Massachusetts : a guide to its places and people, Part 13

Author:
Publication date: 1937
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company
Number of Pages: 802

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The truth is, the glorification of the individual and of individualism had reached such a pitch of egoism and self-absorption, accompanied by such an entire indifference to the external world, that had they not been

Literature

geniuses, literary geniuses, none of these men would have escaped disaster. Only a genius can be artless with impunity, and of all this wonderful group only one was a genuine artist, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne listened carefully to everything the others had to say, he was himself something of a transcendentalist, he even stayed for a while at Brook Farm; but he remained always a little detached, he was essentially both in his life and in his work a moral and social observer; and it was this carefully kept moral and esthetic distance which enabled him alone of his group to understand the necessity for form and to achieve an indi- vidual mastery of it. Alone, too, was Hawthorne in having a quite definite social awareness, and in seeing precisely to what sort of bank- ruptcy the doctrine of uncontrolled individualism might lead. Emerson may not have realized it, but 'The Scarlet Letter' was, among other things, a very grim comment on the doctrine of self-reliance; and 'The Blithedale Romance' as well.

If in this sense Hawthorne was the only commentator on transcendental individualism, and the one analyst and chronicler of the final phases of the evolution of the Puritan passion for freedom of conscience, he was also the only link between the Concord group and the writer who carried farthest and deepest that perilous frontier of mystic consciousness which had always been the Puritan's fiercest concern : Herman Melville. 'Moby Dick' was dedicated to Hawthorne, and it was written while Hawthorne and Melville were neighbors in Pittsfield. Without any question the greatest book which has come out of New England, and one of the very greatest works of prose fiction ever written in any language, it is also the final and perfect finial to the Puritan's desperate three-century-long struggle with the problem of evil. Hunted from consciousness into the unconscious, and in effect beyond space and time, magnificently sub- limated so that it becomes not one issue but all issues, a superb and al- most unanalyzable matrix of universal symbolism, the white whale is the Puritan's central dream of delight and terror, the all-hating and all- loving, all-creating and all-destroying implacable god, whose magnetism none can escape, and who must be faced and fought with on the frontier of awareness with the last shred of one's moral courage and one's moral despair. Man against God? Is the principle of things, at last, to be seen as essentially evil? And redeemable only by war à outrance? Impossible, at any rate, to surrender; one's freedom to feel toward it what one will, whether hatred or love, must be preciously preserved. One must grapple with it, and alone, and in darkness, no matter whether it lead to a death throe or to an all-consuming love.

Massachusetts: The General Background

Melville, writing to Hawthorne about this extraordinary book, which was destined for half a century to be considered just a good romance for boys, likened himself to one who strips off the layers of consciousness as one might strip off the layers of an onion, and added that he had come at last to the central core. And indeed to all intents he had; when a year later, at the age of thirty-three, he published 'Pierre,' he had really finished his voyage. And he had carried William Blackstone with him to such strange borderlands as that bold explorer of Rhode Island never dreamed of. Perhaps it is worth noting that Melville himself denied that 'Moby Dick' had any allegorical intention - if only to point out that the denial can really have no meaning. 'Mardi' was quite obviously allegorical; allegory and parable came almost instinctively to the hands of a group so vitally concerned with moral and religious matters, and as a 'form' it very likely seemed no more artificial or unusual to Hawthorne or Melville than that, say, of a poem: it was something which played with meaning and which gave out meanings on many different levels, and that was the end of it.

And indeed 'Moby Dick' may be said to have been the great poem, the epic of the Puritan civilization, and to have marked a turning-point in its evolution, if not quite its end. There could not again be any such violent imaginative projection of the problem; the problem itself was beginning to dissipate and break up, to disappear in the dishevelment of analysis: individualism was to turn outward again. It could receive in the hands of Henry James a fine symphonic abstraction, or in the hands of William James a bold social and scientific externalization and analysis, but the creative poisons were all but drained from it. The worlds around were changing, new winds of doctrine brought new seeds and spores, and in 'The Education of Henry Adams' one has almost the spectacle of a dead civilization performing an autopsy on itself. The note of retrospect, the backward-looking eye - this could have only one meaning, that the Puritan struggle was at last, in all important senses, over. One genius remained yet to be heard from, and this the most exquisitely character- istic of all - Emily Dickinson. In her life of hushed and mystic and self-absorbed sequestration, no less than in her work, where we watch the lonely soul alembicating itself that it may test its own essence, we have the very mayflower of the Puritan passion for privacy and freedom. How strict was that soul with itself, when there was none to watch! Was it not her own epitaph that she wrote - or can we say that it was an epitaph for a whole phase of the human soul - in the lines:

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Lay this laurel on the one Too intrinsic for renown. Laurel! veil your deathless tree - Him you chasten, that is he!

This wonderful pride and immense strength in solitude which could give up as worth nothing any notion of fame or acclaim if only its soul's house be in order and its accounts straight with heaven - perfectly content, and serenely self-sufficient, so long as the windows which looked on the Eternal were kept clear - this was the final rededication of the spirit of William Blackstone, who had come to Boston when it was still a wilderness, was found there by the first settlers 'watching the growth of some apple trees,' and moved on to another wilderness and another privacy when the 'lord brethren,' his neighbors, came too close.

Emily Dickinson was the last of her line, the last of the great Massa- chusetts frontiersmen; and with her it may be said that the literature of Puritanism, as a purely local phenomenon, came to an end. Henceforth its heirs were to be sought farther afield, dispersed inconspicuously, but perhaps none the less indestructible, in the consciousness of the country at large. Amy Lowell had little of this temper in her; and if in the con- temporary scene it has any ambassadors, they are Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot. But the movement itself is complete and at an end.

LITERARY GROUPS AND MOVEMENTS

THE tendency among writers to form groups around political, social, or literary ideas began very early in Massachusetts. The voluminous re- ligious tracts of the seventeenth century concealed, under a garb of godly language, the warring concepts of two opposed groups - the advocates of theocracy and the champions of democracy. The theocrats were vic- torious, and for nearly one hundred years the clergy dominated the press. Not until the founding of the Hell Fire Club and the publication of the first number of The New England Courant by James Franklin in 1721 did secular ideas have currency. In the exciting decade of 1760-70 a battle of the books took place between two political factions, a battle which enlisted Tories like Thomas Hutchinson on one side and revolutionaries such as James Otis on the other.

Even those ardent individualists, the writers of the literary renaissance of the 1840's, betrayed a decided affinity for the society of their peers, and together they organized literary clubs, publishing ventures, and Utopias. The informal group generally known as the Transcendental Club in- cluded at one time or another Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, Amos Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Charles T. Follen, William H. Channing, and that complete mystic and arch-individualist, Jones Very. An early literary magazine, The Monthly Anthology (1803-1I), was carried on as the organ of 'a society of gentlemen,' the Anthology Club of Boston. The North American Review was established by a group which had for its purpose the emancipation of American literature from sub- servience to England. The Dial (1840-44), although proclaiming itself 'A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion,' was notable for expressing, under the editorship of Margaret Fuller, the ideas of the Transcendentalists, as The Harbinger (1845-49) expressed those of the co-operativists. Such group expression was strongly characteristic of early magazines: they were oriented, not as most magazines are today, toward their readers or their advertisers, but toward their writers. Even as late as the 1850's, Atlantic Monthly dinners ranked in importance with

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Literary Groups and Movements

Atlantic pages, and younger writers outside New England bitterly accused the magazine of being a kind of closed club. Hawthorne had founded the 'Potato Club,' a literary society, at Bowdoin while still an undergraduate. Thoreau, so anti-social as to get himself jailed for non-payment of taxes, may be said to have betrayed a certain longing for society when he re- proached Emerson for not sharing his cell; and Whittier said flatly, 'I set a higher value on my name as appended to the Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833 than on the title-page of any book.'

After the Civil War, literature in Massachusetts for the first time since the eighteenth century was motivated and reinforced by scientific method and invigorated by new political currents. Realism and the Anti-Poverty Society made a simultaneous appearance, and reading Boston was di- vided into those who admired William Dean Howells's novels and those who despised them. Again, during the brief renaissance of 1912-16, cut short by the war, Massachusetts poets revolved around a brilliant if not fixed star, Amy Lowell.

Certain distinguished authors remained aloof from their fellow writers - notably Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. But with few excep- tions it can be said that the history of literature in Massachusetts is the history of its diverse and divergent literary groups and movements.

When the Puritans, who desired a theocratic hierarchy, arrived in Massachusetts, they found the Plymouth congregation, a group of demo- cratic dissenters, before them; and to their alarm the Salem church shortly fell under this radical influence. In the resulting battle of words the conservatives were represented by John Cotton; Nathaniel Ward, author of 'The Simple Cobler of Aggawam' (1647); the ingenuous apos- tle to the Indians, John Eliot; Samuel Sewall, the diarist; Cotton Mather, harsh and dogmatic in religion, progressive in natural science and medi- cine; and subtle-minded Increase Mather. The democrats counted fewer but on the whole more trenchant writers: Hugh Peter, Nathaniel Morton, Edward Johnson (author of 'Wonder-Working Providence,' 1654), Roger Williams, John Wheelwright.

The first press to be set up in the new country was that of Stephen Daye in Cambridge, under the control of clerical Harvard College. The Daye press issued the 'Bay Psalm Book,' that monument to early print- ing and bad rhyme, in 1640. Daye was succeeded by Samuel Green, who printed John Eliot's Indian New Testament in 1661 and the entire Bible in 1663. In 1669 Green issued Morton's 'New England's Memorial,' noteworthy for having not only a printer but a publisher, 'H. Usher of

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Massachusetts: The General Background

Boston,' the latter probably a bookseller, in the days when booksellers combined the functions of importer and publisher. John Dunton, Scots bookseller, remarked in 1686 that there were eight bookshops in 'Boston village.' Not until 1675 was Boston's first press established, by John Foster.

Not only theological tracts and sermons by Massachusetts writers were published during the seventeenth century. Mary Rowlandson's account of her captivity among the Indians, written in a vivid style without literary pretense, appeared in a second edition in 1682 (no copy of the first edition has survived). The anonymous 'Relation,' descriptive of Plymouth and its settlement, appeared in 1622; and two years later was published Edward Winslow's 'Good News from New England,' simply written, like a letter home describing the wonders of the new country. William Bradford, governor from 1621 to 1657 save for five years, wrote a 'History of Plymouth Plantation' in 1630-46, the manu- script of which was lost for two hundred years, finally turning up to be published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1856. But Captain Nathaniel Morton had access to the manuscript, for he used much of it in his 'New England's Memorial' (1669). Verse flourished no less than prose: Peter Folger's satire, 'A Looking-Glass for the Times,' appeared in 1677; Benjamin Tompson's 650-line epic on King Philip's War, 'New England's Crisis,' in 1676; Anne Bradstreet's 'The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung up in America,' in London in 1650 and in Boston in 1678; and Michael Wigglesworth's 'Day of Doom' (1662), an epic of the last judg- ment, was widely read for a hundred years.

Many of the products of these first presses, as well as some priceless manuscripts, were in the library of the Reverend Thomas Prince of Bos- ton, which, stored in the tower of the Old South Church, was dispersed and partly destroyed when British troops were quartered in the church during the American Revolution. Among these manuscripts was William Bradford's 'History of Plymouth Plantation.' Prince published in 1736 the first volume of his 'Chronological History of New England in the Form of Annals,' which he unsuccessfully endeavored to continue in six- penny serial parts. His careful use of sources makes him the first trust- worthy American historian: 'I cite my vouchers to every passage,' he said - and did.

For almost one hundred years, before a Massachusetts printer dared publish a book he had to secure what practically amounted to an im- primatur; and if an author wrote a book with an heretical taint, he pub- lished it, if at all, in England. This condition existed until the first quar-

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Literary Groups and Movements

ter of the eighteenth century, when Benjamin Franklin's brother James founded the lively New England Courant (1721) with the aid of the Hell Fire Club, hardly a clerical organization. Benjamin Franklin, while em- ployed in his brother's printshop, contributed the satiric 'Silence Dog- wood' papers to the Courant, slipping the first of them anonymously under the door. The Courant was a sort of American Spectator, differing in its liveliness and its literary tone from the Boston Gazette, already estab- lished in 1719. Two years after the Courant first appeared, Benjamin went to Philadelphia, and his direct connection with Massachusetts ended.

The editors of the Courant continually jeered at the dullness of its contemporaries, their staleness, their lack of American news and political comment. In self-defense, perhaps, The New England Weekly Journal was founded by a more sober group. The Journal had something of the liveliness of the Courant, but it was conservative in tone, and endeavored to offset the damage to faith, morals, and politics being worked by the Franklins' paper.

During the brave times of 1770-76 Isaiah Thomas published The Massachusetts Spy, which pleaded the cause of revolution. This enter- prising publisher, founder of the American Antiquarian Society, later became the publisher of The Royal American Magazine (1774-75), chiefly remembered for containing engravings by Paul Revere; The Worcester Magazine (1786-88); and The Massachusetts Magazine (1789-96). Other early Massachusetts magazines were The American Magazine and His- torical Chronicle (1743-46) and The New England Magazine (1758-60).

During this period of political pamphleteering, every agitator was an author and every author an agitator. James Otis the younger, advocate- general, was the most brilliant of these; 'The Rights of the British Colo- nies Asserted and Proved' (1764) and the 'Letter to a Noble Lord' (1765) are perhaps the best known of his writings. Oxenbridge Thacher, John Adams, and Josiah Quincy all produced political pamphlets, as did Noah Webster, author of the dictionary and the blue-backed speller, who proved to be as radical in politics as he was later to be in spelling. Samuel Adams, with his Committees of Correspondence, his 'Massachusetts Circular Letter' (1768), is the prototype of them all.

A new note among Colonial historians appeared with the publication of the first volume of the 'History of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay' in 1764. Its author, Thomas Hutchinson, was a descendant of Anne, and as unpopular as the latter, though for different reasons. He was a mer- chant, with conservative leanings, and the rising revolutionary temper of

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Massachusetts: The General Background

the people made Bostonians actively mistrust him as a Tory. His history was the first account of the Colony to be written without theological bias, and notwithstanding its conservative tone, it displays a considerable political sense. The Reverend William Gordon of Roxbury wrote a his- tory of the Revolution in 1788; and Mercy Otis Warren, sister of James Otis, produced a popular history of the same period in 1805. George Richard Minot's 'History of the Insurrection in Massachusetts' (1788) dealt with Shays's Rebellion of 1786, and Minot also continued Hutchin- son's history.

The North American Review was founded in 1815. The short-lived Pioneer, whose three issues included contributions by Poe and Haw- thorne, was published in 1843 by James Russell Lowell, who became the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly in 1857. With the establishing of The North American Review and of two great publishing houses, Ticknor and Company (1833), later Ticknor and Fields, the direct predecessors of Houghton Mifflin Company - and of Little and Brown (1837), literature in Massachusetts had a firm underpinning. In 1837, the year in which Charles C. Little and James Brown put up their sign, William Lloyd Garrison was publishing The Liberator (1831-65). 'Poems' by William Cullen Bryant had appeared sixteen years before; Ralph Waldo Emerson had recently moved to Concord and had just published 'The American Scholar'; Whittier was an agent of the Anti-Slavery Society; R. H. Dana, Jr., and Henry David Thoreau had just graduated from Harvard, where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had begun to teach and James Russell Lowell was an unruly undergraduate; Hawthorne was struggling at Con- cord; Oliver Wendell Holmes had just begun to practice medicine; Pres- cott was about to publish his 'Ferdinand and Isabella'; the Saturday Club was eleven months old; Ticknor's Old Corner Bookstore was a liter- ary gathering place; and Annie Fields's literary salon had not yet begun.

Until the first third of the nineteenth century, authorship was the avocation of amateurs and gentlemen of means. As late as 1842 Chan- ning remarked that Hawthorne was the only American who supported himself by writing. Channing was mistaken, although not very much so. Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826) of Charlestown, America's first geographer, had been one of the few writers in America to make writing pay, al- though his school geographies and gazetteers scarcely rank as literature. In 1790, Congress passed a law designed to protect literary property. But in the absence of substantial publishing houses or magazines that paid for contributions, and in view of the continual pirating of books by English and American authors on both sides of the Atlantic, authorship

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Literary Groups and Movements

was a poor enough business. Even after the great Boston magazines and publishing houses were established, Bryant had to edit anthologies and a newspaper; Whittier struggled desperately until the publication of 'Snow-Bound'; Mrs. Stowe made less than a living from her books until the phenomenal success of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'; and Prescott was the first historian to achieve financial success from his writings. None of these authors received any income from the European editions of their works. It was not until writers organized in the American Copyright League (1883) and publishers in the American Publishers' Copyright League (1887) that international piracy was halted by the copyright agreement of 1891.

Mrs. Fields tells the story of Dr. Holmes's indignant exclamation, one morning when hearing the doorbell ring, that he was afraid it was 'the man Emerson.' Holmes, driving the twin horses of medicine and essay- writing, had learned to guard himself from intrusion. But it is significant that most of the writers responsible for the New England renaissance of the 1840's and 1850's not only called upon one another, but formed inter- locking circles of friendship, and embarked together in publishing schemes, in literary cenacles, and in such ventures as Fruitlands and the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education. Amos Bronson Alcott, ostracized by proper folk for teaching young children in his school the plain facts about birth and for refusing to dismiss a Negro pupil, was stoutly defended by his fellow transcendentalists, who, tolerating his orphic doings and sayings, yet recognized his progressive attempt to bring modern educational methods to New England. One of the sources of strength of the New England movement, in fact, was its awareness of contemporary European culture. Emerson, for example, brought Car- lyle, and through him German currents of thought, to American atten- tion; Prescott and Motley made Spain and the Netherlands homegrounds to Yankees; and Longfellow devotedly presented to his contemporaries the best of European literature, from the Finnish saga through Dante to Lamartine and Victor Hugo. In addition, established writers encouraged younger writers. Two of many examples are familiar: Whittier's encour- agement of a Lowell mill operative, Lucy Larcom, whose poetry is prop- erly forgotten, but whose 'A New England Girlhood' survives as a valua- ble social document; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson's careful foster- ing, however inept, of Emily Dickinson's brittle genius.

With Richard Hildreth (1807-65) and his 'History of the United States, 1492-1821,' nineteenth-century historical writing began. Hildreth was followed by John Gorham Palfrey (1798-1881), one of the editors of

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Massachusetts: The General Background

the North American Review, who defended the old régime in his 'History of New England.' George Bancroft (1800-91), an historian of enormous patience and learning despite his bias, made careful use of sources now available in the Massachusetts Historical Society, founded by Jeremy Belknap, an historian of New Hampshire, in 1791. Jared Sparks (1789- 1866), also an editor of the North American Review, edited Franklin's and Washington's writings, and inaugurated the 'American Biography Se- ries.' In preparing Washington's letters for the press, Sparks altered them, as he thought for the better, and the resulting hot discussion among scholars as to the necessity for accurate textual presentation of docu- ments probably had a wholesome effect on contemporary historical edit- ing.

William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859), published his 'Ferdinand and Isabella' in 1838, his 'Conquest of Mexico' in 1843, and his 'Conquest of Peru' in 1847; John Lothrop Motley (1814-77) made the United Nether- lands his life study; and Francis Parkman (1823-93) concentrated on the history of Colonial United States. With these three authors, American historical writing came of age. Justin Winsor (1831-97), in his 'Narrative and Critical History of America,' published 1886-89, was the first to offer full bibliographical and source material to the reader of American history. Francis Parkman and John Fiske (1842-1901) belonged to a younger generation, as did Charles Francis Adams's three sons, all historians - Charles Francis, Jr., Brooks, and the brilliant Henry.

Four bright philosophical planets had orbits which centered in Harvard University. Two of these were Massachusetts men, William James (1842- 1910), psychologist and stylist, and Charles S. Pierce (1840-1914), a re- markable scientific realist. Two others were not Yankees, but have come to be identified with Massachusetts: Josiah Royce (1855-1916) and George Santayana (b. 1863). Louis Agassiz (1807-73), nourished on idealistic philosophy, remained during twenty-five professorial years at Harvard the storm center of opposition to the shockingly novel ideas of Darwin, and was accused by his skeptical European contemporaries of trading his scientific birthright for a mess of Puritan pottage. His stu- dents became evolutionists to a man.

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Massachusetts : a guide to its places and people, Part 13

Author: Publication date: 1937 Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company Number of Pages: 802

Author:
Publication date: 1937
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company
Number of Pages: 802