ciently rare in American letters and that are quite remarkable as coming from Franklin. They set one to wondering what this man might have done in literature had he chosen to be less of a statesman and philosopher. Such work as he did do, however, is on the whole purely American,-virile, blunt almost to rudeness, with only sufficient polish to give it currency. He inculcated, as we have seen, a practical morality only, and he did this best in plain, unvarnished prose. We can see his limitation clearly enough,—not exactly that he was no visionary, but that he was blind on the side of enthusiasm and idealization, that his eyes were shut to the poetry of life. His great defect was a defect of spirituality, and he stands ir strong contrast to even such feebly poetical men as Cottor Mather and Jonathan Edwards. "There is a flower of religion, a flower of honor, a flower of chivalry," says Sainte-Beuve, "that you must not require of Franklin." Of course we remember the age. His life was fairly contemporaneous with that of the great French sceptic, Voltaire. And the eighteenth century in England was notoriously an age of prose, dull and unimaginative in comparison with the centuries before and the century after.

CHAPTER III

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.-INDEPENDENCE AND

NATIONALITY

1765-1800

The review of colonial literature in the first chapter closed with the work of the theologians. It must not be supposed that theology died out in New England. It will be found after another century tingeing still the writings even of those who openly rebelled against the Puritanism of their forefathers. But interest in it had to give way before new and more vital issues. Men cease to speculate on the freedom of the will when their actual freedom of thought and deed is threatened. The colonies were steadily growing, from New Hampshire on the north to Georgia on the south. They were becoming commercially and politically important. They found themselves far away from the powers that governed them, and they felt those powers to be often sadly out of sympathy with their wishes and needs. There arose discontent, rebellion, revolution.

To trace in detail the growing sentiment among the colonies in favor of union, and the growing dissatisfaction with British rule, which led to the Declaration of Independence of 1776, is the business of the historian, and here a very few facts must suffice. The French and Indian War (1754-1763) had indirectly much to do with the movement by showing the necessity for union, perhaps also by proving the prowess of American arms; and the very year in which Edwards published his Freedom of the Will the youthful Washington marched with a regiment of soldiers into the western wilderness to

resist the claims of the French. But the more direct causes were the various measures passed by Parliament for the taxation of the colonies, from the Importation Act of 1733 to the Stamp Act of 1765. Some of the earliest and bitterest opposition came from Massachusetts, where, in 1761, we find the oratory of James Otis inciting among the people hints of resistance by arms. Fourteen years later, too, the first armed resistance came from Massachusetts. But the movement centralized farther south. In 1765 the young mountaineer Patrick Henry startled the Virginia House of Burgesses with his resolutions against British taxation. The First Colonial Congress met in 1765 at New York, the Second in 1774 at Philadelphia; the Declaration of Independence was signed at Philadelphia; the man chosen for commander-in-chief of the army and destined to become first President of the Union was a Virginian.

The literature of the time might be expected to follow the course of these events, and in large measure it does. But this period, like the century and a half that had gone before, was not fruitful of good literature. For the most part it produced only the fleeting record of its own immediate concerns, in the form of revolutionary speeches, state documents, patriotic songs. These are all sincere enough and touch some of the noblest passions of humanity, but they lack art; and it takes art as well as sincerity to make any work lasting. The calm, the impartiality, the sense of perspective which art requires, are not at the command of one who celebrates contemporary events. Franklin in his old age could write with masterly skill the story of his youth, but not even Franklin, granting him the poetic powers which he lacked, could have fitly sung our nation's birth. It was reserved for Hawthorne, in the nineteenth century, to transfer Puritanism from history to literature, and our romancers are only just beginning to busy themselves seriously with our revolutionary age.

ORATORY AND POLITICAL PROSE

It would be idle to review at length the oratory of the period, or to single out the merits of this or that orator, from James Otis of Massachusetts, whom John Adams likened to a "flame of fire," to Patrick Henry of Virginia, who spoke, thought Jefferson, "as Homer wrote." These men spoke for their time, and not ineffectually; and their speeches, devoutly preserved, fired the youthful patriotism of several generations and served as models to orators whose fame has since partially eclipsed their own. But we scarcely revert to their speeches now. If we do, we find them often painfully "academic"; the ideas are couched in stately and pompous phrase-long, balanced sentences, resonant, Latinized diction, elaborate figures. We half fancy the orators must have been cold and unimpassioned weighers of words and polishers of periods. It was not so. Their style was the only style taught and approved in their day. Precisely such oratory was to be expected of an age which in England elevated almost to the position of a literary dictator Samuel Johnson. Yet a few of the words then uttered echo still. We shall be slow indeed to forget that cry of Patrick Henry, the most gifted, least academic speaker of them all— that cry which is the largest and deepest expression of the spirit of the age: "Give me liberty or give me death." But our Revolution brought forth no Edmund Burke, eloquent, cultured, and profound, to measure himself with Demosthenes and Cicero of old. With the noble Farewell Address of Washington in 1796, the old issues were fairly closed. Daniel Webster, our greatest orator, belongs wholly to another era.

On the documentary side the literature was good, as such literature goes. The Declaration of Independence easily takes rank with the great state papers of history, not alone because of its political significance but also because of its lofty theme and its earnest and dignified expression. It was composed, of course, with the im

Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826.

mediate object of making a wide popular appeal,—“a kind of war-song" says Professor Tyler,—and it was but natural that it should contain some "glittering generalities" and that its eloquence should approach grandiloquence. But it has stood a long and severe test, and stood it well; and no one, whether in youth or age, can read it to-day without some stir of emotion. To Thomas Jefferson belongs the chief credit of composing it, and Jefferson was a writer of considerable ability. His Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, attracted contemporary attention in England, where it was republished by Edmund Burke. Moreover his voluminous and scholarly letters, which make up the bulk of his collected works, give him a respectable rank among writers of a class of literature that has been much neglected since his day.

A most picturesque figure of this period, and one closely associated in ideas with Jefferson, was Thomas Paine, an Eng

Thomas
Paine,

1737-1809.

Paine He was an

lishman who came to America in 1774, at the age of thirty-seven. He had neither the solid attainments nor the cultivated tastes of Jefferson, but he had all of Jefferson's radicalism and was utterly fearless in parading it. Jefferson had written on the Rights of America. wrote later, in England, on the Rights of Man. open sceptic and scoffer, at war generally with the established order of things. Such a revolutionary spirit belongs to no land, and when the American cause was won, Paine followed the torch of revolution to France, declaring, "Where Liberty is not, there is my home." After spending a considerable time there and in England he returned to America, where he died in 1809. On the whole, Thomas Paine has been too persistently remembered for his violence and his so-called atheism, too little for his naturally humane instincts. His coarse and superficial Age of Reason may well be neglected. Besides, that book, like the Rights of Man, was not written in America. What Americans should remember him for are his