A short history of American literature

Preface

Although this book is intended primarily for use io the class-room, the attempt has been made to give it a literary atmosphere, in the conviction that text-books on literature should contribute directly to the student's culture as well as to his knowledge of facts. It is hoped, therefore, that the general reader may find the following pages not wholly uninteresting. A good deal of the matter, especially in the foot-notes and the appendix, should also give the book some value for purposes of reference; to that end, definiteness and accuracy have been sought at no little labor ; but in such a mass of details errors are inevitable, and corrections will be welcomed.

The judicious teacher will readily recognize that the parts dealing with minor authors and with whole periods whose interest is historical rather than literary, as well as the more critical matter upon the greater authors, should be passed over lightly or omitted altogether when the class is immature. There is much to be said, however, in favor of requiring the older pupils in high schools and academies to devote some study to Colonial and Revolutionary literature, not only for its relation to the literature of the Republic, but also for the light it throws upon early American history and the life iv PREFACE.

and character of our forefathers. Furthermore, the extracts in the appendix will be found to contain much that is interesting as well as illustrative of the times ; and the very spirit of the age speaks in some of the unconsciously humorous title-pages given in the bibliography.

Throughout the book the literature has been presented in its relation to general conditions in America and to the literatures of England and the Continent of Europe, for only so can it be completely understood and its full significance perceived ; but the personality of the authors and the intrinsic qualities of their work have, it is hoped, received due attention. The division into periods is not meant to be insisted upon too strongly. But some dividing lines must be run for convenience and clearness in treating of so wide and diversified a field, and those adopted are perhaps liable to fewer objections than any others. They have, however, been transgressed freely where it was necessary to do so in order to avoid splitting the discussion of an author's work. In the case of writers with whom ,the reader is probably not familiar and never need be, the method is chiefly descriptive ; elsewhere the book is intended to be merely a guide in reading and studying the literature itself.

I wish to express my indebtedness, for inspiration and guidance and occasionally for information, to Professor Tyler's admirable history of the Colonial and Revolutionary literature. But it is due to the reader to add that even the earlier portions of this little work are based almost wholly upon a study of the literature at first hand. Any other method, indeed, would have been inexcusable in the case of one having access to such remarkable collections of Americana as the Harris Collection of

PREFACE. v

American Poetry, in the library of Brown University, and the John Carter Brown Library in the city of Providence. It has been my privilege to work from many rare first editions, and in a few instances to hit upon material not hitherto utilized, so far as I know, in books upon American literature. It may be fitting to say, further, that what is presented upon pages 79-90 embodies the results of a canvass of all the poetry published between the years 1789 and 1815 and contained in the Harris Collection. It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that the bibliography in the appendix has been made to % considerable extent from the original editions, and, where these were lacking, largely from Sabin's Bibliotheca Americana ; that the lives of the greater authors wid the lists of their works are derived from the larger biographies and bibliographies ; and that details about minor authors have been taken from standard books of reference.

My special thanks are due to Mr. Harry L. Koopman, librarian of Brown University, and to his assistants, for many courtesies; to Mr. George P. Winship, librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, for the use of that collection; to the authorities of the Rhode Island Historical Society for access to some rare publications on their shelves; to Mr. William E. Foster, librarian of the Providence Public Library, for special privileges ; and to Professor Alois Brandl, of the University of Berlin, for securing me the use of the University and Royal Libraries in Berlin. To Dr. F. R. Lane of the Central High School, Washington, D.C., to Professor L. A. Sherman of the University of Nebraska, and to Mr. H. L. Boltwood, Principal of the Evanston High vi PREFACE.

School, Illinois, I am indebted for sundry suggestions made while the book was going through the press ; but as their suggestions were not always adopted, they are in nowise responsible for the faults of the book. The faults are doubtless many. I can only hope that, in spite of them, the following pages may be of some real service in the study of the literature of my country.

Preface To The New Edition

In the present edition the literature from 1870 to 1900 receives fuller treatment than before, and an account of the literature since 1900 is added; extracts from writers of the nineteenth century are included in the Appendix, as illustrations of their thought and style ; and the Reference List of Books and Articles is brought down to date. A few corrections and insertions have also been made in the earlier pages of the book.

I express my thanks to my colleague, Professor Thomas Crosby, for aid in selecting material for the discussion of the modern American drama ; to Miss Edith R. Blanchard of the Brown University Library, for assistance in collecting biographical data ; and most of all to my wife, who offered helpful criticisms of the text of the new chapter, remade the index, and assisted in reading the proofs.

W. C. B.

Providence, R. I., June 15, 1919.

Contents

PAGES

PREFACES iii-vi

INTRODUCTION 3-4

Introduction

Men of the English race have occupied what is now the United States of America for nearly three centuries. In that time, aided by men of other races, they have done an immense and splendid work. They have increased from a few thousands to seventy millions ; subdued and settled a wilderness stretching from ocean to ocean \ established the greatest Republic in the world's history ; fought two great wars, one for national independence and one for national unity and the liberation of the slave ; developed a magnificent material civilization ; covered a continent with churches, schools, and colleges ; and made respectable beginnings in literature and the fine arts.

Of this manifold activity the literary side only will be the subject of special study in the following pages. But it should be remembered that a nation's literature is closely related to the other sides of the national life and cannot be fully understood apart. For the first two centuries, indeed, our literature is chiefly valuable, not as art, but as history, as an expression of the spirit of the people and the times. Nor can its full significance be seen until we widen our view still more and recognize that American literature is one branch of the greater English literature, a part of the life of a great race as well as of a great nation.

4 INTRODUCTION.

The history of American literature will, therefore, here be divided into periods corresponding to the great periods of American history :

I. The Colonial Period, 1607-1765.

II. The Revolutionary Period, 1765-1789.

III. The Period of the Republic, 1 789-1918.

In the first two periods the purely literary aspects of the subject-matter will, for the reason already mentioned, receive less attention ; in the last period the literature will be studied chiefly for its own sake, although its historical and social relations must not be forgotten; and from first to last there will be frequent occasion to note the influence exerted upon American writers by those of England and the other countries of Europe.

THE COLONIAL AND REVOLU- TIONARY PERIODS

FOREWORDS.

The development of American literature during the first two centuries presents a peculiar phenomenon. The literature is not that of a people slowly emerging from barbarism and creating their own civilization through the long toil of ages. On the contrary, it is the literature of a people already highly civilized, but transplanted to another continent, where they set up in the wilderness the institutions of the Old World, modifying them to meet changed conditions and taking on in time a somewhat new spirit, yet on the whole clinging tenaciously to the substance of the old, and imitating with the provincial's feeling of dependence the current life and fashions of the mother country. A colonial literature has the advantage of inheriting the riches of an old civilization ; it has the disadvantage of crude surroundings and lack of originality. Such was the case with American literature for two hundred years.

During the first three-fourths of the seventeenth century, the period when most of the English colonies in America were planted, England was the home of great men and of a great literature. Spenser had died as the old century went out, Shakspere and Bacon lived on into the new, and Milton was born one year after the settlement of Jamestown. The colonists were of the same stock which had just produced these and other literary Titans ; but it would of course be folly to look for writers equally great in the forests of America. Settling a wilderness and laying the foundations of a state are of themselves tasks ample enough for the strongest. If Shakspere the

8 THE COLONIAL PERIOD.

deer-stealer had fled to Virginia instead of to London, il Milton had been a dissenting parson in a little New England village, should we have had King Lear and Paradise Lost? Furthermore, it should be remembered that for a century and more the population of the colonies was: comparatively small ; and since geniuses are rare in every generation, it is no wonder that they were not numerous among the few hundred thousand inhabitants scattered along the Atlantic seaboard. It must be said, however, that not only the great lights were absent from America, but the lesser ones as well, and that the general level of literary talent was low. Unfavorable environment accounts for this state of things in part ; the character of the colonists accounts for yet more. Among the early settlers of the South were many paupers, convicts, and needy adventurers. In Virginia the leading colonists were indeed of the Cavalier class and inherently capable of literary culture ; but there, as will soon be shown, the local conditions were peculiarly unfavorable for the creation of a literary atmosphere. And the Northern and Middle colonies were settled chiefly by practical, religious people, more intent upon their political rights and the salvation of their souls than upon the delights of belles-lettres. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the greater part of the eighteenth, literature in England itself was comparatively inferior, the splendid Elizabethan age of poetry and imagination having given place to the " age of prose and reason." Yet the names of Dryden, Addison, Swift, Pope, Fielding, Gray, Goldsmith, Johnson, Gibbon, and Hume are in their own way great, and American literature for the same period has — with two exceptions — no names worthy of a place beside them. But this is not matter for surprise ; conditions in America, although improving, were still unfavorable. Along the frontier the contest with wild nature went on unceasingly ; and within the area already settled, arose a new set of sinew-straining tasks — the development of commerce and industry, the wars with France for the possession of Canada, and the struggle for independence and national union. Furthermore, from first to last the literature of the mother country retarded the growth of a native literature by diminishing the need of one ; our ancestors imported poetry, essays, and novels from England just as they imported fine fabrics and other luxuries.

Next to the inferiority of early American literature, the most conspicuous fact is its imitation of English models. Throughout its whole course it runs parallel with literature in the mother country, although usually lagging about a generation behind. In America as in England, the heavy prose of the seventeenth century is succeeded by lighter and more orderly prose in the eighteenth. The " metaphysical " poetry of the Jacobean and Caroline periods is solemnly echoed from the rocky New England coast. The didactic and satiric verse of Dryden and Pope feathers the shaft of the American satirist in regions which not long before knew only the whiz of the Indian's arrow. The profitable pleasantries of Addison, the pensive moralizing of Gray, the genial grace of Goldsmith, the ponderous sesquipedalian tread of Johnson, the new Romanticism of Collins, Macpherson, and Walpole, the " sensibility " of Mackenzie and Sterne, all find admirers and imitators in the colonial writers of verse and prose.

THE COLONIAL PERIOD.

EVENTS IN AMERICA.

Settlement of Jamestown, 1607.

Negro slavery introduced into Virginia, 1619.

Landing of Pilgrims at Plymouth, 1620.

New York settled by Dutch, 1621.

Indian massacre in Virginia, 1622.

Founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1630.

Founding of Maryland, 1634.

First settlement in Connecticut,

1635.

Founding of Providence, 1636.

Pequot War, 1637.

Delaware settled by Swedes, 1638.

First settlement in Nor*h Carolina,

Persecution of Quakers, 1656-1661*

English seize New York, 1664.

Founding of Charleston, S.C., 1670.

Bacon's Rebellion, 1676.

King Philip's War, 1675-1678.

Pennsylvania settled, 1682.

Salem witchcraft, 1692.

Wars in America between France (aided by Indians) and England : King William's War, 1689-1697; Queen Anne's War, 1702-1713; King George's Wai, 1744-1748; French and Indian War, 1754-1763.

EVENTS IN ENGLAND.

Reign of James I., 1603-1625.

Charles I. came to throne, 1625.

Civil War, 1642-1646.

Charles I. beheaded, 1649.

England a commonwealth, 1649-

1660.

Restoration of monarchy, 1660.

The Bloodless Revolution, 1688.

William and Mary came to throne,

1689.

Reign of Anne, 1702-1714.

Reign of George I., 1714-1727.

Reign of George II., 1727-1760.

George III. came to throne, 1760.

LITERATURE IN ENGLAND.

Milton, 1608-1674; early poems

(published), 1645; prose, 1641-

1674 ; Paradise Lost, 1667. * Metaphysical " poets : Donne,

Quarles, 1592-1644 ; Cowley,

1618-1667.

Great preachers : Taylor, 1613- 1667; Barrow, 1630- 1677; Tillot son,i63o-i694; South, 1633-1716.

Pilgrim's Progress, 1678 and 1684

IO

THE COLONIAL PERIOD.