AMERICAN LITERATURE

CHAPTER I

AMERICAN LITERATURE BEFORE 1800

I. INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT

The Lack of Primitive Beginnings. As an expression of national life, American literature is different from any other in its lack of primitive beginnings. It does not, like the early English, progress as civilization progresses, gradually passing from the ruggedness of orally transmitted song to the intricacies of Elizabethan verse, the polished felicities of the early eighteenth century, and the studious and deliberate variety of the Victorian era. Nor does it take all the successive steps which lead up to, through, and out of feudalism. The effect of chivalry is not to be traced in its mediæval life, for it had no mediæval life. As a consequence, therefore, American literature does not in its beginnings directly feel the world-awakening influences of the Renaissance and the Reformation. These influences are, of course, traceable in American life, but it is only because their effects were brought over ready-made into America, just as certainly as clothes and tools and furniture and books. In the Colonial period one can study the process of transplanting a hardy flower from a sunny and protected place around the corner into the shade and the wind. Its roots are disturbed, but not at first wholly torn away from the original soil. Will the plant survive, blossom, and come to fruitage under the new conditions? Is it its previous self or something new? Or is it both, as the old stem drinks in new sap?

American Literature Defined.-It has been the practice of a number of historians of American letters to declare that nothing worthy of the name of literature was produced in the country before 1800. In order to differ intelligently with

critics of this type it is well to start with a definition. What is meant by literature, and what by American literature? The first requisite of literature is that it have some vital interest. If we can feel that an essay, a play, a song, or a story was the product of some living, energetic individual vitally interested in what he was doing, we can hardly maintain that we have not been reading literature. Yet it is necessary to go farther than this. It is not enough that a man show such enthusiasm or energy that " he tears a passion to tatters"; for with this element of vitality in any work of literature must also be combined a certain formal quality. The definition must be carried a step farther, moreover, to the other term, "American." What is it for literature to b national? Any national literature should be so distinct in its character that we could not conceive of its having been produced in any other country than that in which it was given birth. In this connection it appears that two main qualities are to be sought. First, literature may establish its claim to nationality by portraying or criticising the life in the midst of which it was written. The whole course of English letters is marked by works of this sort. The value of the Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with its fine series of portraits of the Knight and the Squire, of the Nun, the Priest, of the Merchant and the Shipman, the Clerk and the Wife of Bath, is that they make a composite study of English life in the fourteenth century, which is as useful to the historian as it is charming to the lover of literature. The comedies of Ben Jonson two centuries later, again help to expound the life of the subjects of Elizabeth. One hundred years after this, the satires of Joseph Addison on the subjects of Queen Anne are inevitably English. Then there follow a whole series of story-tellers from Richardson and Fielding to Dickens and Thackeray and on down to writers of the present day who have been respectively English and American because they have portrayed society in its different as pects, and perhaps passed criticisms upon it.

Yet to stop here with the definition of nationalism would be to omit some of the very greatest literature. Turn to Chaucer again. Thus far only the Prologue and connecting

links to the Canterbury Tales have been cited. What are the stories themselves? They have, in the majority of cases, little to do with the England of Chaucer's day. They are based on originals in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French. Yet they are distinctly English in reflecting the taste of the England of Chaucer's day, an England which was so full of stories of romantic adventure that the love of them was one of the characteristics of the age. These points should be kept in mind in a survey of the literature of America between 1600 and 1800. Do we find anything written in this long period which is full of life and therefore is literature? Do we discover anything which possesses artistic form and thus lays claim to the title? Can we admit that any of the material portrays and criticises American life in its earliest stages? Does any reflect the taste of the times?

II. COLONIAL LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1700

Seventeenth-Century Life in America.-The significance of the century marks in the Colonial period has been well indicated. In 1600 none of the settlements which developed into the original thirteen colonies had been established. In 1700 all but one of the colonies, Georgia, were flourishing. By 1800 the Revolution had taken place, and they had become an independent nation.

A glance over the period between 1600 and 1700 shows that whatever literature there was at the outset had to be of a very elementary type. For, though it was the record of a highly educated group of men, these men had left one of the great centres of seventeenth-century life and settled under primitive conditions from which they were trying to free themselves as soon as possible. Their lives were given over to the work of ploughing, building, fishing, and hunting, and of carrying on an active commerce with the Old World. There was, of course, plenty of material for romance in this experience. They encountered resistance on every side. In the north they forced the reluctant soil to yield them the bare necessities of life. Their suffering brought them intimately together, and their nobler emotions and baser pas

In fact,

sions offered much material for literary treatment. they had everything necessary except leisure. But engrossed as they were in the material problems of getting for themselves food and fuel, shelter and clothing, what they did write, although sometimes not of the briefest, was of the simplest nature.

Early Motives for Authorship.-Their motives for authorship during the early days were few. They wrote to keep in personal contact with England, to inform their families and their friends, to keep in touch with their financial backers and with the state authorities. Aside from this personal sort of production they wrote to remove prevailing misconceptions about America, and in so doing to stimulate colonization. At rare intervals, even in these early days, a third motive appeared in the case of a few colonists who wrote for their own edification and pleasure. Yet during most of this century it is significant that little printing was done in America, and that comparatively few utterances were addressed through the press to American readers. In the main, English-born men were supplying to London printers material for the English public.

First Writings in the South.-Captain John Smith, the most picturesque of the early settlers, has appropriately the honor of being first writer, by virtue of his True Relation of Virginia, published in London, 1608. It is a spirited work, heavy in spots where he piles up rather dry accumulations of facts about plants and animals, but full of lively interest when he comes to his own experiences with the colonists and the Indians, and freshened by "tall" stories which, through his genial disregard for the facts, cast a good deal of light upon his own character. The same jaunty animation appears in the so-called Burwell Papers, an incomplete account of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676; and both of these works, which may be taken as the most interesting early products from the South, show the same evident attention to the rather intricate prose style of the later Elizabethans.

Religious Feeling in the North.-In the North, for evident reasons, the output was much greater. In 1620, and again in 1630, companies of Englishmen in Plymouth and in Bos