Part 5

The Puritans in New England, indeed, knew or cared little enough about Shakespeare. The late Thomas Goddard Wright’s scrupulous researches have unearthed no signs that Shakespeare’s works reached the Puritan colonies before 1722, when the reprobated James Franklin announced that he had them at the office of the _New England Courant_ for any writer who might want to use them; or before 1723, when Harvard, also under fire for its lack of orthodoxy, listed them in its library catalogue. Nor was even Milton greatly valued for his poetry, though four copies of _Paradise Lost_ are known to have been shipped to Boston in 1683; though Cotton Mather clearly knew the epic; though Yale received a gift, among other books, of all Milton’s poetical works in 1714; and though Harvard in 1721-22 acquired “a new & fair Edicon” in two volumes (probably Tonson’s noble quartos of 1720). Mather once or twice quotes Chaucer, whose writings were in both the Yale and Harvard libraries by 1723; Anne Bradstreet makes a solitary—and conventional—reference to “Spencer’s poetry”; her father, Gov. Thomas Dudley, curiously enough, possessed the “Vision of Piers Plowman.” But on the whole there was scanty demand in New England for imaginative literature of any kind.

It is the contention of Mr. Wright, persuasively sustained, that while New England was no great country for poets it was a good country for scholars, and that it does not suffer by comparison with provincial Britain as regards its literary culture. The press at Cambridge was set up before the first one at Glasgow, or Rochester, or Exeter, or Manchester, or Liverpool. The ministers and magistrates of the colonies brought books with them, and regularly received more. Theologians and theological treatises flowed back and forth across the Atlantic in a consistent stream. “_Old_ England,” says the _Magnalia_ with pride, in 1702, after the founding of Harvard “had more ministers from _New_, than our New England had since _then_ from Old.” The younger John Winthrop was one of the early fellows of the Royal Society, and but for the Restoration might possibly have drawn Robert Boyle and others like him to Connecticut to establish there a “Society for Promoting Natural Knowledge”; Jonathan Brewster of that colony was by 1656 already a practising alchemist who felt sure he could perfect his elixir in five years. Even scholarship, however, tended to fall into a lower status as the first generation passed; in 1700 Harvard had certainly a smaller prestige abroad than it had had in 1650. The distance from London and the English universities was beginning to have its effect, precisely as would have happened had any of the English counties suddenly been cut off from them by a thousand leagues of dangerous ocean. Irrepressible scholars like Cotton Mather kept up the European tradition, but learning can hardly have been so generally diffused as it was during the first half century.

The creative instincts underwent a similar decline. John Cotton and his contemporaries were as eminent in theology as the Puritan ministers in England, and the funeral elegies which were their sole contributions to belles-lettres can stand unashamed side by side with similar English performances. But as the Restoration succeeded the Commonwealth, and in turn was succeeded by “Anna’s reign,” New England neither evolved a literary class to follow, at a distance, the modes of the capital nor produced, as the English provinces were doing, an occasional wit who could leave home and make his literary fortunes in London. For that there was needed a stronger secular taste than New England had. Literature settled down to sermons. Instead of Marlowe’s tragedy, people read the prose _History of the damnable Life and deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus_; the earliest play printed in New England seems to have been Lillo’s edifying _George Barnwell_, issued by James Franklin in the _Weekly Journal_ in 1732. And yet the importers’ lists which Mr. Wright has unearthed make it clear that for a long time such plays and romances as Sidney’s _Arcadia_, Head’s _English Rogue_, _Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Guy of Warwick_, and _Reynard the Fox_ had been coming over in considerable numbers. John Dunton—an unreliable fellow, it is true—tells that during his stay in Boston in 1686 he had a customer who bought such books, “which to set off the better, she wou’d ask for Books of _Gallantry_.” In 1713 Cotton Mather was so much annoyed by the “foolish Songs and Ballads, which the Hawkers and Pedlars carry into all parts of the Countrey,” that he wanted, “by way of Antidote,” to issue “poetical Composures full of Piety”—including some of the “excellent _Watts’s_ Hymns.” And shortly thereafter the influence of the English wits had become so strong that Benjamin Franklin is seen to begin his literary career with imitations of the _Spectator_ and that Mather Byles,

Harvard’s honor, and New England’s hope, Bids fair to rise and sing and rival Pope,

as a poetical friend neatly put it at the time.

THE KIND MOTHER OF US ALL

I imagine that those of our ancestors who first struggled up from the aboriginal slime used to sit occasionally in moody caucuses and talk of the good old days and perhaps envy the slower creatures which still drew their breath—such as that breath was—in the simple freedom of the mud. I know that at this very moment there are excursion steamers plying, as a certain wit says, from the foot of Main Street to the Blessed Islands of the Pacific, where the air never dreams of biting, where love lies for ever in the green shade, and where the noble savage runs wild and beautiful and good—but not too good—on the lovely land or gives himself ecstatically to the tumbling surf. And I have just been reading of a time in the eighteenth century—most amusing of centuries—when curiosity and sentiment and a kind of cosmic libido among Englishmen focussed themselves upon the State of Nature and found what they were looking for, first abroad in many quarters of the earth and then at home, where proper English explorations end.

Little Britain, as Chauncey B. Tinker shows in a solid and jolly monograph called “Nature’s Simple Plan,” was waking up. During the sixties of the century Commodore Byron had come back with yarns about the giant Patagonians; Wallis had seen Tahiti and named it after the idyllic George III; Cartwright, having lived for years in Labrador, had brought live Eskimos to London; Bruce had studied deepest Abyssinia, and Captain Cook had begun to plough the most distant seas with many a home-keeping eye upon him. Not only did the poets hymn the delights of new paradises, but the more or less sober men of science took up the ardent chorus. Lord Monboddo claimed that the Golden Age still lingered in the South Seas and tickled all the wags with his talk about men with tails and about the cousinship of men and monkeys. Luxury was under fire: Dr. Johnson defended it, but Goldsmith wept to see it devastating villages and consequently to

see the rural virtues leave the land.

Rousseau, orator and laureate of the primitive, called the attention of mankind to Corsica, where liberty still survived and where it might be possible for some wise man to teach the people how to preserve it. He himself began a constitution for the island, though he never finished it. Half Europe looked on encouragingly—but idly—while Pasquale Paoli led his Corsican revolt against Genoa. Boswell, visiting Rousseau while the philosopher was about his constitutional task, formed such a passion for the hardy island that he ventured into it, talked with Paoli, carried back to England a Corsican costume, and now and then conspicuously wore it while he tried to arouse the interest of Englishmen at large in the heroic little revolution. When Genoa gave Corsica to France and England let France keep it the lovers of liberty had a dreadful shock.

They need not have been quite so shocked if they had viewed the matter more in its political and less in its literary aspect. But most of the partisans of Corsica were men, or amateurs, of letters, and they believed its defeat meant the loss to the world of that outburst of song which they had made up their minds they would hear as soon as Corsica should be free. Without liberty, they thought, there would be no lyres. At the very moment when countless peasants of England, unable or unwilling to endure the hard conditions of life in that tight realm, were taking themselves off in droves to the colonies, the poets of the country, partly stifled by a smug atmosphere and a tame tradition, sent their imaginations voyaging into lands and ages more hospitable to their profession. In _The Progress of Poetry_ Gray talked about the behaviour of the Muse in Lapland and Chile; in _The Bard_ he set forth the figure of an ancient minstrel whose rage lifts him to the point of prophecy. And whereas Gray had created a primitive singer, James Macpherson created a primitive song and filled the world with the wails of Ossian. The dream of a State of Nature had borne at least that much fruit.

But there was more to come. Romance had sown its seeds broadcast and the mood of the race kept on writhing in parturition. Gray had brooded over the mute Miltons of Stoke Poges churchyard; the generation which saw his poem did what it could to see that no such persons should be mute. With the somewhat famous Stephen Duck the Poetical Thresher must stand, Professor Tinker points out, Mary Collier the Poetical Washerwoman and Henry Jones the Poetical Bricklayer and James Woodhouse the Poetical Shoemaker and Ann Yearsley the Poetical Milkwoman—all of them being wonders whom the fashionable exploited to this or that extent. Poetically, it happened, they were unanimously fizzles; and yet they paved a kind of way for a later peasant who was a genius. The discoverers of Robert Burns the Poetical Ploughman must at first have thought that here was merely another Duck. When they had caught him, indeed, they did not know what to do with him, and it is a question whether they helped or hurt him. He did not come, somehow, in the garb and gesture they had expected. Where were the high strains of the primitive bard? Where were the abstract declamations about liberty? Where the novel “numbers” in which he might be expected to dress his “natural” thought? Where the noble suavity? Where, I am afraid they asked in some chagrin, was the meek gratitude that even an inspired peasant should feel towards those who had unearthed him? So far as they could see, this was a man very much like other men.

Well, give them credit for what they did, whatever it was. They had been hunting for a simple, holy plan of nature, and they had looked for it in the wrong places. They had looked into dim pasts and into distant islands about which they knew too little to be able to distinguish between nature and art. In their ignorance they had taken to pleasant guesses, to pretty sentiments, to poetical inventions. At least, however, they had longed for something simpler than the muddled universe they lived in; and at last they must some of them have understood that there is no State of Nature and there never has been and there never will be. Among the turbulence of things the mind, each mind, must discover and conquer its own simple plan.

Professor Tinker’s book, besides being a pungent footnote to human history, is allegory. Its hero, which was a generation, set out to find simplicity. It travelled into very far countries and was disappointed, but in the end it turned back and learned that simplicity begins at home.

MOCHA DICK

Moby Dick, the hugest character in American fiction, had his original in a whale which Melville’s biographer does not even mention but which must have been known to Moby Dick’s. The name of the creature, according to the principal authority, was Mocha Dick, and he was first seen and attacked near the island of Mocha about 1810. For years he resisted capture. “Numerous boats are known to have been shattered by his immense flukes,” wrote J. N. Reynolds a dozen years before _Moby Dick_ was published, “or ground to pieces in the crash of his powerful jaws; and on one occasion it is said that he came off victorious from a conflict with the crews of three English whalers, striking fiercely at the last of the retreating boats at the moment it was rising from the water in its hoist up to the ship’s davits.... From the period of Dick’s first appearance his celebrity continued to increase, until his name seemed naturally to mingle with the salutations which whalemen were in the habit of exchanging in their encounters upon the broad Pacific, the customary interrogatories almost always closing with ‘Any news from Mocha Dick?’”

No wonder that “nearly every whaling captain who rounded Cape Horn, if he possessed any professional ambition, or valued himself on his skill in subduing the monarch of the seas, would lay his vessel along the coast, in the hope of having an opportunity to try the muscle of this doughty champion, who was never known to shun opponents.” No wonder, either, that his fame went so far. “From the effect of age, or more probably from a freak of nature, ... he was white as wool. Instead of projecting his spout obliquely forward, and puffing with a short, convulsive effort, as usual with his species, he flung the water from his nose in a lofty, perpendicular, expanded volume, at regular and somewhat distant intervals; its expulsion producing a continuous roar, like that of vapour struggling from the safety-valve of a powerful steam engine. Viewed from a distance, the practised eye of the sailor only could decide that the moving mass which constituted this enormous animal was not a white cloud sailing along the horizon.”

In time Mocha Dick’s back came to be serried with irons which had pierced his mighty hide and his wake was tangled with yards of line which he had broken in his rush or which had been cut off by desperate whalers to keep their boats from being dragged under water. Caution, too, entered that head with the barnacles clustered hard and tight upon it; he learned to present his back to the harpooner and to guard his “small” and the softer area under his fins. But with so many allies against him he finally met his fate. Attacked in his last battle, off the coast of Chile, he charged the boat at the first encounter and frightened the harpooner into missing him and then, on being accused of fear, of plunging into the water to drown himself for chagrin. Later Mocha Dick, who had been keeping out of sight though suspected to be still near the ship, was angered at the attack which the whalers made upon a calf and its mother and again charged them. This time the first mate made a surer stroke and, after a furious struggle, got his victim. “Mocha Dick was the longest whale I ever looked upon. He measured more than seventy feet from his noodle to the tips of his flukes; and yielded one hundred barrels of clear oil, with a proportionate quantity of ‘head-matter.’”

This material underwent a great alchemy in Melville’s imagination. He would not let his Moby Dick be mortal, but carried him unscathed through his adventures and at the end sent him off, victorious, shouldering the troubled waves with his ancient head. Nor would Melville allow the war against Moby Dick to be the plain war of the hunter and the hunted, but gave his hunter the excuse to chase the whale that the whale had chased him and had bitten off his leg. Nor would Melville allow the story to be conducted on the simple plane of mere adventure, but lifted it up into the regions of allegory and symbolism, added the fury of hot passions, drenched it with poetry and dark mystery, lighted it with irony and satire and comic vividness and vast laughter. It was his genius which made the story of Moby Dick important. Because it is important, the neglected story of Mocha Dick deserves at least its little moment.

FOLK-LORE IN KENTUCKY

The first and second members of the firm of Mencken, Nathan, and God must have shouted for joy when they first opened—as doubtless they have opened—the compilation lately made of nearly four thousand “Kentucky Superstitions,” in the volume of that name. _The American Credo_ had only about an eighth as many vulgar errors, for all its satiric malice. And satiric malice can find nothing in the national mind more primitive than some of the beliefs here set forth. For instance: “To cure a child of thrush, let a stallion snort into the child’s face”; “Gunpowder is given to women to facilitate childbirth”; “Catch a toad, put it under a rock, and let it starve to death. After it has dried thoroughly, beat it into a powder, and sprinkle this powder on the person whom you wish to fall in love with you.” Doctrines like these recall medieval medicine, aboriginal witchcraft, the jungle, and the cave. And yet side by side with them are recent absurdities as new as the news: “Billikins bring good luck”; “It is well for an aviator to wear a lady’s stocking around his neck”; “It brings bad luck for the last of three people to use a lighted match in smoking.” The idol has become a Billikin, and the knight wearing his lady’s favour has taken to the air, but these are superficial accidents. Otherwise it looks as if the folk changes not much more rapidly than mountains grow.

The compilers of _Kentucky Superstitions_ have in a fashion perfectly impartial printed all they have found (with some expurgations) without distinction of age or novelty, universality or locality. “The good die young,” according to one of the citations; and “No news is a sign of good news.” Such notions belong to folk-lore everywhere. Others among these Kentucky superstitions are more specific: “If once you get your feet wet in the Cumberland River, you will always return to the Kentucky Mountains”; “It is firmly believed by the people of Leslie County, a mountain county, that President McKinley’s name was written by spiders in their webs as a prophecy of his death.” There are ceremonies for May Day that point to the rites of Flora: “To become beautiful, wash your face in dew before sunrise on May Day”; there are quaint fancies about Christmas old-style, such as that “At midnight of Old Christmas the elders bloom”; there are sortileges and incantations, divinations and auguries, weather wisdom, dream-lore, signs of the moon and of the zodiac, witchcraft and hoodoos. The most numerous of all are concerned with animals, birds, insects, and reptiles; then follow cures and preventives, divinations concerning love (most of them practised by girls), weather, household and domestic life, the human body, in the order named.

The total result is an amazing palimpsest, as if each new generation had written its lore upon an original manuscript, partly erasing the old symbols and partly employing them to make new symbols; altering the old text or adapting it; adding new illustrations or comments; bringing in fresh material that flatly contradicts the old. One superstition says that “If you take the next to the last biscuit on the plate, you will never marry”; but another, that in such an event “you will have a handsome husband.” A merely mnemonic change may alter the whole point of a saying: “A whistling woman or a crowing hen never comes to a very good end”; but “A woman that whistles, or a hen that crows, has her way wherever she goes.” Most of these superstitions are, of course, held by few people, and many by no one very seriously. The more highly educated sections of the state, while represented by a large number of superstitions, report rather trivial ones, for the reason that they are of little importance in the life of these sections. The mountain whites and the Negroes cherish a larger number of superstitions, which are more barbarous but obviously more authentic than those of the lowland whites. “If you drink water out of a stranger’s shoe,” they say in the mountains, “your sore throat will be cured.” This is not so casual an invention as the notion that “It brings bad luck to see an empty street-car.” “If you curse God and shoot at the sun, you will be able to see the wind,” according to mountain doctrine: according to the Louisville Negroes, “If you cut your eyelashes, you will be able to see the wind.”

Such a compilation is genuinely valuable to the anthropologist, the folk-lorist, the historian, the teacher, but to none of them more so than to the student of imaginative literature or, indeed, to the creative writer. Every folk-superstition alluded to in _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_ is here recorded. Other superstitions in this collection it is easy to remember from various novels and tales of Kentucky life. And yet to read the book with such matters in mind is to realize how little the riches of our folk-lore have been utilized. Consider Thomas Hardy, working away like a profound mole among the buried lores and memories of Wessex, and then consider the so much more trivial, the sentimental use that literary Kentuckians have made of their materials. The ordinary attitude of American men of letters is that inasmuch as we have a briefer history on this continent than Europeans have on theirs, there is hardly an excuse for investigating our own folk-lore and employing it. But, of course, the folk here is as old as the folk there, in any but a political or geographical, and therefore superficial, sense. It has, too, customs and superstitions developed on the native soil. Here is an extraordinarily important field for the imaginative writer to plough. We write of our smart sets, tinkling and cosmopolitan; we write of our Indians and Negroes, looking for essentially native material there; but between these extremes, except in the highly circumscribed “local colour” stories, we have done little to sound the life and opinions of our folk as regards anything deeper than their outward manners. In _Kentucky Superstitions_ we have a document to help us in going deeper. There is the germ of such another story as Hardy’s _The Withered Arm_ in the Kentucky belief that “You may remove birth-marks by rubbing them with the hand of a corpse.” There are poetry and drama both in one superstition from the mountains: “A maid says: ‘If I’m not going to marry anybody, knock, Death, knock!’ If she hears nothing, she says: ‘If I’m going to marry a young man, whistle, bird whistle!’ If her appeal remains unanswered, she says: ‘If I’m going to marry an old man, hoot, owl, hoot!’”

PAUL BUNYAN GOES WEST

It was idle, of course, to expect that Paul Bunyan would continue to be satisfied with the home in the neighbourhood of the Great Lakes where that mighty man seems to have reached his majority. Call it invented, if you will; true it is that the epic Paul sprang from the imaginations of many lumbermen competing at evening fires for the honour of having told the biggest whopper about the career of Paul the logger’s darling. But a ghost of such heroic vigour is not lightly raised; Paul’s fame has widened out, by word of mouth alone till very lately, to a thousand camps in many forests; in that sense he has gone himself, for the man lives, like your true epic hero or your politician, by the breath of reputation. Now, as the first chapbook about Paul records for us, he has moved west and done magnificent new deeds under the sunset. The chapbook is called _Paul Bunyan Comes West_ and it should make all lovers of Americana and all collectors of chapbooks snatch for it. What are copies of the first _Faustbuch_ fetching now?