A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.*

A HISTORY of American literature must inevitably be that unattractive thing,--a heavy collection of small matters,—heavy, not weighty ; for the historian, in dealing with so great a mass of mediocrities, must either notice all, or leave unnoticed all but the few. Mr. Coit Tyler has noticed all. His studies only reach, at the end of the second volume, down to the comple- tion of the colonial period of American history. A prolongation of his work is promised which will follow American letters into our own time. The task is one which strikes us as character- istic of the age. Whether the beer be small or not, our own or our fathers', the nineteenth century will chronicle it. If we effect little, we will at least make copious records of all that has been effected. We will identify writers, verify dates, cleverly give a personality to unauggcstive names, and criticise with analytical insight, with scientific industry, with receptive enthusiasm. Our tenderness of heart, our respect for humanity, and our sympathetic estimate of the importance of this world, make details of the lives and works of men so precious to us, that we will not let them die. We cannot bear to lose human things. As the self- conscious woman keeps a diary with the feeling that while she records her little life, it is not at least passing into annihilation, the self-conscious and woman-like generation writes histories, keeping its diaries of little lives. The most perfect antithesis to this spirit is to be found precisely in those modes of life which are bygone or fast disappearing,—in the monastic Orders of the Roman Church, for instance. There the individuality we love so much is effaced, personality passes into oblivion, sympathy is silenced, power is unused. It is not any misappreciation of the interest of Mr. Coit Tyler's work, or of the admirable man- ner in which he has done it, that leads us to these reflections. Chronicles must needs be made ; it is the temper of the time to demand them, and it would be well if they always came into the hands of writers so grave, so moderate, and SO impartial as the author of this history. His work might, indeed, merit the name of classic, but for certain scarcely avoidable Americanisms of style. "Forceful" is not a pleasant wond. to cis-Atlantic ears, nor is " racy " in Mr. Tyler's sense, for he uses it to qualify the style of every writer of any merit whom Mr. Tyler has to describe. The habits of writing "forever," and of dropping the ii in such words as "neighbour," "colour," and the rest, unpleasant always, are especially objectionable in quotations from authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How. ever well the author has written, studied, classified, and criticised, no one can struggle through his records of such lights of American literature as versifiers of the Psalms compared to whom Tate and Brady were poets, nor can any one look through the painfully-complete lists, in which he has tabulated the whole race of writers in the New World, from the day of the Pilgrim Fathers down to the War of Independence, without a conviction that nothing but the persistent American hallucina- tion as to the significance of small American work, by reason of the youth and freshness of the national genius, could have • Inelory of American Literature. Vohs. I. and Ii. By BC Cott Tyler. London Sampson Low and Co.

induced any author to enter upon a labour of such, scrupulous: thoroughness. Mr. Tyler has done a service to history ; whether he has done a service to a literature which was already too self- conscious,' may be open to question.

It is, of course, the above-mentioned theory as to the arbi- trary rejuvenescence of the race which colonised America that makes what Mr. Tyler calls • "The Beginning" interesting a,nd important in his eyes. "Tire first writer of the first book in American literature" was Captain John Smith, who landed in Virginia in 1607, with three little ship-loads of "poor gentle- men, tradesmen, serving-men, libertines, and such like." This man was, however, remarkable not as an American, but as an Elizabethan. Mr. Tyler describes him, in an excellent passage :—

"He was the man of action, who was also a man of letters man of letters, who was also a man of action ; the wholesomest type of manhood anywhere to be found ; body and brain both active, both cultivated ; the mind not made fastidious and morbid by too much bookishness, nor coarse and dull by too little ; not a doer who is dumb, not a spoech-maker who cannot do; the knowledge that comes of books, widened and freshened by the knowledge that comes of ex-. porience ; the literary sense fortified by common-sense; the bashful- ness and delicacy of the scholar hovering as a finer presence above. the forceful audacity of the man of the world."

This same type of man soon gives place to that which America more warmly adopted and made more peculiarly her own,—the Puritan. It is not Virgima, but New England, whose. voice is heard in Transatlantic literature ; and a most appalling voice it is. The doom of an unfortunate humanity, hated by its Creator, judgment and eternal torments, a scientific theology without the appui of precedent and tradition, asceticism with- out the humilities and charities of the Cloister,—such are the principal subjects which exercised American thought and American power of expression thenceforward. The pulpit and the chapel became pyux and agora, stage and' auditorium ; and the Press had no mission, save to. second the pulpit. In following divine after divine. through long careers of conceit and Calvinism, the author- is sustained by a national interest, of which readers will feel the need, though Mr. Tyler makes the way easier for them by smiling at his own task ; and several suggestive thoughts arise- during the dreary study. For instance, the chief object of puritanic denunciation seems to have been not sin, but sinful-. ness,—that is, not the tangible and common vices in a warfare against which there is some hope and some victory, but the vague and general hatefulness of man,—not because he does wrong, but because his is a condemned nature. A comparison, between this and the practical asceticism of other ages and countries would be inatructive.

A small group of historians, amongst whom Bradford,. Morton, and Winthrop stand more or less memorably, defers but for a little time the advance of the theologians. Edward Johnson, with his Wonder. workilud Providence of Zion's, Sainour in New England, heads the array ; Daniel Gookin follows, with a certain qualifying influence in the direc- tion of liberality and pity, and especially of charity to- wards the hated Indiana; such a voice as his is rare enough in the stream of pulpit eloquence. Then come the three. greatest preachers of that earliest time, Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, John Cotton, Mr. Tyler draws a very vivid, and indeed masterly picture of the personality of these men; this personality—the influence of word, bearing, expression, and even beauty or grandeur of feature—bore a large part in their reli-

gious influence, as has proved to be the common case in Puritanism,—the worship of the dead saints being replaced by the callus of the living minister. In the same way, Hooker substituted for the confessional a weekly consultation in pri- vate upon cases of conscience, to which the devout and per- turbed flocked, not because they needed to open their souls to a minister, but because they needed to open them to Thomas. to follow our historian in Hooker. Space will not allow ue to

examination of the characteristics of these men, nor into many of the details of the life and work of their more celebrated successors, the family of the Mathers,—a dynasty,. Mr. Tyler calls it. Terribly prolific were these authors, and the New England divines only rivalled the number of their books by the number of their children. Increase Mather was the author of a book which was long a sort of Puritan classic :— "Of all the great host of Increase Mather's publications, perhaps only one can be said to have still any power of walking alive on the earth,—the book commonly known by a name not given to it by its author, ' Remarkable Providences.' The origin of this book is worth mention A number of Puritan ministers in England and in

Ireland combined to put on record authentic accounts of

extraordinary interpositions of Providence in recent human affairs." The work fell "into the energetic hands of Increase Mather. He sent forth proposals through New England calling upon Ministers and other reputable persons, to forward to him written narratives of Providential events that had occurred under their own observation." What the solemn gobemouche collected was eagerly swallowed by the congregation; it was a collection of miracles, of which the quaintness mitigates the fanaticism; a tyro in evangelical theology, by the way, would

be much startled at finding that these interpositions of

Heaven are supposed to include judgments by lightning on "Quakers, drunkards," &a. Cotton Mather, the son of In- crease, was the greatest of the family. This is one of the few names, with those of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Frank- lin, which have any popular celebrity out of America. This remarkable man was a freshman at Harvard College at eleven years of age, having before that time read Homer and Isocrates, "and many unusual Latin authors ;" he took his firstdegree at fifteen; at seventeen, he began to preach. There was no sense of humour in New England at the time to repress such repulsive precocities in the only effectual way. Where, indeed, the reader asks aghast, was the wholesome, useful, blessed, and sane faculty of laughter, in those times, in America P The elaborate and depressing gibes of one theologian at another are the mock- ing memories that remained 'of the good gift,—if we except one passage of fun and frolic, and that is from the pen of a woman. In this respect, let us gratefully acknowledge that America has retrieved herself nobly. Having blade this bad beginning, Cotton Mather was elected pastor of North Church, Boston, at twenty-two, "and there, in the pa us..ele„ prosecution of almost incredible labours, literary, philanthropical, oratorical, and social, he continued to the end of his days on earth. He de- parted this life in 1728, having been permitted to contemplate, for many years and with immense delight, the progress of his own fame, as it reverberated through Christendom. Cotton Mather married early, and .married often. He had appro- priate thoughts and aspirations for all occasions of the day, such as "drinking a dish of tea, of which he was a great admirer," mending his fire, putting out his candle, and so on ; Mr. Tyler aptly describes him as being "himself imposed upon by his own moral affectations; com- pletely surrendered to spiritual artifice; stretched, every instant of his life, on the rack of ostentatious exertion, intellectual and religious, and all this partly for vanity's sake, partly for conscience' sake." His most famous book (and he published fourteen in a single year) was the "Ragnalia Christi knericanct; or the Ecclesiastical History of Areie England, from its first planting in the year 1620, unto the year of our Lord 1698." We refer the reader to Mr. Tyler's pages for an excellent, impartial, and thoroughly intelligent analysis of this man's work, merely re- marking that one of his labours—the warfare against witches —seems to us to be somewhat slightly treated. Cotton Mather's literary style was in the highest degree tourmentg, fantastic, and pedantic; the titles of a few of his books must suffice us here :—AdverEM8 Liberttnos, or Evangelical Obedience Described;

en the

Boanerges, a Short Essay to Strength Impression Produced by Earthquakes ; Ohrtsttanus pet: ./ane„; or a Disciple Warm- ing of Himself and Owntng of ." 7 T. --(wd; Coheleth, a Soul upon Recollection coming into Incontestabio Sentiments of Religion ; Hatzar-Maveth, Comfortable Words; and so on. His son, Samuel, was "the last and the least of the Mothers." He pub- lished, it need scarcely be said. A. rather more cheerful little group of lay-writers follow in Mr. Tyler's history; it includes the first journalists, and the almanack-makers, a curious class of /itierateure, who mingled a great deal of theology and dismal prophecy with lighter matter. Among them also the reader welcomes with a certain relief a few rebels against the over-whelming and ever-growing power of the preachers, and a few voices raised to demand something like a judicial sifting of evidence in the matter of witchcraft. Among such protestants against the most arbitrary, narrow, and personal spiritual tyranny which the world has seen, special attention should be given to John Wise, who thought freely and wrote powerfully. Our author says of him that he was the first real democrat in America. The wars with the Indians also gave rise to some interesting and pathetic, because natural, narratives of sorrow, fear, and captivity; and with the quaint- ness of these hiatories is mingled a pedantry of classic allusion very original in effect. Samuel Penhallow tells us how two aged men,— " Mr. Phipenny and Mr. Kent, 'were attacked by Indians,' and soon. fell by their fury ; for, being advanced in years, they were so infirm that I might say of them, as Juvenal did of Priam, They had scarce blood enough left to tinge the knife of the sacrifice.'" This conjunc- tion of Priam and Mr. Phipenny [adds Mr. Tyler], is unexpected, to say the least."

Jonathan Edwards, "the most original and acute thinker yet produced in America," was born in the beginning of the

last century. It is curious, we may be permitted to note, how,.

in a modified form, "the most remarkable man in the country is always cropping up, even in these grave and critical pages. This New England author and divine began his literary life with a ponderous and dismal theological satire, written at twelve years old, against an older boy, who held that the soul remained with the body until the resurrection. Mr. Tyler quotes this production very fully, and with some praise. To our mind,. nothing more wearisome has ever been penned; it is also puerile in the matter of argument. But what a picture t Two New England boys at a literary controversy on such a matter! Jonathan Edwards grew up a naturalist, philosopher, and a Calvinist, above all, of the blackest typo; his life was laborious, heroic, and self-denying, and he left one of the names which all Americans unite in honouring. We may conclude this very slight notice of New-England literary history by a glance at the few writers who spared time from religion to enjoy the lovely Nature of the New World. Amongst these were Francis Higginson, William Wood, John Josselyn, and one or two more. A review of the versifiers of the Puritan colony offers the dreariest results. As we have said, they were hardly worth nothing, even by name. The "poetic vice," as Mr. Tyler aptly calls it, raged in the most unsuspected qnartere. The "sly dissipation of writing verses" was the vent for all the human nature suppressed in the Puritans ; from the governor to the town clerk, all found some strange pleasure in deplorable verse. For one only—Anne Bradstreet—is the name of poet claimed, and even in her case the grounds of the claim are hardly sufficient. As to the versifications of the Psalms, the grotesque could not be carried further than it was in those efforts. Mr. Tyler feels the joke keenly :— "It is pathetic to contemplate the tokens of intellectual anxiety scattered along these pages; the prolonged baffling, perspiration, and discouragement which these good men had to pass through, in order to overcome the metrical problems presented, for example, by the 51st Psalm."

From New England the author turns to the less acutely char- acteristic records of New York, New .Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Southern colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Nothing of really great noteworthiness seems to have been produced in the first two settlements during the colonial period. Pennsyl- vania, though she did not produce Benjamin Franklin, who was born at Boston, claims to have been his foster mother. Of this. great man, whose life bridges over the gulf between the colonial and the independent periods, Mr. Tyler intends to treat at length in his future volumes. The literature of the South is, of course, less theological, less terrible, than that of New England; but its sprightliness, satire, and spirit produced little that is worthy of general remembrance. Mr. Coit Tyler's volumes are furnished with an excellent index; the whole scheme and plan of his work is admirably

orderly and scientific.