The Poems of Philip Freneau Volume I Part 9

"She felt the fury of her ball, Down, prostrate down, the Britons fall; The decks are strew'd with slain: Jones to the foe his vessel lash'd; And while the black artillery flash'd Loud thunders shook the main."

It is not impertinent to observe that Thomas Campbell was but four years of age when this appeared. It was not Scott or Cooper who added the domain of the ocean to literature; it was Freneau. His books are full of the roar and the sweep of the open sea, which he knew as the farmer knows his ancestral acres. There is no more true and vigorous picture of an ocean voyage and a naval combat than that contained in Canto I of "The British Prison Ship." The episode of the boatswain's fiery prayer, just before the conflict, is unique in literature.

The war over, Freneau would return to his dream; he would pour forth the poetic message that was in him; but his countrymen, delighting in his hard blows and biting sarcasm, refused to listen to the merely poetic.

They demanded jingles and clever hits. The poet turned fiercely upon them. "For men I keep a pen," he cried, "for dogs a cane." The time for using the cane was past; he would use it no more. But who would listen to anything that was not rant and bombast? Fate had thrown him into a "bard-baiting clime." A wave of the old bitterness swept over him:

"Expect not in these times of rude renown That verse like yours will have the chance to please: No taste for plaintive elegy is known, Nor lyric ode,--none care for things like these."

How he at length deliberately turned from the muse of his choice, and how after a long experience with the world of actual affairs he exchanged his old poetic ideals for those of mere reason and common sense, we have attempted to show.

Here was a man equipped by nature for a true poet, a man with a message, yet dwarfed and transformed by his environment. America was not ready for her singer. It took half a century more to make way in the wilderness for the new message that had been whispered to Freneau in his young manhood. Had he been a great world-poet, he would have been heard despite all difficulties; he would have trampled down the barriers about him and have compelled his age to listen, but the task was beyond him.

America, to this day, has produced no poet who single-handed and alone could have performed such a labor of Hercules. Sadly Freneau turned to other things.

He has never been adequately recognized. Had the first edition of his poems, published the same year as the Kilmarnock edition of Burns, been an English book, it long ago would have figured largely in the histories of the romantic and naturalistic movement which made possible the great outburst of the nineteenth century. That Freneau was the most conspicuous pioneer in the dim romantic world that was to be explored by Coleridge and Poe, we have already shown; that he was a pioneer in the movement that succeeded in throwing off the chain forged by Pope is evident to any one who will examine his early work. "The Wild Honey Suckle," for instance, which was written in 1786, twelve years before the "Lyrical Ballads," is as spontaneous and as free from Pope as anything written by Wordsworth. It is a nature lyric written with the eye upon the object, without recollection of other poetry, and it draws from the humble flower a lesson for humanity in the true Wordsworthian manner. Before Freneau, American poetry had been full of the eglantine, the yew, the Babylonian willow, the lark--the flora and fauna of the Hebrew and British bards. In our poet we find, for the first time, the actual life of the American forest and field--the wild pink, the elm, the wild honeysuckle, the pumpkin, the blackbird, the squirrel, the partridge, "the loquacious whip-poor-will," and in addition to this the varied life of the American tropic islands. We find for the first time examples of that true poetic spirit that can find inspiration in humble and even vulgar things; that, furthermore, can draw from lowly nature and her commonplaces deep lessons for human life. Freneau sees the reflection of the stars in the bosom of the river,

"But when the tide had ebbed away The scene fantastic with it fled, A bank of mud around me lay And sea-weed on the river's bed,"

and from this he draws the obvious moral for human life. Consider what Pope would have said of mud. Indeed, to appreciate Freneau, one must come to him after a careful reading of the cla.s.sic poets who preceded him. What a shock to this school would have been the vividly realistic poem on "Logtown." Just how much Freneau influenced the school of poets who in England broke away from the trammels of the eighteenth century, we can never know; yet no one can read long in the American poet and not be convinced that his influence was considerable. His poems were known and read freely in England at the very dawn of the critical period in British poetry, and their echoes can be detected more than once.

In his use of his native land and his familiar surroundings as a background for art, Freneau discovered the poetical side of the Indian, and thus became the literary father of Brockden Brown, Cooper, and the little school of poets which in the early years of the century fondly believed that the aboriginal American was to be the central figure in the poetry of the new world. To the little real poetry that there is in the Indian, Freneau did full justice, but he went to no such absurd lengths as did Eastburn and Whittier. The "Indian Death Song," if it indeed be his, is full of the wild, stoical heroism of the brave who is dying beneath the torture of his enemies. In "The Indian Student" he has covered fully the Indian's love for the pathless forest, and to the untamable wildness of his nature. "The Dying Indian" and "The Indian Burying-Ground" sum up what is essentially poetic in Indian legend and all that is pathetic in the fate of the vanishing race. Poetry, if it is to confine itself to the truth, can do little more for the Indian.

Such was Philip Freneau, a man in every respect worthy to bear the t.i.tle of "the father of American poetry." He was the first true poet born upon our continent; he realized in his early youth his vocation; he gave himself with vigor and enthusiasm to his calling; he fitted himself by wide reading and cla.s.sic culture; he received the full inspiration of a great movement in human society; he lifted up his voice to sing, but he was smothered and silenced by his contemporaries. He was all alone; he had about him no circle of "Pleiades" to encourage and a.s.sist; he had no traditions, religious or otherwise, that would compel silence. He was out of step with the theology of his generation; he was out of tune with the music of his day; he was beating time a half century ahead of the chorus about him. The people have to be educated to revolution, and America had not yet learned to take the initiative in things intellectual and aesthetic. She must follow the literary fashions beyond the sea. Freneau was for breaking violently away from England and for setting up a new standard of culture and literary art on this side the water.

"Can we never be thought To have learning or grace Unless it be brought From that d.a.m.nable place?"

he cried. But he reckoned without his countrymen. Not until Emerson's day did it dawn upon America that it was possible for her to think for herself and make poetry that did not echo the English bards. Thus did America reject her earliest prophet; thus did she stop her ears and compel him to lay aside his seven-stringed lyre for the horn and the bagpipes.

Freneau lived to see his discarded harp in full tune in other hands, first in England and then in his own land. There is something truly pathetic in the figure of the old minstrel, who had realized almost nothing of his early dreams, and yet who had been told by the great Jeffries that the time would surely come when his poems would command a commentator like Gray, who had been extravagantly praised by such masters as Scott and Campbell, who had written to Madison as late as 1815, "my publisher tells me the town will have them [his verses] and of course have them they will," it is pathetic to see this poet, in his h.o.a.ry old age, for he lived until 1832, realizing that he had been utterly forgotten, witnessing the triumph of the very songs that had haunted his youth, and seeing those who had not half his native ability crowned by those who had rejected and forgotten him. Such ever is the penalty of being born out of due time.

The present age has also been unjust to Freneau. It has left his poems in their first editions, which are now extremely rare and costly; it has scattered his letters and papers to the winds; it has garbled and distorted his life in every book of reference; it has left untold the true story of his career; it has judged him from generalizations that have floated from no one knows where. But time works slowly with her verdicts; true merit in the end is sure to receive its deserts; and Freneau may even yet be given the place that is his.

[1] Ann Maury's _Memoirs of a Huguenot_.

[2] In the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

[3] Madison Papers, Vol. XIII. p. 9.

[4] Introduction to the 1846 edition of "Modern Chivalry."

[5] The _United States Magazine_, February number.

[6] A perfectly preserved copy is in the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

[7] In the possession of Miss Adele M. Sweeney, Jersey City.

[8] Published in the _Freeman's Journal_, August 20, 1788.

[9] Published in the _Freeman's Journal_, July 8, 1789.

[10] _American Historical Review_, January, 1898.

[11] Randall's _Life of Jefferson_, vol. ii, 78.

[12] Randall's _Life of Thomas Jefferson_, ii, 81.

[13] _Writings of Jefferson_, i, 231.

[14] _Writings of Jefferson_, i, 251.

[15] Wallace Papers, vol. i. Pa. Hist. Soc.

[16] Madison Papers, vol. xxi, p. 70.

[17] In the possession of Adele M. Sweeney.

[18] In the possession of Mrs. Helen K. Vreeland.

[19] Madison Papers, x.x.xiv, p. 77.

[20] Madison Papers, vol. x.x.xv, p. 17.

[21] Morer. Horace, _Epistles_, Lib. ii, lines 1-4.

[22] Jefferson Papers, series 2, vol. 34, p. 135.

[23] Jefferson Papers, series 2, vol. 34, p. 134.

[24] Madison Papers, vol. liv, p. 49.

[25] Madison Papers, vol. liv, p. 49.

[26] Madison Papers, vol. lv, p. 5.

[27] Madison Papers, vol. lv, p. 77.

[28] Contributed to Duyckinck's _Cyclopaedia of American Literature_.

PART I

EARLY POEMS

1768--1775