Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 01.djvu/540

AMERICAN LITERATURE. William Douglass, whose Summary dates from 1747-51.

But theology did not vanish from New Eng- land with the weakening of the theocracy. The Kev. John Wise, with his Churches' Quarrel Es- poused (1710) and his Vindication of the Gov- ernment of New England Churches (1717) showed himself to be the peer of any of his fore- runners, and gave lessons in statesmanship to the Revolutionary leaders who were to follow him. Greater than Wi.se was Jonathan Edwards, the most original theologian and metaphysician that the New World has produced. In his juvenile papers Edwards anticipated Berkeley ; in his personal memoranda and occasionally in his for- mal treatises, he showed that he was a poet-mys- tic and a lover of nature rare for his times; in his Narrative of Surprising Conversions (1736), he displayed a remarkable psychological acumen. He is, of course, best known to-day by his Freedom of the Will (1754), which is still a powerful piece of exposition, although its con- clusions seem monstrous and untenable, and by his minatory sermons, which, like the famous one preaclied at Enfield, Conn., held his awestruck hearers suspended over the very mouth of hell. Edwards's theology is now antiquated, but his works contain the germs of nearly all subsequent theological speculations, and they are a well of inspiration to thoughtful readers.

The only American colonial who ranks with Edwards as a writer and thinker, Benjamin Franklin, while also a New Englander, is always regarded as a representative of the middle colo- nies. Other interesting writers were grouped about him in Philadelphia, but New York and New Jersey produced few of any consequence. As a student of nature Franklin was only the fore- most of an interesting group of men such as James Logan, John Bertram, and Jolin Winthrop, of Harvard. As a writer and thinker on political subjects he exemplified the spirit of the age that was to produce publicists like John Dickinson, whose Letters from a Farmer (1767) focused the spirit of resistance; Samuel and John Adams, Jefterson, Hamilton, and Madison — men whose political writings, culminating in The Federalist ( 1788), astonished Europe and reached what per- haps is the high-water mark in this species of composition. For, as is well known, the eigliteenth century was not less predominatingly political than the seventeenth had been theologi- cal. It was also utilitarian, and so Franklin, who thoroughly sunnned up his age, was the cre- ator of Poor Richard, whose Almanac may almost be said to be the foundation stone of popular education in America. It is probably his de- lightful Autobiography, however, that gives Franklin his position as the wiiter of the only literary classic produced in America before the nineteenth century. Taken along with his let- ters, this book, in both style and substance, fur- nishes us with one of the most remarkable self- revelations in literature. We read from a sense of duty a few authors of our Revolutionary pe- riod, like the .satirists Francis Hopkinson and John Trumbull, author of MeFingal (1775-82) ; we know The Indian Burying Ground, and a few other verses of the patriotic poet, Philip Fre- neau; we remember from our histories that the ill-fated Thomas Godfrey was the author of our first real po tical tragedy. The Prince of Par- thia (1765); we smile at the mention of Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus (1787), which de- veloped into liis formidable epic, The Columbiad (1807) ; but for many of us the true American literatm-e of the eighteenth century is repre- sented by the miscellaneous writings of Franklin. This, however, is not altogether fair. Several of Franklin's contemporaries deserve to be re- membered as writers of interest and of some im- portance. Among these are the Quaker John Woolman, the loyalist historian of Massachu- setts; Thomas Hutchinson, the patriotic historian and portentous dramatist and poet : Mrs. Mercy Otis Warren : the negro poetess, Phillis Wheatley, whose imitative verses astonished the learned of her day; the laborious poet, Rev. Timothy Dwight, whose Conquest of Canaan (1785), to- gether with the productions of the so-called "Hartford Wits," was intended to lay the founda- tion of a real American literature, and has at least been buried sufficiently deep for that pur- pose; the novelist, Mrs. Susanna Haswcll Row- son, whose Charlotte Temple (1790) is still read — all these and a few other writers should be re- membered before we accuse the eighteenth cen- tury in America of literary barrenness. These are not a tithe of the authors whom a serious literary historian would feel obliged to treat, and even we must add to them such a conscientious, if dull, historian as the Rev. William Stith, of Virginia, the distinctly more picturesque de- fender of the Old Dominion, Robert Beverley, and the genial cavalier. Colonel William Byrd, of Westover, who.se History of the Dividing Lino (172'J) between Virginia and!orth Carolina is a remarkably entertaining production. To these Southern historians the name oi Dr. David Ram- say, of South Carolina, should be added ; but it is of more importance not to forget the gi'eater works of two citizens by adoption — the English- man, Thomas Paine, and the Frenchman, Hector St. Jean de Crevecceur. Paine's Crisis and his Common Sense (1776) did perhaps more to make independence the goal of the American Revolu- tionists than any other contemporary writings, and it was the spirit of the Revolution that ani- mated his later but less acceptable books. CrSve- coeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) are full of an idealism more charming than can be found in Paine and of a love of nature almost worthy of Thoreau himself.

The confused period between the close of the Revolution and the beginning of the nineteenth century was naturally not propitious to litera- ture. But many of the writers mentioned in the last paragraph did their best work in it, and to them we may add the names of Royal 1 Tyler, whose play, entitled The Contrast (1786), was the first American comedy of importance; Noah Webster and Lindley Murray, famous later for their works in lexicography and grammar; Jere- my Belknap, author of one of the best of our early State histories, that of New Hampshire (1784) ; William Dunlap, whose History of the American. Stage (1832) is still important, and Joseph Dennie, a writer of a mildly Addisonian type, whose Portfolio, founded in 1801, marked, with the contemporaneous establishment of the New York Evening Post, the great aid that jour- nalism would give to literature throughout the new century.

But a more conspicuous writer than any of these, our first novelist, Charles Broekden Blown, had written his three most important novels, VFieland, Ormond, and Arthur Mervyn in the three closing years of the eighteenth century. He pub-