A Manual of American Literature. Various
of that district, afterward foolishly exchanged for Ipswich. Early in 1645, he commenced writing the remarkable book, The Simple Cobbler of Agawam, which will keep for him a perpetual place in early American literature. It had the good fortune to fit the times and the passions of men; it was caught up into instant notice, and ran through four editions within the first year. The Simple Cobbler of Agawam may be described as a prose satire upon what seemed to the author to be the frightful license of new opinions in his time, both in New England and at home; upon the frivolity of women and the long hair of men; and finally upon the raging storm of English politics, in the strife then going forward between sects, parties, Parliament, and King. It is a tremendous partisan pamphlet. After all, the one great trait in this book which must be to us the most welcome, is its superiority to the hesitant, imitative, and creeping manner that is the sure sign of a provincial literature. The first accents of literary speech in the American forests seem not to have been provincial, but free, fearless, natural. Our earliest writers, at any rate, wrote the English language spontaneously, forcefully, like honest men. We shall have to search in some later period of our intellectual history to find, if at all, a race of literary snobs and imitators—writers who in their thin and timid ideas, their nerveless diction, and their slavish simulation of the supposed literary accent of the mother-country, make confession of the inborn weakness and beggarliness of literary provincials.
Roger Williams.—From his early manhood even down to his late old age, Roger Williams stands in New England a mighty and benignant form, always pleading for some magnanimous idea, some tender charity, the rectification of some wrong, the exercise of some sort of forbearance toward men’s bodies or souls. He became an uncompromising Separatist. By the spectacle of the white men helping themselves freely to the lands of the red men, he became an assailant of the validity, in that particular, of the New England charters. Roger Williams also held that it was a shocking thing—one of the abominations of the age—for men who did not even pretend to have religion in their hearts, to be muttering publicly the words of religion with their mouths; and that such persons ought not to be called on to perform any acts of worship, even the taking of an oath. Finally, he held another doctrine, that the power of the civil magistrate “extends only to the bodies and goods and outward state of men,” and not at all to their inward state, their consciences, their opinions. For these four crimes, particularly mentioned by Governor Haynes in pronouncing sentence upon him, Massachusetts deemed it unsafe to permit such a nefarious being as Roger Williams to abide anywhere within her borders.
The illustrious Westminster Assembly of Divines had been in session since July, 1643. Already the Presbyterians in it had come to hard blows with the Congregationalists in it, with respect to the form of church government to be erected in England upon the ruins of the Episcopacy. On that subject Roger Williams had a very distinct opinion. While some were for having the new national church of this pattern, and others were for having it of that, Roger Williams boldly stepped two or three centuries ahead of his age, and affirmed that there should be no national church at all. Putting his argument into the differential form of mere questions, he published, in 1644, what he called Queries of Highest Consideration. This, of course, was stark and dreadful heresy; but it was heresy for which Roger Williams had already suffered loss and pain, and was prepared to suffer more. Above all, his nature had become absolutely clear in its adjustment of certain grand ideas, of which the chief was liberty of soul. On behalf of that idea, having now an opportunity to free his mind, he resolved to do so, keeping nothing back; and accordingly, almost upon the heels of the little book that has just been mentioned, he sent out another—not a little one; a book of strong, limpid, and passionate argument, glorious for its intuitions of the world’s coming wisdom, and in its very title flinging out defiantly a challenge to all comers. He called it The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience. His book reached in due time the library of John Cotton, and stirred him up to make a reply, which bore a title reverberating that given by Roger Williams to his book: The Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb. Cotton’s book quickly found Roger Williams, at his home in Rhode Island, and of course aroused him to write a rejoinder. Its title is a reiteration of that given to his former work, and is likewise a characteristic retort upon the modification made of it by his antagonist: The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton’s Endeavour to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb. This book is the most powerful of the writings of Roger Williams. There are three principal matters argued in it—the nature of persecution, the limits of the power of the civil sword, and the tolerance already granted by Parliament.
With Roger Williams, the mood for composition seems to have come in gusts. His writings are numerous; but they were produced spasmodically and in clusters, amid long spaces of silence. He is known to have written two or three works which were never printed at all, and which are now lost. In 1652, he published, in addition to his rejoinder to John Cotton, two small treatises. From that time, no book of his was given to the press until the year 1676, when he published at Boston a quarto volume of nearly 350 pages, embodying his own report of a series of stormy public debates, which he had held in Rhode Island, not long before, with certain robust advocates of Quakerism. This book bears a punning title, George Fox Digged out of his Burrows. Besides those of his writings that were intended for books, there are many in the form of letters, some addressed to the public, most of them to his personal friends. In these letters, which cover his whole life from youth to old age, we seem to get very near to the man himself.
Puritanism and Poetry.—A happy surprise awaits those who come to the study of the early literature of New England with the expectation of finding it altogether arid in sentiment, or void of the spirit and aroma of poetry. The New Englander of the seventeenth century was indeed a typical Puritan; and it will hardly be said that any typical Puritan of that century was a poetical personage. In proportion to his devotion to the ideas that won for him the derisive honour of his name, was he at war with nearly every form of the beautiful. He himself believed that there was an inappeasable feud between religion and art; and hence the duty of suppressing art was bound up in his soul with the master-purpose of promoting religion. Hence, very naturally, he turned away likewise from certain great and splendid types of literature—from the drama, from the playful and sensuous verse of Chaucer and his innumerable sons, from the secular prose writings of his contemporaries, and from all forms of modern lyric verse except the Calvinistic hymn. Nevertheless, the Puritan did not succeed in eradicating poetry from his nature. Of course, poetry was planted there too deep even for his theological grub-hooks to root it out. Though denied expression in one way, the poetry that was in him forced itself into utterance in another. If his theology drove poetry out of many forms in which it had been used to reside, poetry itself practised a noble revenge by taking up its abode in his theology. Though he stamped his foot in horror and scorn upon many exquisite and delicious types of literary art, yet the idea that filled and thrilled his soul was one in every way sublime, immense, imaginative, poetic. How resplendent and superb was the poetry that lay at the heart of Puritanism, was seen by the sightless eyes of John Milton, whose great epic is indeed the epic of Puritanism.
Turning to Puritanism as it existed in New England, we may perhaps imagine it as solemnly declining the visits of the Muses of poetry, sending out to them the blunt but honest message—“Otherwise engaged.” Nothing could be further from the truth. It is an extraordinary fact about these grave and substantial men of New England, especially during our earliest literary age, that they all had a lurking propensity to write what they sincerely believed to be poetry—and this, in most cases, in unconscious defiance of the edicts of nature and of a predetermining Providence. It is impressive to note, as we inspect our first period, that neither advanced age, nor high office, nor mental unfitness, nor previous condition of respectability, was sufficient to protect any one from the poetic vice. Here and there, even a town-clerk, placing on record the deeply prosaic proceedings of the selectmen, would adorn them in the sacred costume of poetry. Remembering their unfriendly attitude towards art in general, this universal mania of theirs for some forms of the poetic art—this unrestrained proclivity toward the “lust of versification”—must seem to us an odd psychological freak. Or, shall we rather say that it was not a freak at all, but a normal effort of nature, which, being unduly repressed in one direction, is accustomed to burst over all barriers in another? As respects the poetry which was perpetrated by our ancestors, it must be mentioned that a benignant Providence has its own methods of protecting the human family from