History of American Literature Part 8

He is the first American writer to show a keen sense of humor. There may be traces of humor in _The Simple Cobbler of Agawam_ (p. 41) and in Cotton Mather (p. 46), but Franklin has a rich vein. He used this with fine effect when he was colonial agent in England. He determined to make England see herself from the American point of view, and so he published anonymously in a newspaper _An Edict of the King of Prussia_. This _Edict_ proclaimed that it was a matter of common knowledge that Britain had been settled by Hengist and Horsa and other German colonists, and that, in consequence of this fact, the King of Prussia had the right to regulate the commerce, manufactures, taxes, and laws of the English. Franklin gave in this _Edict_ the same reasons and embodied the same restrictions, which seemed so sensible to George III. and the Tories. Franklin was the guest of an English Lord, when a man burst into the room with the newspaper containing the _Edict_, saying, "Here's news for ye! Here's the King of Prussia claiming a right to this kingdom!"

In writing English prose, Franklin was fortunate in receiving instruction from Bunyan and Addison. The pleasure of reading Franklin's _Autobiography_ is increased by his simple, easy, natural way of relating events.

Simplicity, practicality, suggestiveness, common sense, were his leading attributes. His sense of humor kept him from being tiresome and made him realize that the half may be greater than the whole. The two people most useful to the age in which they lived were George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

JOHN WOOLMAN, 1720-1772

A GREAT ALTRUIST.--This Quaker supplements Franklin in teaching that the great aim in life should be to grow more capable of seeing those spiritual realities which were before invisible. Life's most beautiful realities can never be seen with the physical eye. The _Journal_ of John Woolman will help one to increase his range of vision for what is best worth seeing. It will broaden the reader's sympathies and develop a keener sense of responsibility for lessening the misery of the world and for protecting even the sparrow from falling. It will cultivate precisely that side of human nature which stands most in need of development. To emphasize these points, Charles Lamb said, "Get the writings of John Woolman by heart," and Whittier wrote of Woolman's _Journal_, which he edited and made easily accessible, "I have been awed and solemnized by the presence of a serene and beautiful spirit redeemed of the Lord from all selfishness, and I have been made thankful for the ability to recognize and the disposition to love him."

John Woolman was born of Quaker parentage in Northampton, New Jersey. He never received much education. Early in life he became a shopkeeper's clerk and then a tailor. This lack of early training and broad experience affects his writings, which are not remarkable for ease of expression or for imaginative reach; but their moral beauty and intensity more than counterbalance such deficiencies.

A part of his time he spent traveling as an itinerant preacher. He tried to get Quakers to give up their slaves, and he refused to write wills that bequeathed slaves. He pleaded for compa.s.sion for overworked oxen and horses. He journeyed among the Indians, and endeavored to improve their condition. It cut him to the quick to see traders try to intoxicate them so as to get their skins and furs for almost nothing. He took pa.s.sage for England in the steerage, and learned the troubles of the sailors. From this voyage he never returned, but died in York in 1772.

In the year of his death, he made in his _Journal_ the following entry, which is typical of his gentle, loving spirit:

"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."

When a former president of Harvard issued a list of books for actual reading, he put Franklin's _Autobiography_ first and John Woolman's _Journal_ second. Franklin looked steadily at this world, Woolman at the next. Each record is supplementary to the other.

EARLY AMERICAN FICTION

THE FIRST ATTEMPTS.--MRS. SARAH MORTON published in Boston in 1789 a novel ent.i.tled _The Power of Sympathy_. This is probably the first American novel to appear in print. The reason for such a late appearance of native fiction may be ascribed to the religious character of the early colonists and to the ascendency of the clergy, who would not have tolerated novel reading by members of their flocks. Jonathan Edwards complained that some of his congregation were reading forbidden books, and he gave from the pulpit the names of the guilty parties. These books were probably English novels. Sir Leslie Stephen thinks that Richardson's _Pamela_ (1740) may have been one of the books under the ban. There is little doubt that a Puritan church member would have been disciplined if he had been known to be a reader of some of Fielding's works, like _Joseph Andrews_ (1742). The Puritan clergy, even at a later period, would not sanction the reading of novels unless they were of the dry, vapid type, like the earliest Sunday school books.

Jonathan Edwards wrote the story of one of his youthful experiences, but it was "the story of a spiritual experience so little involved with the earth, that one might fancy it the story of a soul that had missed being born."

Timothy Dwight (p. 92), who became president of Yale in 1795, said that there is a great gulf fixed between novels and the _Bible_. Even later than 1800 there was a widespread feeling that the reading of novels imperiled the salvation of the soul. To-day we know that certain novels are as dangerous to the soul as leprosy to the body, but we have become more discriminating. We have learned that the right type of fiction, read in moderation, cultivates the imagination, broadens the sympathetic powers, and opens up a new, interesting, and easily accessible land of enjoyment.

A quarter of a century before the _Declaration of Independence_, the great eighteenth-century English writers of fiction had given a new creation to the literature of England. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) had published _Pamela_ in 1740 and _Clarissa Harlowe_ in 1748. Henry Fielding (1707-1754) had given his immortal _Tom Jones_ to the world in 1749.

Mrs. Morton's _Power of Sympathy_, a novel written with a moral purpose, is a poorly constructed story of characters whom we fortunately do not meet outside of books. One of these characters, looking at some flowers embroidered by the absent object of his affections, says, "It shall yield more fragrance to my soul than all the bouquets in the universe."

The majority of the early novels, in aiming to teach some lesson, show the influence of Samuel Richardson, the father of English fiction. This didactic spirit appears in sober statement of the most self-evident truths. "Death, my dear Maria, is a serious event," says the heroine of one of these novels. Another characteristic is tepid or exaggerated sentimentality. The heroine of _The Power of Sympathy_ dies of a broken heart "in a lingering graceful manner."

At least twenty-two American novels had been published between 1789 and the appearance of Charles Brockden Brown's _Wieland_ 1798. Only an antiquary need linger over these. We must next study the causes that led to a p.r.o.nounced change in fiction.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE CLa.s.sIC AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL.--The next step in fiction will show a breaking away from the cla.s.sic or didactic school of Samuel Richardson and a turning toward the new Gothic or romantic school.

To understand these terms, we must know something of the English influences that led to this change.

For the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, English literature shows the dominating influence of the cla.s.sic school. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) in poetry and Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) in prose were the most influential of this school. They are called _cla.s.sicists_ because they looked to the old cla.s.sic authors for their guiding rules. Horace, more than any other cla.s.sic writer, set the standard for poetry. Pope and his followers cared more for the excellence of form than for the worth of the thought. Their keynote was:--

"True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

[Footnote: Pope's _Essay on Criticism_, lines 297-8.]

In poetry the favorite form was a couplet, that is, two lines which rhymed and usually made complete sense. This was not inaptly termed "rocking horse meter." The prose writers loved the balanced ant.i.thetical sentences used by Dr. Johnson in his comparison of Pope and Dryden:--

"If the flights of Dryden, therefore, are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing.... Dryden is read with frequent astonishment and Pope with perpetual delight."

Such overemphasis placed on mere form tended to draw the attention of the writer away from the matter. The American poetry of this period suffered more than the prose from this formal influence.

Since the motto of the cla.s.sicists was polished regularity, they avoided the romantic, irregular, and improbable, and condemned the _Arabian Nights_, _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, _The Tempest_, and other "monstrous irregularities of Shakespeare." This school loved to teach and to point out shortcomings, hence the terms "didactic" and "satiric" are often applied to it.

The last part of the eighteenth century showed a revolt against the cla.s.sicists. Victory came to the new romantic school, which included authors like Wordsworth (1770-1850), Coleridge (1772-1834), Sh.e.l.ley (1792-1822), and Keats (1795-1821). The terms "romantic" and "imaginative"

were at first in great measure synonymous. The romanticists maintained that a reality of the imagination might be as satisfying and as important as a reality of the prosaic reason, since the human mind had the power of imagining as well as of thinking.

The term "Gothic" was first applied to fiction by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), who gave to his famous romance the t.i.tle of "_The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Romance_" (1764). "Gothic" is here used in the same sense as "romantic." Gothic architecture seemed highly imaginative and overwrought in comparison with the severe cla.s.sic order. In attempting to avoid the old cla.s.sic monotony, the Gothic school of fiction was soon noted for its lavish use of the unusual, the mysterious, and the terrible.

Improbability, or the necessity for calling in the supernatural to untie some knot, did not seriously disturb this school. The standard definition of "Gothic" in fiction soon came to include an element of strangeness added to terror. When the taste for the extreme Gothic declined, there ensued a period of modified romanticism, which demanded the unusual and occasionally the impossible. This influence persisted in the fiction of the greatest writers, until the coming of the realistic school (p. 367). We are now better prepared to understand the work of Charles Brockden Brown, the first great American writer of romance, and to pa.s.s from him to Cooper, Hawthorne, and Poe.

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, 1771-1810

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN]

Philadelphia has the honor of being the birthplace of Brown, who was the first professional man of letters in America. Franklin is a more famous writer than Brown, but, unlike Brown, he did not make literature the business of his life. Descended from ancestors who came over on the ship with William Penn, Brown at the age of ten had read, with Quaker seriousness, every book that he could find. He did not go to college, but studied law, which he soon gave up for literature as a profession.

Depression from ill health and the consciousness that he would probably die young colored all his romances. He has the hero of one of his tales say, "We are exposed, in common with the rest of mankind, to innumerable casualties; but, if these be shunned, we are unalterably fated to die of consumption." In 1810, before he had reached forty, he fell a victim to that disease. Near the end of his days, he told his wife that he had not known what health was longer than a half hour at a time.

Brown deserves a place in the history of American literature for his four romances: _Wieland_, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, and _Edgar Huntly_. These were all published within the s.p.a.ce of three years from 1798, the date of the publication of _Wieland_. These romances show a striking change from the American fiction which had preceded them. They are no longer didactic and sentimental, but Gothic or romantic. Working under English influence, Brown gave to America her first great Gothic romances. The English romance which influenced him the most was _Caleb Williams_ (1794), the work of William G.o.dwin (1756-1836), the father-in-law of the poet Sh.e.l.ley.

_Wieland_ is considered the strongest of Brown's Gothic romances, but it does not use as distinctively American materials as his three other stories of this type, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, or _Memoirs of the Year 1793_, and _Edgar Huntly_. The results of his own experience with the yellow fever plague in Philadelphia give an American touch to _Ormond_ and _Arthur Mervyn_, and at the same time add the Gothic element of weirdness and horror. _Arthur Mervyn_ is far the better of the two.

_Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep Walker_, shows a Gothic characteristic in its very t.i.tle. This book is noteworthy in the evolution of American fiction, not because of the strange actions of the sleep walker, but for the reason that Brown here deliberately determines, as he states in his prefatory note _To the Public_ to give the romance an American flavor, by using "the incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the Western wilderness." If we a.s.sume that John Smith's story of Pocahontas is not fiction, then to Brown belongs the honor of first recognizing in the Indian a valuable literary a.s.set from the Gothic romancer's point of view. In Chapter XVI., he reverses Captain Smith's story and has Edgar Huntly rescue a young girl from torture and kill an Indian. In the next two chapters, the hero kills four Indians. The English recognized this introduction of a new element of strangeness added to terror and gave Brown the credit of developing an "Americanized" Gothic. He disclosed to future writers of fiction, like James Fenimore Cooper (p. 125), a new mine of American materials. This romance has a second distinguishing characteristic, for Brown surpa.s.sed contemporary British novelists in taking his readers into the open air, which forms the stage setting for the adventures of _Edgar Huntly_. The hero of that story loves to observe the birds, the squirrels, and the old Indian woman "plucking the weeds from among her corn, bruising the grain between two stones, and setting her snares for rabbits and opossums." He takes us where we can feel the exhilaration from "a wild heath, whistled over by October blasts meagerly adorned with the dry stalks of scented shrubs and the bald heads of the sapless mullein."

Brown's place in the history of fiction is due to the fact that he introduced the Gothic romance to American literature. He loved to subject the weird, the morbid, the terrible, to a psychological a.n.a.lysis. In this respect he suggests Hawthorne, although there are more points of difference than of likeness between him and the great New England romancer. In weird subject matter, but not in artistic ability, he reminds us of Poe. Brown could devise striking incidents, but he lacked the power to weave them together in a well-constructed plot. He sometimes forgot that important incidents needed further elaboration or reference, and he occasionally left them suspended in mid-air. His lack of humor was too often responsible for his imposing too much a.n.a.lysis and explanation on his readers. Although he did not hesitate to use the marvelous in his plots, his realistic mind frequently impelled him to try to explain the wonderful occurrences. He thus attempted to bring in ventriloquism to account for the mysterious voices which drove Wieland to kill his wife and children.

It is, however, not difficult for a modern reader to become so much interested in the first volume of _Arthur Mervyn_ as to be unwilling to leave it unfinished. Brown will probably be longest remembered for his strong pictures of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, his use of the Indian in romance, and his introduction of the outdoor world of the wilderness and the forest.

POETRY--THE HARTFORD WITS

The Americans were slow to learn that political independence could be far more quickly gained than literary independence. A group of poets, sometimes known as the Hartford Wits, determined to take the kingdom of poetry by violence. The chief of these were three Yale graduates, Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, and John Trumbull.

TIMOTHY DWIGHT (1752-1817).--Before he became president of Yale, Dwight determined to immortalize himself by an epic poem. He accordingly wrote the _Conquest of Canaan_ in 9671 lines, beginning:--

"The Chief, whose arms to Israel's chosen band Gave the fair empire of the promis'd land, Ordain'd by Heaven to hold the sacred sway, Demands my voice, and animates the lay."

[Ill.u.s.tration: TIMOTHY DWIGHT]

This poem is written in the rocking horse couplets of Pope, and it is well-nigh unreadable to-day. It is doubtful if twenty-five people in our times have ever read it through. Even where the author essays fine writing, as in the lines:--

"On spicy sh.o.r.es, where beauteous morning reigns, Or Evening lingers o'er her favorite plains,"

there is nothing to awaken a single definite image, nothing but glittering generalities. Dwight's best known poetry is found in his song, _Columbia_, composed while he was a chaplain in the Revolutionary War:--

"Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise, The queen of the world, and the child of the skies."

JOEL BARLOW (1755-1812) was, like Dwight, a chaplain in the war, but he became later a financier and diplomat, as well as a poet. He determined in _The Vision of Columbus_ (1787), afterwards expanded into the ponderous _Columbiad_, to surpa.s.s Homer and all preceding epics. Barlow's cla.s.sical couplets thus present a general in the Revolution, ordering a cannonade:--

"When at his word the carbon cloud shall rise, And well-aim'd thunders rock the sh.o.r.es and skies."