A History of American Literature. Boynton Percy Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ put it, to have “freedom to worship God,” but not to give this freedom to others. They had endured so much for their religious faith that they wanted a place where this, and this only, should be tolerated. So they became, not illogically, the fiercest kind of persecutors, practicing with a vengeance the lessons in oppression that they had learned in England at the cost of blood and suffering. They settled in compact towns where they could believe and worship together; they put up “meetinghouses” where they could listen to the preacher on the Lord’s Day and where they could transact public business, with the same man as “moderator,” on week days. He was the controlling power – “pastor,” or shepherd, and “dominie,” or master, of the community. And when the meetinghouses were finished, the settlers erected as their next public buildings the schoolhouses, where the children might learn to read the Scriptures so that they could “foil the ould deluder, Satan.” Education became compulsory as well as public. The Puritans’ place-names were Indian – Massachusetts and Agawam; derived from England of Puritan associations, like Boston, Plymouth, and Falmouth; or quaintly Scriptural, like Marthas Vineyard, Providence, and Salem. These people, unlike the settlers in the South, came over to live and die here. They wrote for the same social and business reasons that the Virginians did, but they also wrote much about their religion, compiled the “Bay Psalm Book,” published sermons, and recorded their struggles, which began very early and were doomed to final failure, to keep their New England free from “divers religions.” At first their writings were sent to England for publication, but before long, in 1638, they had their own printing press, and the things that were printed on it were not so much the sayings of individual men as the opinions of the community.

      The history of the migrations to the North and to the South during the seventeenth century is one with the history of the civil struggle in England. Up to 1640 colonization was slow and consistent at both points. From 1640 to 1660 it increased rapidly in the South and declined in the North, for in those years the grip of the Puritans on the old country relieved them from persecution there and from the consequent need to avoid it and, at the same time, made many Royalists glad of a chance to escape to some more peaceful spot. From 1660 on, with the return of the Royalists to power in England, Puritan migration was once more started to the North, and the home country was again secure for the followers of the king. But the real characters of the two districts were unchanged. They were firmly established in the earliest years, and they have persisted during the intervening centuries clear up to the present time. The America of to-day is a compound whose basic native qualities are inherited from the oldest traditions of aristocratic Virginia and the oldest traits of democratic and Puritan Massachusetts.

      In dealing with the early periods of any literature the exercise of artistic judgment is always very charitable. Rough, uncouth, fragmentary pieces are taken into account because they serve as a bridge to the remoter past. Harsh critics of colonial American literature seem to forget this practice when they rule out of court everything produced in this country before the days of Irving and Cooper. A great deal of the earlier writing should, of course, be considered only as source material for the historian; but some of it has the same claim to attention as the old chronicles, plays, and ballads in English literary history. It deserves study if it portrays or criticizes or even unconsciously reflects the life and thought of the times, and it is significant as an American product if in form or content or point of view it clearly belongs to this side of the Atlantic.

      The nature of settlement and the neglect of popular education led to an early lapse in authorship in the Southern colonies, so that in a survey as brief as this chapter their writers do not come into view until they find expression in the oratory and statesmanship of the Revolutionary period. Their narratives and descriptions of colonial life, as long as they wrote them at all, were quite like most of the earliest Northern writings of the sort. The one outstanding difference is that in whatever they wrote, the religious motive for settlement and the belief in a personal Providence were less insistently recorded than by the Puritans. Thus where John Smith was content with the general phrase “it pleased God,” Anthony Thacher, saved from shipwreck in Boston Harbor, wrote devoutly, “the Lord directed my toes into a crevice in the rock”; and where Smith’s companions hoped for the benevolent favor of the Most High, Thacher’s fellow-worshipers were perfectly certain that every step they took was ordained by God, so that even their apparent misfortunes were His punishments for misconduct.

      In all the great mass of Puritan writing in the first century of residence in America one definite current appears, and that is the quiet but irresistible current of change in human thought. The Puritans had made the profound but constantly repeated mistake of assuming that after thousands of years of groping by mankind, they had at last discovered the “ultimate truth”; that for the rest of time men need do nothing but follow the precepts which God had revealed to them about life here and life hereafter. They were, in their own serious way, happy in their confident possession of truth and sternly resolved to bestow it or, if necessary, impose it on all whom they could control. Their failure was recorded with their earliest attempts, and it came, not because of their particular weakness or the strength of their particular adversaries, but because they were trying to obstruct the progress of human thought, which is as inexorable as any other force of nature. They might as well have entered into an argument with gravitation or the tides. The most interesting and the best-written pieces of seventeenth-century New England literature all give evidence of this rearguard action against the advancing forces of truth.

      The Puritanism against which this rising tide of dissent developed was admirably embodied in William Bradford (1590-1657), the Mayflower Pilgrim who was more than thirty times governor of his colony and the author of “A History of Plimouth Plantation.” He was a brave, sober, devout leader with an abiding sense of the holy cause in which he was enlisted. His journal of the first year in America and his history are clearly and sometimes finely written, and give ample proof of his stalwart character – “fervent in spirit, serving the Lord,” and free from the personal narrowness which is often mistakenly ascribed to all Puritans. In his account, for example, of the reasons for the Pilgrims’ removal from Leyden the chronicle tells of the hardships under which they had lived there, the encroachments of old age, the disturbing effects of the life on the children, and, lastly, the great hope they entertained of advancing the church of Christ in some remote part of the world. It recounts many of the objections advanced against attempting settlement in America, and concludes:

      It was answered, that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages. It was granted the dangers were great, but not desperate; the difficulties were many, but not invincible. For though there were many of them likely, yet they were not certain; it might be sundry of the things feared might never befall; others, by provident care and the use of good means, might in a great measure be prevented; and all of them, through the help of God, by fortitude and patience, might either be borne or overcome. True it was, that such attempts were not to be made and undertaken without good ground and reason; not rashly or lightly, as many have done for curiosity or hope of gain, etc. But their condition was not ordinary; their ends were good and honorable; their calling lawful and urgent; and therefore they might expect the blessing of God in their proceeding. Yea, though they should lose their lives in this action, yet might they have comfort in the same, and their endeavors would be honorable.

      Unhappily this heroic trait of Puritanism was coupled with a desperate religious bigotry which the world is even yet slow to forgive.

      One of the earliest local dissenters was Thomas Morton (1575? -1646), author of the “New English Canaan,” published in London, 1637. It is a half-pathetic fact that this should stand out to-day beyond anything else written in the same decade in America, for the best of it – the third book – is a savage satire on the Puritans in Massachusetts. Morton, it is needless to say, was not a Puritan himself. He was a restless, dishonest, unscrupulous gentleman-adventurer from London who gave the best part of his life to fighting the Puritans on their own grounds. He started a fur-trading post at “Merry Mount,” just southeast of Boston, sold the Indians liquor and firearms, consorted with their women, and in wanton mockery set up a Maypole there and taught the Indians the English СКАЧАТЬ