720 AMERICAN LITERATURE lectual culture. They have sought the sources, the themes, the rules, and the sanctions of their art in the Old World, and their highest ambition, like that of all colonists, has hitherto been to receive a favourable verdict, not from the country of their birth, but from that of their ancestors. Even Franklin in some respects an American of the Americans was in philosophy a practical disciple of Locke, as Jefferson was of the French Revolution. " The literary genius of Great Britain," says De Tocqueville, "still darts its rays into the recesses of the West. . . . The small number of men who write are English in substance, and still more in form. Of the great number of men who have written in America since the date of this criticism, only a fev have written much to confute it. Washington Irving, who, in the course of four distinct visits, spent much of his life in Europe, only escapes from the influence of Addison in his Knickerbocker and Dutch sketches. On land at least, Cooper though in many respects an original writer everywhere remembers Scott. As in the works of the Scotch novelist, the semi-barbarous feudal spirit is repre sented in conflict with modern law, in those of the Ameri can the enterprise of New England is struggling against the ruggedness of nature and a savage life. The writers of the last thirty years have been making strenuous, some times spasmodic, efforts after originality, but they are still affected by transatlantic associations. In the style of Mr Motley we cannot help observing the stamp of Carlyle. The Transcendental movement begun by Emerson is ad mitted to have derived its first impulse from Sartor Resartus ; and among the eccentricities that mark its followers none is more remarkable than their mania for German and Oriental quotations. The tyranny which five centuries load of classics, in the same tongue, exercises over tLo mind of a nation not yefe a century old is very much strengthened by the non-existence of an international copyright, which leads to the intellectual market being glutted with stolen goods. As long as a publisher in Boston or New York can republish a good book written in Edinburgh or London without paying for it, he is likely to prefer an undertaking which involves no risk and com paratively no outlay, to another which involves both; that is, the republication of the English to the first publication of an American book ; for the English book has already attained its reputation, and its popularity in America is secured, while the American book, for the copyright of which he has to pay, has, except in the case of a few authors, still to win its spurs. If the people of the United States had spoken a language of their own, it is probable they would have gained in originality; as it is, they arc only now beginning to sign their intellectual declaration of independence, a fact confessed among the latest words of their own greatest prose artist: " Bred in English habits of thought as most of us are, we have not yet modified our instincts to the necessities of our new modes of life. Our philosophers have not yet taught us what is best, nor have our poets sung to us what is most beautiful in the kind of life that we must lead, and therefore we still read the old English wisdom, and harp upon the ancient strings." III. EARLIER AMERICAN LITERATURE. We may trace the influence of the foregoing controlling facts or tendencies, subject to various phases of personal power, through the three great periods under which Anglo- American history obviously falls: The Colonial, the Revolutionary, and that of the 19th Century. 1. The Colonial Period. Little of interest in the world of letters has come down to us from the 17th century in the West. Sandys s Ovid, translated on the banks of the James River, dedicated to Charles I., and published 1626, is worthy of note as the first contribution to English literature from America. About the same date the Welsh Puritan Vaughan sent home his Golden Fleece from New foundland, and Captain Smith gave to the world his descriptions of Virginia. But the earliest verse that has a real claim to be regarded as American is a doggerel list, by an anonymous author, of New England s annoyances, which, if we remember the date a generation after Spenser had celebrated " the Indian Peru " in his Faery Queen will confirm our view of the backwoodsman s want of leisure for " polishing his stanza:" " The place where we live is a wilderness wood, Where grass is much wanting that s fruitful and good.
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If fresh meat be wanting to fill up our dish, We have carrots and pumpkins, and turnips and fish ; We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon, If it was not for pumpkins we should be undone." A little later we have a Puritan version of the Psalms, the worst of many bad; and about 1650 the poems of Anne Bradstreet and Benjamin Thomson, worthy of mention, but scarcely readable. In prose are relics of the sermons and controversies of Roger Williams and John Cotton and Eliot, the apostle of the Indians, with the ponderous Magnalia and witch denunciations of Cotton Mather. The main literary event of the century was the founda tion (1G36) of Harvard University. Yale College followed at a long interval, and subsequently Princeton College, and Brown University (Rhode Island). In all new countries in dustrial and commercial interests are at first the strongest. The febrile activity produced by fear of a sterile future leaves little room for speculative imagination. But in the New World, colonised in part by adventurers, in pail by reli gious refugees and enthusiasts, another influence was from the first at work. When her solitudes began to give place to cities, the brains of her people were expended on the farm or the exchange with a zeal materially modified by the spirit and formula? of the faith which led the founders of the Northern States across the sea, and continued to infuse a religious clement into their enterprises. This element, which elevated the settlers of New England above ordinary emigrants, adding to their strength and giving a faster dye to their morality, was yet, in its original form, no more favourable to freedom or variety of thought than the industrialism by which it was surrounded. But it begat and fostered the Puritan theological literature which was concentrated in the massive yet incisive treatises and discussions of Jonathan Edwards of Connecticut (1703- Kd vard- 1758) who, if not, as asserted by American panegyrists, " the first man of the world during the second quarter of the 18th century," was yet, by the clear vigour of his thought and the force of its expression, one of the fore most figures of that era. An estimate of his rank as a theologian belongs to a distinct branch of the history of American literature. It is enough here to refer to the testimony of all competent judges as to the singular lucidity of his style, and to that of his contemporaries as to the fervour of his eloquence and the modest simplicity of his life. Passages of his occasional writings, as the description of his future wife, evince a grace and sweet ness of temper not always associated with the views of which he was and remains the most salient English advo cate. A slightly junior contemporary of Edwards, the exponent KCLT e^oxr/r of the other that is, the secular side of early American life was destined to see the end of one and play a prominent part in opening another era of his country s history. Benjamin Franklin, as long as Utili tarian philosophy endures, will be a name to conjure with. It is durum et veneralile, though its owner was endowed with as little as possible for a great man of the " faculty divine." Franklin s autobiography, the details of which
Franklin
