A History of American Literature. Boynton Percy Holmes
read over with microscopic care by both an editorial proofreader and the author. During the printing experience a liberal allowance is made to the author for actual changes from his original copy, but the printer is held responsible for any slightest departure from the manuscript that is supplied him. The boy who, like Franklin, has spent some years in the printing room and the editorial office has received a discipline which is miles beyond that which can ever be given in any school or college composition course.2
To this important training Franklin added a conscious attempt to develop his own powers. Printing and the love of books led the horse to water, but his desire for self-expression made him drink. Of this he tells in an early passage of the “Autobiography.” His daily work had taught him to spell and punctuate correctly, but he was faulty in choice of words and in “perspicuity,” or clearness of construction. So he took Addison’s Spectator as his model, put paragraphs into his own words, then tried to set them back into the original form, compared the two products, and made up his mind wherein Addison’s versions were better than his and wherein, as he sometimes thought, his were better than his teacher’s. He also followed up the art of discussion both in speech and in writing, making it always a point to convince his opponents without antagonizing them. These things he did, not in order to become a professional writer but solely in order to utter or write his ideas to the best effect. “It has ever since,” he says, “been a pleasure to me to see good workmen handle their tools; and it has been useful to me, having learned so much by it as to be able to do little jobs myself.” Prose writing was simply a tool for him – the most useful one that he ever mastered and, as he says elsewhere, the principal means of his advancement.
As long as he was a printer (until he was forty-two years old) he employed his prose composition in writing copy which was clear and interesting and therefore salable – chiefly in the Pennsylvania Gazette and in Poor Richard’s Almanac; but during and after that time he put his powers to even greater use as a speaker and as a writer of articles and pamphlets on affairs of public interest. He was almost always simple, definite, and practical, for he wrote to the mass of people with little education. He realized that if he was to bring his points home to them he must not write “over their heads,” and that he must appeal to their common sense and their self-interest; and he was invariably good-humored, for he knew that good humor makes more friends than enemies.
Out of the great mass of Franklin’s published writings – and they run to a dozen large volumes – two deserve special attention as pieces of American literature: Poor Richard’s Almanac and the “Autobiography.” The former of these was a commercial undertaking; it was written to sell. The almanac, an annual publication of which the calendar was a very small part, had been popular in England and America for many generations before Franklin started his own. It preceded the newspaper and until 1800, or even later, reached a wider public. The second piece of printing in this country was Pierce’s Almanack, printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1639. Others followed: in Boston, 1676; in Philadelphia, 1676; in New York, 1697; in Rhode Island, 1728; and in Virginia, 1731. There had been, however, only one great almanac editor to precede Franklin in America – Nathaniel Ames, who began publishing his series in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1726. Besides the calendar, the astronomical data for the year, and the half-jocular weather predictions, the chief feature of Ames’s was the poetry, very considerable in bulk, and the “interlined wit and humor,” which was brief and usually rather pointless. Franklin, realizing the fondness of his generation for the wise sayings of which Alexander Pope was then the master-hand in the English-speaking world, dropped the poetry and studied to expand the interlined material of Ames into the chief contribution of his “Richard Saunders.” “I endeavored to make it both entertaining and useful,” he said in the “Autobiography,” “and it accordingly came to be in such demand, that I reaped considerable profit from it; vending annually near ten thousand. And observing that it was generally read, scarce any neighborhood in the province being without it, I considered it as a proper vehicle for conveying instruction among the common people, who bought scarcely any other books. I therefore filled all the little spaces, that occurred between the remarkable days in the Calendar with proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality, as the means of procuring wealth, and thereby securing virtue; it being more difficult for a man in want, to act always honestly, as, to use here one of those proverbs, it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.”
In the Almanac of 1757 he collected the sayings of the last twenty-five years into a timely essay on “The Way to Wealth,” making an old man deliver a speech filled with quotations from “Poor Richard.” This contained not only sound practical advice for any time but was also pertinent to a political issue of the moment, and so applied to the state as well as to all the people in it. It was reprinted by itself and had an immense circulation in America and abroad, in the original and in several translations. Very likely since “The Day of Doom,” in 1662, nothing had been so influential in the colonies as “The Way to Wealth,” in 1757; and no contrast could better indicate the change that had taken place between those two dates. Said Father Abraham, the old speaker:
It would be thought a hard Government that should tax its People one-tenth Part of their Time, to be employed in its Service. But Idleness taxes many of us much more, if we reckon all that is spent in absolute Sloth, or doing of nothing, with that which is spent in idle Employments or Amusements, that amount to nothing. Sloth, by bringing on Diseases, absolutely shortens Life. Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than Labour wears; while the used Key, is always bright, as Poor Richard says. But dost thou love life, then do not squander Time, for that’s the stuff Life is made of, as Poor Richard says. How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep, forgetting that The sleeping Fox catches no Poultry, and that There will be sleeping enough in the Grave, as Poor Richard says.
This was the sort of workaday advice that was shouldering the old-time theology into modest Sabbath-day retirement.
Franklin’s “Autobiography” is the greatest of his writings if not the greatest of all his achievements. “Poor Richard” and “The Way to Wealth” are full of good common sense, but they belong only to the “efficiency” school of ideas and morality; they are neither distinguished in form nor inspiring in content, and they are chiefly interesting because they so well mirror what was in the eighteenth-century mind. The “Autobiography” has a larger claim to attention than these, for by general consent it has come to be regarded as one of the great classics of literature. Several features have combined to make it deserve this high place. Simply stated they are all nothing more than ways of explaining that this book is the simple, definite, honest life-story of an eminent man, as he recalled it in his old age.
In the first place, it is simple and uncalculated. It was not composed, like “Poor Richard,” to sell, nor, like many of Franklin’s speeches and pamphlets, to convince by skillful argument. As a matter of fact, Franklin did not want to write it at all, and consented only when the insistence of his friends and relatives made it easier to do it than to leave it undone. Moreover, he dropped it for the thirteen years from 1771 to 1784, took it up again when wearied, old, and ill, and left it at his death hardly more than well started, with all the most celebrated part of his life still to be recounted. It is simple therefore because it was done with no desire to create an impression or to be “literary,” and is the unadorned narrative of an old man familiarly told to those who knew him best.
For the same reason it is definite and homely in what he chose to record. It is the “little, nameless, unremembered” episodes not set down in more pretentious histories for which the “Autobiography” is itself best remembered. Some of the details make real the conditions of living in those simple times – the invention of the stove named after him, the improvements in street lighting and paving, the organization of a fire company. Others are typical of human nature in any age, as his portrait of the croaker, Samuel Mickle, who sadly predicted Franklin’s failure as a printer, or as his jocular account of the entrance of luxury into his own household.
We have an English proverb that says, He that would thrive, must ask his wife. It was lucky for me that I had one as much disposed to industry and frugality as myself. She assisted me cheerfully in my business, folding and stitching
This same discipline was enjoyed – among later American authors – by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Walt Whitman, all of whom were scrupulously careful writers.