A History of American Literature. Boynton Percy Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ But when he said that the American, sprung from Europe but here adopted into a new nation, “ought therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born,” he was saying something that has been repeated with new conviction ten thousand times since the outbreak of the Great War. And when he declared that “the American is a new man, who acts upon new principles” he was foreshadowing national policies which the world has been slow to understand. The possibility of a nation’s being too proud to fight at the first provocation, and the subordination of national interest to the interest of mankind – this is the language of the new principles that Crèvecœur was invoking. It is nearly a century and a half since he tried to answer the question “What is an American?” Much has happened since then. Internally the country has developed to the extent of his farthest dreams, and in the world-family, after five great wars, it has become one of the greatest of the powers, fulfilling so much of his predictions that one speculates in all humility on what may be the next steps “for that new race of men whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”

      BOOK LIST

       Individual Author

      Michel Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecœur. Letters from an American Farmer. Written for the information of a friend in England. Edited by J. Hector St. John. 1782.

      Available Editions

      Letters from an American Farmer. Ludwig Lewisohn, editor. With prefatory note by W. P. Trent. 1904.

      W. B. Blake, editor. In Everyman’s Library.

      Biography and Criticism

      Boynton, Percy H. A Colonial Farmer’s Letters. New Republic, June 19, 1915.

      Mitchell, Julia Post. St. Jean de Crèvecœur. 1916.

      Tyler, M. C. Literary History of the American Revolution (1765–1783), Vol. II, chap. xxvii. 1897.

      TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

      Read the characterization of the American colonies in Burke’s “Speech on Conciliation.”

      Read the letter entitled “What is an American?” and see how far its generalizations apply to the America of to-day.

      Read Zangwill’s play “The Melting Pot” in the light of this letter on “What is an American?”

      Read passages which deal with nature for Crèvecœur’s observation on plant and animal life.

      Read the closing essay in comparison with Rousseau’s “Émile” for its romantic idealization of primitive life. Compare this essay with the picture of frontier life as presented in “The Deerslayer” or “The Last of the Mohicans.” Note the resemblances to Châteaubriand’s “René.”

      Read the opening chapters or divisions of Thoreau’s “Walden” and compare with the Crèvecœur “Letters” in point of the contrasting views on property, labor, and citizenship.

      Read Mary Antin’s “The Promised Land” for the differences in the America to which Crèvecœur came and the America which she found.

      CHAPTER VI

      THE POETRY OF THE REVOLUTION AND PHILIP FRENEAU

      With the Revolutionary War there was naturally a great output of printed matter. Controversial pamphlets, state papers, diaries, letters, and journals, plays (with prologues and epilogues), songs, ballads and satires, all swelled the total. No one can fully understand the Revolution or the period after it who does not read extensively in this material; yet, taken in its length and breadth, the prose and most of the verse are important as history rather than as literature. Out of the numerous company of writers who were producing while Franklin was an aging man and while Crèvecœur was an American farmer, one, Philip Freneau, may be considered as chief representative, and two others, Francis Hopkinson and John Trumbull, deserve a briefer comment.

      Francis Hopkinson (1737–1791), the Philadelphian, was well characterized in a much-quoted letter from John Adams to his wife in August, 1776:

      At this shop I met Mr. Francis Hopkinson, late a mandamus councillor of New Jersey, now a member of the Continental Congress, who … was liberally educated, and is a painter and a poet… He is one of your pretty little, curious, ingenious men… He is genteel and well-bred and is very social. I wish I had leisure and tranquillity of mind to amuse myself with those elegant and ingenious arts of painting, sculpture, statuary, architecture and music. But I have not.

      Undoubtedly Hopkinson’s work savors of the dilettante throughout; yet part of its historical significance is inherent in this fact, for Hopkinson is one of the earliest examples of talented versatility in American life. He had virtues to complement the accomplishments half enviously cited by John Adams. He was a learned judge, a stalwart revolutionist, a practical man of affairs, and a humorist.

      His collected writings in three volumes were done in the best manner of eighteenth-century England. Five sixths of them are essays, written not in series, but quite of the Spectator type. Three prose satires – “A Pretty Story” (1774), “A Prophecy” (1776), and “The New Roof” (1778) – are as important a trio as any written by one man in the Revolutionary days. The other sixth – his verse – belonged no less to the polite literature of the period. There are Miltonic imitations, songs, sentiments, hymns, a fable, and a piece of advice to a young lady. There are occasional poems, including birthday and wedding greetings, dramatic prologues and epilogues, elegies, and rimed epitaphs. Verses of these kinds, if they were all Hopkinson had written, would indicate a hopeless subservience to prevailing English fashions. But Hopkinson was nobody’s vassal. When he wrote he might as truly have asserted his refusal to submit to any sort of trammels except at his own option. Into a few imitation ballads he poured the new wine of Revolutionary sentiment, one of which, “The Battle of the Kegs,” with its mocking jollity, put good cheer in all colonial hearts in the times that tried men’s souls. It was his jaunty self-control, the quality of heroism without its pompous mannerisms, that set Hopkinson off in contrast with his fellows. He was almost the least pretentious of them all, yet few were more effective.

      My generous heart disdains

      The slave of love to be,

      I scorn his servile chains,

      And boast my liberty,

      John Trumbull (1750–1831), most talented of the “Hartford Wits,” tried his hand, like Hopkinson, at the conventional poetical subjects, but, unlike him, the bulk of his verse was contained in two long satirical essays: “The Progress of Dulness” (1772 and 1773) and “M’Fingal” (1776 and 1782). Apparently he had no further ambition for himself or other American poets than to

      bid their lays with lofty Milton vie;

      Or wake from nature’s themes the moral song,

      And shine with Pope, with Thompson and with Young.

      This land her Swift and Addison shall view,

      The former honors equalled by the new;

      Here shall some Shakspeare charm the rising age,

      And hold in magic chains the listening stage;

      A second Watts shall strike the heavenly lyre,

      And other muses other bards inspire.

      Nevertheless, in these two satires he wrote first from a provincial and then from an early national point of view. “The Progress of Dulness” is a disquisition on how not to bring СКАЧАТЬ