A History of American Literature. Percy Holmes Boynton
tradition; and a distinguishing feature of them was that they were different from the English poetry of the time, in form as well as in content. As a young man Freneau had set out on his career by writing after the style of Milton and Dryden and Pope and their lesser imitators. This was absolutely natural. Until after the Revolution, America was England; and it was more nearly like England in speech and in thought than much of Scotland and Ireland are to-day. All the refinements of America were derived from English sources; practically all the colonists’ reading was from English authors. But after the Revolution there came a strong reaction of feeling. We can look to Freneau’s own rimes (journalistic ones again) for an explanation of the new and native quality of his later verse; they are called “Literary Importation,” and they conclude as follows:
It seems we had spirit to humble a throne,
Have genius for science inferior to none,
But hardly encourage a plant of our own:
If a college be planned
’Tis all at a stand
’Till to Europe we send at a shameful expense,
To send us a bookworm to teach us some sense.
Can we never be thought to have learning or grace
Unless it be brought from that horrible place
Where tyranny reigns with her impudent face;
And popes and pretenders
And sly faith-defenders
Have ever been hostile to reason and wit,
Enslaving a world that shall conquer them yet.
’Tis a folly to fret at the picture I draw:
And I say what was said by a Doctor Magraw;
“If they give us their Bishops, they’ll give us their law.”
How that will agree
With such people as we,
Let us leave to the learned to reflect on awhile,
And say what they think in a handsomer stile.
As a consequence of this feeling that America should be different, the tendency grew to seek out native subject matter and to cease conscious imitation of English literary models. For the next half century American authors were contending, every now and then, that native themes should occupy their attention, and a good deal of verse and prose was written with this idea in mind. Most of it was more conscientious than interesting, for literature, to be genuinely effective, must be produced not to demonstrate a theory but to express what is honestly in the author’s 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
The Indian, when from life releas’d,
Again is seated with his friends
And shares again the joyous feast,
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.
Nathaniel Ames, in one of his early almanacs, recorded soberly:
MAY
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