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Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 1: the pioneers (search)
new surroundings are felt in colonial life and in colonial writings. One of these is the instinct for order, or at least that degree of order essential to the existence of a camp. It was not in vain that John Smith sought to correct the early laxness at Jamestown by the stern edict: He that will not work, neither shall he eat. Dutch and Quaker colonies taught the same inexorable maxim of thrift. Soon there was work enough for all, at good wages, but the lesson had been taught. It gave Franklin's Poor Richard mottoes their flavor of homely, experienced truth. Order in daily life led straight to political order, just as the equality and resourcefulness of the frontier, stimulated by isolation from Europe, led to political independence. The pioneer learned to make things for himself instead of sending to London for them, and by and by he grew as impatient of waiting for a political edict from London as he would become in waiting for a London plough. This year, wrote one coloni
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 3: the third and fourth generation (search)
churches — and a dancingmaster. Young Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, professes a high respect intellect of the eighteenth century; and Benjamin Franklin, certainly the most perfect exponent of an reputation comparable with that enjoyed by Franklin in science and Jefferson in political propagaseat of the Washingtons was not far away, and Franklin's latest biographer points out that the pinkce long road which humanity has traveled. But Franklin faced the other way. He would have endorsed han instant to the London of 1724--the year of Franklin's arrival. Thirty-six years have elapsed sin of the Spectator rules — an admirable style, Franklin thought, and he imitated it patiently until iry to call the roll of all the good things in Franklin's ten volumes. I will simply say that those who know Franklin only in his Autobiography, charming as that classic production is, have made but aagazines. Their influence made for union, in Franklin's sense of that word, and their literary mode[7 more...]<
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 4: the revolution (search)
em. One American, no doubt our most gifted man of letters of that century, passed most of the Revolutionary period abroad, in the service of his country. Benjamin Franklin was fifty-nine in the year of the Stamp Act. When he returned from France in 1785 he was seventy-nine, but he was still writing as admirably as ever when he head of the Committee for drafting the Declaration of Independence. We need not linger over the familiar circumstances of its composition. Everybody knows how Franklin and Adams made a few verbal alterations in the first draft, how the committee of five then reported it to the Congress, which proceeded to cut out about one-fourth of the matter, while Franklin tried to comfort the writhing author with his cheerful story about the sign of John Thompson the hatter. Forty-seven years afterwards, in reply to the charge of lack of originality brought against the Declaration by Timothy Pickering and John Adams — charges which have been repeated at intervals
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 5: the Knickerbocker group (search)
forward a man of natural lucidity and serenity of mind, of perfect poise and good temper, who knew both Europe and America and felt that they ought to know one another better and to like one another more. That was Irving's service as an international mediator. He diffused sweetness and light in an era marked by bitterness and obscuration. It was a triumph of character as well as of literary skill. But the skill was very noticeable also. Irving's prose is not that of the Defoe-Swift-Franklin-Paine type of plain talk to the crowd. It is rather an inheritance from that other eighteenth century tradition, the conversation of the select circle. Its accents were heard in Steele and Addison and were continued in Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, and Charles Lamb. Among Irving's successors, George William Curtis and Charles Dudley Warner and William Dean Howells have been masters of it likewise. It is mellow human talk, delicate, regardful, capable of exquisite modulation. With instinct
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 7: romance, poetry, and history (search)
jurist, had published his five-volume life of his fellow Virginian a score of years earlier. But Sparks proceeded to write another biography of Washington and to edit his writings. He also edited a Library of American biography, wrote lives of Franklin and Gouverneur Morris, was professor of history and President of Harvard, and lived to be seventy-seven. As editor of the writings of Franklin and Washington, he took what we now consider unpardonable liberties in altering the text, and this erFranklin and Washington, he took what we now consider unpardonable liberties in altering the text, and this error of judgment has somewhat clouded his just reputation as a pioneer in historical research. George Bancroft, who was born in 1800, and died, a horseback-riding sage, at ninety-one, inherited from his clergyman father a taste for history. He studied in Germany after leaving Harvard, turned schoolmaster, Democratic politician and office-holder, served as Secretary of the Navy, Minister to England and then to the German Empire, and won distinction in each of his avocations, though the real pa
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 9: Union and Liberty (search)
c importance of Slavery as a peculiar institution of the South, provoked again the ominous question of the possibility of an enduring Union. From 1820 until the end of the Civil War, it was the chief political issue of the United States. The aim of the present chapter is to show how the theme of Union and Liberty affected our literature. To appreciate the significance of this theme we must remind ourselves again of what many persons have called the civic note in our national writing. Franklin exemplified it in his day. It is far removed from the pure literary art of a Poe, a Hawthorne, a Henry James. It aims at action rather than beauty. It seeks to persuade, to convince, to bring things to pass. We shall observe it in the oratory of Clay and Webster, as they pleaded for compromise; in the editorials of Garrison, a foe to compromise and like Calhoun an advocate, if necessary, of disunion; in the epochmaking novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe; in the speeches of Wendell Phillips,
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 10: a New nation (search)
an integral intellectual and spiritual activity which could express, in obedience to the laws of beauty and truth, the emotions stimulated by our national life. It has been assumed in the preceding chapters that American literature is something different from English literature written in America. Canadian and Australian literatures have indigenous qualities of their own, but typically they belong to the colonial literature of Great Britain. This can scarcely be said of the writings of Franklin and Jefferson, and it certainly cannot be said of the writings of Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lowell, Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Mr. Howells. In the pages of these men and of hundreds of others less distinguished, there is a revelation of a new national type. That the full energies of this nation have been back of our books, giving them a range and vitality and unity commensurate with the national existence, no one would claim. There are other spheres of effort in which A
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Bibliographic note. (search)
. Note W. Bradford, Journal (1898), J. Winthrop, Journal (1825, 1826), also Life and letters by R. C. Winthrop, 2 volumes (1863), G. L. Walker, Thomas Hooker (1891), 0. S. Straus, Roger Williams (1894), Cotton Mather, Diary, 2 volumes (1911, 1912), also his Life by Barrett Wendell (1891), Samuel Sewall, Diary, 3 volumes (1878). For Jonathan Edwards, see Works, 4 volumes (1852), his Life by A. V. G. Allen (1889), Selected sermons edited by H. N. Gardiner (1904). The most recent edition of Franklin's Works is edited by A. H. Smyth, 10 volumes (1907). Chapter 4. Samuel Adams, Works, 4 volumes (1904), John Adams, Works, 10 volumes (1856), Thomas Paine, Life by M. D. Conway, 2 volumes (1892), Works edited by Conway, 4 volumes (1895), Philip Freneau, Poems, 3 volumes (Princeton edition, 1902), Thomas Jefferson, Works edited by P. L. Ford, 10 volumes (1892-1898), J. Woolman, Journal (edited by Whittier, 1871, and also in Everyman's Library), the Federalist (edited by H. C. Lodge, 188
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Index. (search)
Chateaubriand 96 Atlantic monthly, 161, 167, 170, 250, 257 Autobiography, Franklin 58-59 Autocrat of the Breakfast table, the, Holmes 164, 167 Bacchus, Emerstman 201 Dwight, Timothy, 69 Edict of the King of Prussia against England, Franklin 58 Edinburgh review, the, 88 Edwards, Jonathan, 32, 45, 48-52 Eggleston,ll 172 Flood of years, the, Bryant 106 Forest Hymn, a, Bryant 106 Franklin, Benjamin, born (1706), 44; attitude toward church, 44; exponent of New England lif century, 260-61 Poets and poetry of America, Griswold 107 Poor Richard, Franklin 20, 57 Pory, John, 27 Prairie, the, Cooper 98, 99 Precaution, Cooper 97 237 Rowlandson, Mary, 39 Rules for Reducing a great Empire to a Small one, Franklin 58 Russell, Irwin, 246 Salem witchcraft, 43 Salmagundi papers, Irvin192 Uncle Tom's cabin, Stowe 98, 208, 219, 220-23 Union of the colonies, Franklin 59 Unitarianism, 112-13 Verplanck, J. C., 107 Very, Jones, 141 Vir