Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/765

Rh AMERICAN LITERATURE need not find place here, is as romantic as the life of an unromantic person can be. The incidents of the young candle-moulder the printer s apprentice the ballad- monger wisely discouraged by the wise paternal criticism, &quot; Versemakers are generally beggars&quot; the runaway, eating rolls on the Philadelphia street -his struggling life in London with Kalph of the Dunciad his return, &quot; cor recting the erratum &quot; of his infidelities by marriage with his old Pennsylvanian friend his success as a printer, economist, statesman, and diplomatist his triumphs in natural and political philosophy, clenched in Turgot s line, adapted from Manilius &quot; Eripuit cselo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis &quot; Ids examination before the /-House of Commons, resulting in the repeal of the Stamp Act, when Lord Chatham spoke of him as one who was &quot; an honour not to England only, but to human nature &quot; his signature of the Declaration of Independence his ministry in France and popular triumph with Voltaire, who said, &quot; Je n ai pu resister au d6sir de parler un moment la-langue de Franklin&quot; the acclamations of shouting multitudes on his return home Mirabeau s announcement of his death (in 1790, in his eighty-fourth year) to the Assembly &quot; the genius which has freed America, and poured a flood of light over Europe, has returned to the Jposom of the divinity &quot; are elementary facts of schoolboy history. They are the records of the successive stages of the greatest success achieved in modern times by the genius of common-sense, integrity, and in dustry indomitable. Franklin s experiments and physical discoveries form a chapter in the history of science ; but half of his fame even in this field is due to the precision and clearness of the manner in which they are announced. &quot; The most profound observations,&quot; says Lord Jeffrey, &quot; are suggested by him as if they were the most obvious and natural way of accounting for phenomena.&quot; The same literary merit characterises the financial pamphlets and treatises which first brought him into celebrity. Both are marked by the same spirit, the love of the Useful, which was his passion through life. Franklin follows Bacon, to an extreme opposed to that of the Platonists, in decrying abstractions. Archytas is said to have apologised for inventing the arch. Franklin is ashamed to have wasted time over pure mathematics in his &quot; magical squares.&quot; His aim is everywhere to bring down philo sophy, like the lightning, from heaven to earth, &quot;illustrans commoda vita;.&quot; His ethics those of Confucius or the Seven Sages, modified by the experience and the circum stances of a later age are embodied in the most famous of popular annuals, Poor JRichard s Almanack, in which for twenty-six years he taught his readers (rising to the number of 10,000) &quot;the way to be healthy and wealthy and wise,&quot; by following simple utilitarian rules, set forth in plain incisive prose and rhyme, rendered attractive by a vein of quaint humour and the homely illustrations always acceptable to his countrymen. The same train of thought appears in the &quot; Whistle,&quot; among the letters from Passy, where his persistent deification of thrift appears side by side with graceful compliments to Mesdames Helvetius and Brillon, records of the aftermath of senti ment that often marks a green old age. Franklin remains the most practical of philosophers in perhaps the most practical of nations. 2. Tlie Revolution Period. It has been often remarked that periods of political national crisis are more favourable to the preparation than to the actual production of litera ture. Wordsworth s assertion, that poetry is the outcome of emotion recollected in tranquillity, applies with slight modification also to artistic prose. The demands of instant action cast the reflective powers into abeyance, but a stormy era is the seed-time of a later harvest. There is only one exercise of the imagination that it directly stimu lates that of the orator ; and the conditions of his success, save in a few instances, make a drain on his posthumous reputation. In reading even the greatest speeches of the past, divested of the living presence which gave them colour and force, we find it difficult to account for the effect which they are known to have produced. They are the ashes or the fossils of genius. Little that is of per manent literary value is left us of the harangues that were the trumpet-calls of patriotism during the American Eevolutionary War. The triumphs of Patrick Henry, who Orators. &quot; wielded at will that young democraty,&quot; are commemor ated in the judicious biography of Wirt, but few of his orations are accurately preserved ; and of the speeches of James Otis, which were compared to &quot; flames of fire,&quot; we have mainly a tradition. His pamphlet (1762), entitled A Vindication of the conduct of the House of Representa tives, is considered to contain the germ of the Declaration of Independence. Among other considerable efforts of eloquence, those of Fisher Ames are worthy of note as being directed in great measure against the excesses of democracy. The master-minds of the eraywere the states- Statesmen men and jurists, who fought for the free soil, sunk the deep foundations, and reared the superstructure of the new Commonwealth. The history of American law is a distinct theme. It must suffice here to mention, as claiming recog nition in the field of letters, Washington himself, in his Washing clear and incisive thoiigh seldom highly-polished corre- ton. spondence ; his biographer John Marshall, chief justice of Marshall. the supreme court from 1801 to 1835, one of the early pilots of the state, who left behind him a noble and stainless name, and laid down the first principles of that international code afterwards elaborated by Wheaton; Madison, John Jay, the elder Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, during the war Washington s &quot; most confiden- ij am ntor tial aid,&quot; afterwards the presiding genius of the movement represented by the Federalist, the organ of the anti democratic party. To this he contributed three-fourths of the material, marked, as are all his papers and speeches, by originality of thought, breadth of view, and purity of style. As secretary of the treasury, he became perhaps the greatest of financiers. The general judgment of his countrymen acquiesces in the terms of the tribute paid to his memory by Guizot. &quot; He must be classed among the men who have best known the vital principles and fundamental con ditions of a government worthy of its name and mission.&quot; Of Hamilton s numerous historical sketches, the most celebrated is his letter to Colonel Laurens giving .an account of the fate of Major Andre, in which refinement of feeling and inflexible impartiality of view are alike conspicuous. The great and unhappily the bitter anta- Jefferson, gonist of the Federalists is one of the most conspicuous figures in the history of American thought. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), President from 1801 to 1809, is the representative in chief of the revolutionary spirit of his age and country. While his rival compeers stood firmly on the defensive against the encroachments of an arbitrary government, his desire was, in politics as in speculation generally, to break with the past. Inspired with patriotic zeal by Patrick Henry s denunciations of the Stamp Act, he came forward prominently in 1769 as a member of the Colonial Assembly of Virginia. In 1776 the main part of the responsibility of drawing up the Declaration of Independence fell upon him. In 1784 he was appointed minister of the congress in Paris, where he spent the greater part of six years, and brought back an admiration for those phases of the French Revolution from which the more temperate judgments of Hamilton and Fisher Ames had recoiled. He threw himself heart and soul into I. - 91