Part 1

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A Manual of American Literature

Edited by Theodore Stanton, M.A. (Cornell)

In Collaboration with Members of the Faculty of Cornell University

G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York and London The Knickerbocker Press 1909

COPYRIGHT, 1909 BY G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

TO PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT THIS MEMORIAL VOLUME IS DEDICATED IN TOKEN OF HIGH REGARD AND ADMIRATION.

TAUCHNITZ.

EDITOR’S PREFACE

This book has been prepared for publication as No. 4000, a “Memorial Volume,” of the “Tauchnitz Edition.” Perhaps it may be well to explain to American readers what the “Tauchnitz Edition” is and what a “Memorial Volume” is in this collection.

The “Collection of British Authors,” or, as it is more popularly known on the European Continent, the “Tauchnitz Edition,” was instituted in 1841, at Leipsic, by one of the most distinguished of German publishers, the late Baron Bernhard Tauchnitz, whose son is now at the head of the house. The father records that he was “incited to the undertaking by the high opinion and enthusiastic fondness which I have ever entertained for English literature: a literature springing from the selfsame root as the literature of Germany, and cultivated in the beginning by the same Saxon race.... As a German-Saxon it gave me particular pleasure to promote the literary interest of my Anglo-Saxon cousins, by rendering English literature as universally known as possible beyond the limits of the British Empire.” In another place, Baron Tauchnitz describes “the mission” of his Collection to be the “spreading and strengthening the love for English literature outside of England and her Colonies.”

Baron Tauchnitz early felt that the general title of the series, “Collection of _British_ Authors,” was a misnomer, which might even give offence to an important branch of the English-speaking race; for, though Bulwer and Dickens led off in the Collection, “Pelham” being the first volume issued and “The Pickwick Papers” the second, the fourth volume, added at the beginning of the second year of publication, in 1842, was Fenimore Cooper’s “The Spy,” followed in the same year by a second volume of the same author. Furthermore, the year 1843 opened with Washington Irving’s “Sketch Book,” immediately followed by a third novel by Cooper; and, though it was not till 1850 that another American work gained admittance into this charmed circle, not fewer than three of Irving’s books succeeded one another in the single twelvemonth. In 1852, Hawthorne was welcomed with “The Scarlet Letter” and Mrs. Stowe with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; from that time on, scarcely a year has passed without some new American book being included in the Collection, and under the present routine each year’s issue, comprising some seventy-five volumes, includes several American works.

In fact, the representation of American authors in the “Tauchnitz Edition” is now so considerable that the list calls for a place by itself at the end of this volume, where it presents an interesting evidence of the growth of the popularity of American literature in Europe. The reader will notice that there are cases where some of the best works of an author are not included in the “Tauchnitz Edition.” The cause of these omissions is sometimes other than taste or choice. But the catalogue is suggestive just as it stands.

The “Memorial Volumes” form a little series of special issues published at turning-points. This Manual has been made a Memorial Volume out of compliment to American literature and is dedicated, with his permission, to President Roosevelt. In this way, the present Baron Tauchnitz has striven to show his high appreciation of the group of American authors in the Edition, and to follow in the footsteps of his high-minded father.

In his Preface to the first Memorial Volume, No. 500, entitled “Five Centuries of the English Language and Literature,” being a collection of characteristic specimens of British writers from Wycliffe to Thomas Gray, the first Baron Tauchnitz refers to the literature “on the other side of the Atlantic,” and says in a footnote to this Preface: “A glance at my list of authors will show that America has contributed no small part to my Collection. Nevertheless I did not deem it necessary to alter the title under which my undertaking was started, as I thought that the term ‘British Authors’ might not improperly be applied to writers employing the language common to the two nations on either side of the Atlantic.” No. 1000--Tischendorf’s edition of The New Testament--is dedicated “to my English and American Authors,” while in No. 2000--“Of English Literature in the Reign of Victoria, with a Glance at the Past”--the author, the late Professor Henry Morley, who long filled the chair of English Literature at the University of London, opens his Preface with these words: “When Baron Tauchnitz asked me to write this little book, he also wished me to include in it some record of the literature of America. But Baron Tauchnitz cordially agreed to a suggestion that the kindred literature of America, though we are proud in England to claim closest brotherhood with our fellow-countrymen of the United States, has a distinct interest of its own, large enough for the whole subject of another memorial volume, and that an American author would best tell the story of its rise and progress.”

Another work in the “Tauchnitz Edition,” but not a Memorial Volume, offered a good opportunity to present American literature to the attention of the European public. I refer to the two volumes of the late George L. Craik, sometime Professor of English Literature at Queen’s College, Belfast, entitled “A Manual of English Literature, and of the History of the English Language, from the Norman Conquest; with Numerous Specimens.” Here again no space is given to our authors, though they are mentioned once in a reference to “the leading poetical writers who have arisen in the American division of the English race, two or three of whom may be reckoned as of the second rank, though certainly not one as of the first.”

Towards the end of 1893, as the time was approaching for the issuing of No. 3000, and again, in 1900, when No. 3500 was soon to be reached, I hinted to my Leipsic friends the peculiar fitness of singling out one of these possible Memorial Volumes and making it a sketch of our literary life, in accordance with the promise made in Professor Morley’s Preface. I even suggested that Professor Moses Coit Tyler, who had then just completed his great work on our literature, be invited to perform the task. The last letter I ever received from this genial spirit, dated from the Isle of Wight, September 5, 1897, contains this passage: “I appreciate the honour you have done me in mentioning my name to Baron Tauchnitz, in connection with a proposed volume on American literature.” Nothing, however, came of this; and when, some ten years later, I was invited to prepare the present volume, my first thought was to utilise the _magnum opus_ of Professor Tyler, who had, in the meanwhile, passed away. So my chief care has been the first two chapters, drawn, with the kind permission of the publishers, Messrs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, and of the family of Professor Tyler, from his four authoritative volumes, “A History of American Literature during the Colonial Period,” and “The Literary History of the American Revolution,” to which Sir George Otto Trevelyan refers in his “American Revolution” as “a remarkable specimen of the historical faculty.”

The chief labour in the preparation of this volume has fallen upon my friends and collaborators of the Department of English and the Sage School of Philosophy of my Alma Mater. Acknowledgment is, further, particularly due to Professors J. M. Hart and M. W. Sampson, also of Cornell University, for valuable suggestions and considerable help. The work of seeing the American edition through the press has been done by Professors Northup and Cooper.

THEODORE STANTON.

PARIS, September, 1908.

CONTENTS.

PAGE COLONIAL LITERATURE.

By the late MOSES COIT TYLER, LL.D., Professor of American History in Cornell University. Abridged by the Editor.

I. First Period (1607-1676) 1

II. Second Period (1676-1765) 19

III. General Literary Forces in the Colonial Time 30

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.

By the late MOSES COIT TYLER. Abridged by the Editor.

I. A General View 39

II. The Principal Writers 48

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

I. The Historians 89 By ISAAC MADISON BENTLEY, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychology in Cornell University.

II. The Novelists 115 By CLARK SUTHERLAND NORTHUP, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of the English Language and Literature in Cornell University.

III. The Poets 240 By LANE COOPER, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of the English Language and Literature in Cornell University.

IV. The Essayists and the Humorists 321 By ELMER JAMES BAILEY, A.M., Instructor in English in Cornell University.

V. The Orators and the Divines 359 By LANE COOPER.

VI. The Scientists 392 By CLARK SUTHERLAND NORTHUP.

VII. The Periodicals 434 By CLARK SUTHERLAND NORTHUP.

LIST OF AMERICAN AUTHORS IN THE TAUCHNITZ EDITION 455

INDEX. 457 By JOSEPH Q. ADAMS, JR., Ph.D., Instructor in English in Cornell University.

Colonial Literature and The Literature of the Revolutionary Period

A Manual of American Literature

COLONIAL LITERATURE

I. FIRST PERIOD (1607-1676)

_The Beginning._--The present race of Americans who are of English lineage--that is, the most numerous and decidedly the dominant portion of the American people of to-day--are the direct descendants of the crowds of Englishmen who came to America in the seventeenth century. Our first literary period, therefore, fills the larger part of that century in which American civilisation had its planting; even as its training into some maturity and power has been the business of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Of course, also, the most of the men who produced American literature during that period were immigrant authors of English birth and English culture; while the most of those who have produced American literature in the subsequent periods have been authors of American birth and of American culture. Notwithstanding their English birth, these first writers in America were Americans: we may not exclude them from our story of American literature. They founded that literature; they are its Fathers; they stamped their spiritual lineaments upon it; and we shall never deeply enter into the meaning of American literature in its later forms without tracing it back, affectionately, to its beginning with them. At the same time, our first literary epoch cannot fail to bear traces of the fact that nearly all the men who made it were Englishmen who had become Americans merely by removing to America. American life, indeed, at once reacted upon their minds, and began to give its tone and hue to their words; and for every reason, what they wrote here, we rightfully claim as a part of American literature; but England has a right to claim it likewise as a part of English literature. Indeed England and America are joint proprietors of this first tract of the great literary territory which we have undertaken to survey.

Since the earliest English colonists upon these shores began to make a literature as soon as they arrived here, it follows that we can fix the exact date of the birth of American literature. It is that year 1607, when Englishmen, by transplanting themselves to America, first began to be Americans. Thus may the history of our literature be traced back from the present hour, as it recedes along the track of our national life, through the early days of the republic, through five generations of colonial existence, until, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, it is merged in its splendid parentage--the written speech of England.

_The First Writer._--Among those first Englishmen huddled together behind palisadoes in Jamestown in 1607, were some who laid the foundations of American literature, and there was one who still has a considerable name in the world. When he first set foot in Virginia, Captain John Smith was only twenty-seven years old; but even then he had made himself somewhat famous in England as a daring traveller in Southern Europe, in Turkey and the East. This extremely vivid and resolute man comes before us for study, not because he was the most conspicuous person in the first successful American colony, but because he was the writer of the first book in American literature. _A True Relation of Virginia_ is of deep interest to us, not only on account of its graphic style and the strong light it throws upon the very beginning of our national history, but as being unquestionably the earliest book in American literature. It was written during the first thirteen months of the life of the first American colony, and gives a simple and picturesque account of the stirring events which took place there during that time, under his own eye. After all the abatements which a fair criticism must make from the praise of Captain John Smith either as a doer or as a narrator, his writings still make upon us the impression of a certain personal largeness in him, magnanimity, affluence, sense, and executive force. As a writer his merits are really great--clearness, force, vividness, picturesque and dramatic energy, a diction racy and crisp; and during the first two decades of the seventeenth century he did more than any other Englishman to make an American nation and an American literature possible.

_William Strachey._--During the first decade of American literature a little book was written in Virginia, which, as is believed by some authors, soon rendered an illustrious service to English literature by suggesting to Shakespeare the idea of one of his noblest masterpieces, _The Tempest_. It was in May, 1610, that Sir Thomas Gates, with two small vessels and 150 companions, had at last found his way into the James River after a voyage of almost incredible difficulty and peril. Among those who had borne a part in this ghastly and almost miraculous expedition was William Strachey, of whom but little is known except what is revealed in his own writings. He was a man of decided literary aptitude. Soon after his arrival here he was made secretary of Virginia, and in July, 1610, he wrote at Jamestown and sent off to England _A True Reportory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas_. Whoever reads this little book will be quite ready to believe that it may have brought suggestion and inspiration even to the genius of William Shakespeare. It is a book of marvellous power. Its account of Virginia is well done; but its most striking merit is its delineation of his dreadful sea-voyage, and particularly of the tempest which, after the terror and anguish of a thousand deaths, drove them upon the rocks of the Bermudas. Here his style becomes magnificent; it has some sentences which for imaginative and pathetic beauty, for vivid implications of appalling danger and disaster, can hardly be surpassed in the whole range of English prose.

_George Sandys._--The last one of this group of early writers, George Sandys, was perhaps the only one of all his fellow-craftsmen here who was a professed man of letters. He was well known as a traveller in Eastern lands, as a scholar, as an admirable prose-writer, but especially as a poet. His claim to the title of poet then rested chiefly on his fine metrical translation of the first five books of Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. This fragment was a specimen of literary workmanship in many ways creditable; and that he was able, during the next few years, robbing sleep of its rights, to complete his noble translation of the fifteen books, is worthy of being chronicled among the heroisms of authorship. In 1626, he brought out in London, in a folio volume, the first edition of his finished work. The writings which precede this book in our literary history were all produced for some immediate practical purpose, and not with any avowed literary intentions. This book may well have for us a sort of sacredness, as being the first monument of English poetry, of classical scholarship, and of deliberate literary art, reared on these shores. And when we open the book, and examine it with reference to its merits, first, as a faithful rendering of the Latin text, and, second, as a specimen of fluent, idiomatic, and musical English poetry, we find that in both particulars it is a work that we may be proud to claim as in some sense our own, and to honour as the morning-star at once of poetry and of scholarship in the New World.

_The Burwell Papers._--In the year 1676 there occurred in Virginia an outburst of popular excitement which, for a hundred and fifty years afterward, was grotesquely misrepresented by the historians, and which only within recent years has begun to work itself clear of the traditional perversion. This excitement is still indicated by the sinister name that was at first applied to it, Bacon’s Rebellion. With this remarkable event the literary history of Virginia now becomes curiously involved.

In the spring of 1676, at the very moment when the minds of men were torn by anxieties at the lawless interference of the King and Parliament with their most valuable rights, suddenly there swept toward them the terror of an aggressive Indian war. The people called upon the royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley, to take the necessary measures for repelling these assaults. For reasons of jealousy, indolence, selfishness, and especially avarice, this Governor gave to the people promises of help, and promises only. Then the people arose in their anger, and since their Governor would not lead them to the war, with unanimous voice they called upon one of their own number to be their leader, Nathaniel Bacon, a man only thirty years of age, of considerable landed wealth, of high social connections, a lawyer trained in the Inns of Court in London, an orator of commanding eloquence, a man who by his endowments of brain and eye and hand was a natural leader and king of men. He obeyed the call of the people and led them against the Indians, whom he drove back with tremendous punishment. But by the jealous and haughty despot in the governor’s chair, he was at once proclaimed a rebel; a price was set upon his head; and the people who followed him were put under ban. Then followed a series of swift conflicts, military and political, between Bacon and the Governor; and at last, in that same year, Bacon himself died, suddenly and mysteriously, and twenty-five persons were hung or shot.

Shortly after our Revolutionary War, it was discovered that in an old and honourable family in the Northern Neck of Virginia, some manuscripts had been preserved, evidently belonging to the seventeenth century, evidently written by one or more of the adherents of Nathaniel Bacon. These manuscripts are sometimes called the Burwell Papers, from the name of a family in King William County by whom they were first given to the public. The author of the prose portion of these manuscripts reflects, on this side of the ocean, the literary foibles that were in fashion on the other side of the ocean. But apart from the disagreeable air of verbal affectation and of effort in these writings, they are undeniably spirited; they produce before us departed scenes with no little energy and life; and the flavour of mirth which seasons them is not unpleasant.

As the cause of Bacon’s death was a mystery, so a mystery covered even the place of his burial; for his friends, desiring to save his lifeless body from violation at the hands of the victorious party, placed it secretly in the earth. And the love of Bacon’s followers, which in his lifetime had shown itself in services of passionate devotion, and which, after his death, thus hovered as a protecting silence over his hidden grave, found expression also in some sorrowing verses that, upon the whole, are of astonishing poetic merit. Who may have been the author of these verses, it is perhaps now impossible to discover. They are prefaced by the quaint remark that after Bacon “was dead, he was bemoaned in lines drawn by the man that waited upon his person as it is said, and who attended his corpse to their burial-place.” Of course this statement is but a blind; the author of such a eulogy of the dead rebel could not safely avow himself. But certainly no menial of Bacon’s, no mere “man that waited upon his person,” could have written this noble dirge, which has a stateliness, a compressed energy, and a mournful eloquence, reminding one of the commemorative verse of Ben Jonson.

_Early Literature in Virginia and New England._--During the first epoch in the history of American literature, there were but two localities which produced in the English language anything that can be called literature,--Virginia and New England. As we have seen, there were in Virginia, during the first twenty years of its existence, authors who produced writings that live yet and deserve to live. But at the end of that period and for the remainder of the century, nearly all literary activity in Virginia ceased; the only exception to this statement being the brief anonymous literary memorials which have come down to us from the uprising of the people under Nathaniel Bacon. Even of those writers of the first two decades, all excepting one, Alexander Whitaker, “the Apostle of Virginia,” flitted back to England after a brief residence in Virginia: so that besides Whitaker, the colony had during all that period no writer who gave his name to her as being willing to identify himself permanently with her fate, and to live and die in her immediate service. This, as we shall see, is in startling contrast to the contemporaneous record of New England, which, even in that early period, had a great throng of writers, nearly all of whom took root in her soil.