Indian Student_ not from the outskirts of the settlement but from the remote backwoods of the State:

"From Susquehanna's farthest springs, Where savage tribes pursue their game (His blanket tied with yellow strings), A shepherd of the forest came."

Campbell "lifted"--in his poem _O'Conor's Child_--the last line of the following stanza from Freneau's _Indian Burying Ground_:

"By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, In vestments for the chase arrayed, The hunter still the deer pursues-- The hunter and the deer, a shade."

And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to borrow, in _Marmion_, the final line of one of the stanzas of his poem on the battle of Eutaw Springs:

"They saw their injured country's woe, The flaming town, the wasted field; Then rushed to meet the insulting foe, They took the spear, but left the s.h.i.+eld."

Scott inquired of an American gentleman who visited him the authors.h.i.+p of this poem, which he had by heart, and p.r.o.nounced it as fine a thing of the kind as there was in the language.

The American drama and American prose fiction had their beginning during the period now under review. A company of English players came to this country in 1762 and made the tour of many of the princ.i.p.al towns. The first play acted here by professionals on a public stage was the _Merchant of Venice_, which was given by the English company at Williamsburg, Va., in 1752. The first regular theater building was at Annapolis, Md., where in the same year this troupe performed, among other pieces, Farquhar's _Beaux' Stratagem_. In 1753 a theater was built in New York, and one in 1759 in Philadelphia. The Quakers of Philadelphia and the Puritans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the acting of plays, and in the latter city the players were several times arrested during the performances, under a Ma.s.sachusetts law forbidding dramatic performances. At Newport, R.I., on the other hand, which was a health resort for planters from the Southern States and the West Indies, and the largest slave-market in the North, the actors were hospitably received. The first play known to have been written by an American was the _Prince of Parthia_, 1765, a closet drama, by Thomas G.o.dfrey, of Philadelphia. The first play by an American writer, acted by professionals in a public theater, was Royall Tyler's _Contrast_, performed in New York, in 1786. The former of these was very high tragedy, and the latter very low comedy; and neither of them is otherwise remarkable than as being the first of a long line of indifferent dramas. There is, in fact, no American dramatic literature worth speaking of; not a single American play of even the second rank, unless we except a few graceful parlor comedies, like Mr. Howell's _Elevator_ and _Sleeping-Car_. Royall Tyler, the author of _The Contrast_, cut quite a figure in his day as a wit and journalist, and eventually became chief-justice of Vermont. His comedy, _The Georgia Spec_, 1797, had a great run in Boston, and his _Algerine Captive_, published in the same year, was one of the earliest American novels.

It was a rambling tale of adventure, constructed somewhat upon the plan of Smollett's novels and dealing with the piracies which led to the war between the United States and Algiers in 1815.

Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist of any note, was also the first professional man of letters in this country who supported himself entirely by his pen. He was born in Philadelphia in 1771, lived a part of his life in New York and part in his native city, where he started, in 1803, the _Literary Magazine and American Register_. During the years 1798-1801 he published in rapid succession six romances, _Wieland_, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, _Edgar Huntley_, _Clara Howard_, and _Jane Talbot_. Brown was an invalid and something of a recluse, with a relish for the ghastly in incident and the morbid in character. He was in some points a prophecy of Poe and Hawthorne, though his art was greatly inferior to Poe's, and almost infinitely so to Hawthorne's. His books belong more properly to the contemporary school of fiction in England which preceded the "Waverley Novels"--to the cla.s.s that includes Beckford's _Vathek_, G.o.dwin's _Caleb Williams_ and _St. Leon_, Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley's _Frankenstein_, and such "Gothic"

romances as Lewis's _Monk_, Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, and Mrs.

Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. A distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic of this whole school is what we may call the clumsy-horrible. Brown's romances are not wanting in inventive power, in occasional situations that are intensely thrilling, and in subtle a.n.a.lysis of character; but they are fatally defective in art. The narrative is by turns abrupt and tiresomely prolix, proceeding not so much by dialogue as by elaborate dissection and discussion of motives and states of mind, interspersed with the author's reflections. The wild improbabilities of plot and the unnatural and even monstrous developments of character are in startling contrast with the old-fas.h.i.+oned preciseness of the language; the conversations, when there are any, being conducted in that insipid dialect in which a fine woman was called an "elegant female." The following is a sample description of one of Brown's heroines, and is taken from his novel of _Ormond_, the leading character in which--a combination of unearthly intellect with fiendish wickedness--is thought to have been suggested by Aaron Burr: "Helena Cleves was endowed with every feminine and fascinating quality. Her features were modified by the most transient sentiments and were the seat of a softness at all times blushful and bewitching. All those graces of symmetry, smoothness, and l.u.s.ter, which a.s.semble in the imagination of the painter when he calls from the bosom of her natal deep the Paphian divinity, blended their perfections in the shade, complexion, and hair of this lady." But, alas! "Helena's intellectual deficiencies could not be concealed. She was proficient in the elements of no science. The doctrine of lines and surfaces was as disproportionate with her intellects as with those of the mock-bird.

She had not reasoned on the principles of human action, nor examined the structure of society. . . . She could not commune in their native dialect with the sages of Rome and Athens. . . . The const.i.tution of nature, the attributes of its Author, the arrangement of the parts of the external universe, and the substance, modes of operation, and ultimate destiny of human intelligence were enigmas unsolved and insoluble by her."

Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mystery on a basis ludicrously weak. Thus the hero of his first novel, _Wieland_ (whose father antic.i.p.ates "Old Krook," in d.i.c.kens's _Bleak House_, by dying of spontaneous combustion), is led on by what he mistakes for spiritual voices to kill his wife and children; and the voices turn out to be produced by the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of the story.

Similarly in Edgar Huntley, the plot turns upon the phenomena of sleep-walking. Brown had the good sense to place the scene of his romances in his own country, and the only pa.s.sages in them which have now a living interest are his descriptions of wilderness scenery in _Edgar Huntley_, and his graphic account in _Arthur Mervyn_ of the yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. Sh.e.l.ley was an admirer of Brown, and his experiments in prose fiction, such as _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne the Rosicrucian_, are of the same abnormal and speculative type.

Another book which falls within this period was the _Journal_, 1774, of John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, which has received the highest praise from Channing, Charles Lamb, and many others. "Get the writings of John Woolman by heart," wrote Lamb, "and love the early Quakers."

The charm of this journal resides in its singular sweetness and innocence of feeling, the "deep inward stillness" peculiar to the people called Quakers. Apart from his constant use of certain phrases peculiar to the Friends Woolman's English is also remarkably graceful and pure, the transparent medium of a soul absolutely sincere, and tender and humble in its sincerity. When not working at his trade as a tailor Woolman spent his time in visiting and ministering to the monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings of Friends, traveling on horseback to their scattered communities in the backwoods of Virginia and North Carolina, and northward along the coast as far as Boston and Nantucket. He was under a "concern" and a "heavy exercise" touching the keeping of slaves, and by his writing and speaking did much to influence the Quakers against slavery. His love went out, indeed, to all the wretched and oppressed; to sailors, and to the Indians in particular. One of his most perilous journeys was made to the settlements of Moravian Indians in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania, at Bethlehem, and at Wehaloosing, on the Susquehanna.

Some of the scruples which Woolman felt, and the quaint _navete_ with which he expresses them, may make the modern reader smile, but it is a smile which is very close to a tear. Thus, when in England--where he died in 1772--he would not ride nor send a letter by mail-coach, because the poor post-boys were compelled to ride long stages in winter nights, and were sometimes frozen to death. "So great is the hurry in the spirit of this world that, in aiming to do business quickly and to gain wealth, the creation at this day doth loudly groan." Again, having reflected that war was caused by luxury in dress, etc., the use of dyed garments grew uneasy to him, and he got and wore a hat of the natural color of the fur. "In attending meetings this singularity was a trial to me, . . . and some Friends, who knew not from what motives I wore it, grew shy of me. . . . Those who spoke with me I generally informed, in a few words, that I believed my wearing it was not in my own will."