The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays. Beers Henry Augustin

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СКАЧАТЬ and the like); and verse satires after the fashion of Prior and Pope. There is nothing very new about the Jack Dapperwits, Dick Hairbrains, Tom Brainlesses, Miss Harriet Simpers, and Isabella Sprightlys of these compositions. The very names will recall to the experienced reader the stock figures of the countless Addisonian imitations which sicklied o’er the minor literature of the eighteenth century. But Trumbull’s masterpiece was “M’Fingal,” a Hudibrastic satire on the Tories, printed in part at Philadelphia in 1776, and in complete shape at Hartford in 1782, “by Hudson and Goodwin near the Great Bridge.” “M’Fingal” was the most popular poem of the Revolution. It went through more than thirty editions in America and England. In 1864 it was edited with elaborate historical notes by Benson J. Lossing, author of “Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution.” A reprint is mentioned as late as 1881. An edition, in two volumes, of Trumbull’s poetical works was issued in 1820.

      Timothy Dwight pronounced “M’Fingal” superior to “Hudibras.” The Marquis de Chastellux, who had fought with Lafayette for the independence of the colonies; who had been amused when at Windham, says my authority, by Governor Jonathan Trumbull’s “pompous manner in transacting the most trifling public business”; and who translated into French Colonel Humphreys’s poetical “Address to the Armies of the United States of America,” – Chastellux wrote to Trumbull à propos of his burlesque: “I believe that you have rifled every flower which that kind of poetry could offer… I prefer it to every work of the kind, – even ‘Hudibras.’ ” And Moses Coit Tyler, whose four large volumes on our colonial and revolutionary literature are, for the most part, a much ado about nothing, waxes dithyrambic on this theme. He speaks, for example, of “the vast and prolonged impression it has made upon the American people.” But surely all this is very uncritical. All that is really alive of “M’Fingal” are a few smart couplets usually attributed to “Hudibras,” such as —

      No man e’er felt the halter draw

      With good opinion of the law.

      “M’Fingal” is one of the most successful of the innumerable imitations of “Hudibras”; still it is an imitation, and, as such, inferior to its original. But apart from that, Trumbull was far from having Butler’s astonishing resources of wit and learning, tedious as they often are from their mere excess. Nor is the Yankee sharpness of “M’Fingal” so potent a spirit as the harsh, bitter contempt of Butler, almost as inventive of insult as the saeva indignatio of Swift. Yet “M’Fingal” still keeps a measure of historical importance, reflecting, in its cracked and distorted mirror of caricature, the features of a stormy time: the turbulent town meetings, the liberty poles and bonfires of the patriots; with the tar-and-feathering of Tories, and their stolen gatherings in cellars or other holes and corners.

      After peace was declared, a number of these young writers came together again in Hartford, where they formed a sort of literary club with weekly meetings – “The Hartford Wits,” who for a few years made the little provincial capital the intellectual metropolis of the country. Trumbull had settled at Hartford in the practice of the law in 1781. Joel Barlow, who had hastily qualified for a chaplaincy in a Massachusetts brigade by a six weeks’ course of theology, and had served more or less sporadically through the war, came to Hartford in the year following and started a newspaper. David Humphreys, Yale 1771, illustrious founder of the Brothers in Unity Society, and importer of merino sheep, had enlisted in 1776 in a Connecticut militia regiment then on duty in New York. He had been on the staff of General Putnam, whose life he afterwards wrote; had been Washington’s aide and a frequent inmate at Mount Vernon from 1780 to 1783; then abroad (1784–1786), as secretary to the commission for making commercial treaties with the nations of Europe. (The commissioners were Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson.) On returning to his native Derby in 1786, he had been sent to the legislature at Hartford, and now found himself associated with Trumbull, who had entered upon his Yale tutorship in 1771, the year of Humphreys’s graduation; and with Barlow, who had taken his B.A. degree in 1778. These three Pleiades drew to themselves other stars of lesser magnitude, the most remarkable of whom was Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, a native of Waterbury, but since 1784 a practising physician at Hartford and one of the founders of the Connecticut Medical Society. Hopkins was an eccentric humorist, and is oddly described by Samuel Goodrich – “Peter Parley” – as “long and lank, walking with spreading arms and straddling legs.” “His nose was long, lean, and flexible,” adds Goodrich, – a description which suggests rather the proboscis of the elephant, or at least of the tapir, than a feature of the human countenance.

      Other lights in this constellation were Richard Alsop, from Middletown, who was now keeping a bookstore at Hartford, and Theodore Dwight, brother to Timothy and brother-in-law to Alsop, and later the secretary and historian of the famous Hartford Convention of 1814, which came near to carrying New England into secession. We might reckon as an eighth Pleiad, Dr. Elihu H. Smith, then residing at Wethersfield, who published in 1793 our first poetic miscellany, printed – of all places in the world – at Litchfield, “mine own romantic town”: seat of the earliest American law school, and emitter of this earliest American anthology. If you should happen to find in your garret a dusty copy of this collection, “American Poems, Original and Selected,” by Elihu H. Smith, hold on to it. It is worth money, and will be worth more.

      The Hartford Wits contributed to local papers, such as the New Haven Gazette and the Connecticut Courant, a series of political lampoons: “The Anarchiad,” “The Echo,” and “The Political Greenhouse,” a sort of Yankee “Dunciad,” “Rolliad,” and “Anti-Jacobin.” They were staunch Federalists, friends of a close union and a strong central government; and used their pens in support of the administrations of Washington and Adams, and to ridicule Jefferson and the Democrats. It was a time of great confusion and unrest: of Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, and the irredeemable paper currency in Rhode Island. In Connecticut, Democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of five years’ pay to the officers of the disbanded army. “The Echo” and “The Political Greenhouse” were published in book form in 1807; “The Anarchiad” not till 1861, by Thomas H. Pease, New Haven, with notes and introduction by Luther G. Riggs. I am not going to quote these satires. They amused their own generation and doubtless did good. “The Echo” had the honor of being quoted in Congress by an angry Virginian, to prove that Connecticut was trying to draw the country into a war with France. It caught up cleverly the humors of the day, now travestying a speech of Jefferson, now turning into burlesque a Boston town meeting. A local flavor is given by allusions to Connecticut traditions: Captain Kidd, the Blue Laws, the Windham Frogs, the Hebron pump, the Wethersfield onion gardens. But the sparkle has gone out of it. There is a perishable element in political satire. I find it difficult to interest young people nowadays even in the “Biglow Papers,” which are so much superior, in every way, to “M’Fingal” or “The Anarchiad.”

      Timothy Dwight would probably have rested his title to literary fame on his five volumes of theology and the eleven books of his “Conquest of Canaän.” But the epic is unread and unreadable, while theological systems need constant restatement in an age of changing beliefs. There is one excellent hymn by Dwight in the collections, – “I love thy kingdom, Lord.” His war song, “Columbia, Columbia, in glory arise,” was once admired, but has faded. I have found it possible to take a mild interest in the long poem, “Greenfield Hill,” a partly idyllic and partly moral didactic piece, emanating from the country parish, three miles from the Sound, in the town of Fairfield, where Dwight was pastor from 1783 to 1795. The poem has one peculiar feature: each of its seven parts was to have imitated the manner of some one British poet. Part One is in the blank verse and the style of Thomson’s “Seasons”; Part Two in the heroic couplets and the diction of Goldsmith’s “Traveller” and “Deserted Village.” For lack of time this design was not systematically carried out, but the reader is reminded now of Prior, then of Cowper, and again of Crabbe. The nature descriptions and the pictures of rural life are not untruthful, though somewhat tame and conventional. The praise of modest competence is sung, and the wholesome simplicity of American life, under the equal distribution of wealth, as contrasted with the luxury and corruption of European cities. Social questions are discussed, such СКАЧАТЬ