A History of American Literature. Boynton Percy Holmes
mind. The first step toward achieving nationality in American writing was, therefore, to achieve new and independent habits of national thinking. The Irish mind, for example, is basically different from the English mind, and Irish literature has therefore a long and beautiful history of its own, in spite of the fact that Ireland is near to England and subject to it. But the Australian is simply a transplanted English-speaking, English-thinking mind, and Australia has consequently produced no literature of which the world is yet aware.
Now Freneau was a naturally independent thinker. He was educated and well read in the best of English and classical literature. But unlike most of his fellow authors, he was not a city man, nor a teacher, preacher, or lawyer. His hands were hardened by the steersman’s wheel and the plow, and doubtless much of his verse – or at least the inspiration for it – came to him on shipboard or in the field rather than in the library. In the midst of the crowd he was an easy man to stir up to fighting pitch. All his war verse shows this. Yet when he was alone and undisturbed he inclined to placid meditation, and he expressed himself in the simplest ways. As a young man he wrote a little poem called “Retirement.” It is the kind of thing that many other eighteenth-century poets – confirmed city dwellers – wrote in moments of temporary world-weariness; but Freneau’s life-story shows that he really meant it:
A cottage I could call my own
Remote from domes of care;
A little garden, wall’d with stone,
The wall with ivy overgrown,
A limpid fountain near,
Would more substantial joys afford,
More real bliss impart
Than all the wealth that misers hoard,
Than vanquish’d worlds, or worlds restor’d —
Mere cankers of the heart!
And there was another poem of his youth which told a secret of his real character. This was “The Power of Fancy,” an imitation of Milton in its form, but genuinely Freneau’s in its sentiment. The best of his later work is really a compound of these suggestions – poems of fancy composed in retirement. Thus he wrote on “The Indian Burying Ground,” interpreting the fact that instead of being buried recumbent as white men are. And thus he wrote in “To a Caty-did,” “The Wild Honeysuckle,” and “On a Honey Bee,” little lyrics of nature and natural life, which were almost the first verse written in America based on native subject matter and expressed in simple, direct, and unpretentious form.
The Indian, when from life releas’d,
Again is seated with his friends
And shares again the joyous feast,
Nathaniel Ames, in one of his early almanacs, recorded soberly:
Now Winters rage abates, now chearful Hours
Awake the Spring, and Spring awakes the Flowers.
The opening Buds salute the welcome Day,
And Earth relenting, feels the genial Ray.
The Blossoms blow, the Birds on Bushes sing;
And Nature has accomplish’d all the Spring.
This was perfectly conventional and perfectly indefinite; not a single flower, bud, blossom, bird, or bush is specified. The six lines amount to a general formula for spring and would apply equally well to Patagonia, Italy, New England, or northern Siberia. Mr. R. Lewis, who wrote on “A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis” in 1730, improves on this:
First born of Spring, here the Pacone appears.
Whose golden Root a silver Blossom rears.
In spreading Tufts see there the Crowfoot, blue,
On whose green Leaves still shines a globous Dew;
Behold the Cinque-foil, with its dazling Dye
Of flaming Yellow, wounds the tender Eye.
But there enclos’d the grassy Wheat is seen
To heal the aching Sight with cheerful Green.
Lewis mentions definite flowers, colors, and characteristics, but he never misses a chance to tuck in a conventional adjective or participle, and he is led by them into weaving the extravagant fancy of an eye made to ache by flaming and dazzling colors, and healed by the cheerful green of the wheat field. In contrast to these, Freneau’s little nature poems are as exact as the second and as simple as the subject on which he writes:
In a branch of willow hid
Sings the evening Caty-did:
From the lofty locust bough
Feeding on a drop of dew.
In her suit of green array’d
Hear her singing in the shade,
Caty-did, Caty-did, Caty-did.
Such simplicity as this does not seem at all remarkable to-day, but if it be compared with the fixed formalities that belonged to almost all the verse of Freneau’s time it will stand out as a remarkable exception.
On account of the two kinds of poetry which Freneau published he has often been given misleading titles by his admirers. Those who have been interested in him mainly or exclusively from the historical point of view have christened him the “Poet of the American Revolution.” This is unfair because of the implication that he gave his best energy to this and had no other right to distinction. Even as a journalist he was more than poet of the Revolution, since he wrote on local and timely themes for many years after its close. This designation does not claim enough for him. The other title is defective for the opposite reason, that it claims too much. This is the “Father of American Poetry.” Such a sweeping phrase ought to be avoided resolutely. It is doubly false, in suggesting that there was no American poetry before he wrote and that everything since has been derived from him. The facts are that he had a native poetic gift which would have led to his writing poetry had there never been a war between the colonies and England, but that when the war came on he was one of the most effective penmen on his side; that entrance into the field of public affairs diverted him from the paths of quiet life; that after the war he continued both kinds of writing. He never ceased wholly to think and write about “affairs,” but more and more he speculated on the future, dreamed of the picturesque past, and played with themes of graceful and tender sentiment. He is very much worth reading as a commentator on his own times, and he is no less worth reading for the beauty of many poems quite without reference to the time or place in which they were written.
The long and fruitful colonial period must not be overlooked by any honest student of American literature, yet it may fairly be regarded as no more than a preparatory stage. It has the same relationship to the whole story as do the ancestry, boyhood, and education to the development of an individual. In the broad and brief survey attempted in these chapters a few leading facts have been reviewed about the youth of America: (1) Everything characteristic of the early settlers was derived directly from England, those in the South representing the aristocratic traditions of king and court, and those in the North reflecting the democratic revolt of the Puritans. As a natural consequence of these differences the writing of books soon waned in Virginia and the neighboring colonies, but developed consistently in Massachusetts and New England. (2) The attempt of the Puritans to force all New Englanders to think the same thoughts and worship in the same way was unsuccessful from the start, and the most interesting writers of the seventeenth century reveal the spread of disturbing influences. The first three chosen as examples are Thomas Morton, the frank and unscrupulous enemy of the Puritans; Nathaniel Ward, a sturdy Puritan who was alarmed at the growth of anti-Puritan influences; and Roger Williams, a deeply religious preacher, who rebelled against the control of the Church in New England just as he and others had formerly rebelled in the mother country. (3) Even in the first half century a good deal of verse was written: sometimes, as in the case of “The Day of Doom,” as a mere rimed statement of Puritan theology; but sometimes, as in the case of Anne Bradstreet and her followers, as an expression of real poetic feeling.