fessor Pattee is only a shade too severe on the output of Revolutionary epics: "There was no burst of song in America; instead, there followed one of the most pathetic spectacles in all literary history-a people with a vision that transported them into the clouds, yet powerless through environment and early education to transmute that vision into song. We see them, however, struggling heroically with the burden. From 1774, when Dwight completed his 'Conquest of Canaan,' 'the first piece of this kind ever attempted in this country,' as he observed in his preface, until 180[7], which ends the period with Barlow's 'Columbiad'-the 'Polyolbion' of American poetry-the years are strewn thick with the wrecks of epics. Charles Brockden Brown, when only sixteen, had started no less than three of these Homeric efforts; one on the discovery of America, and one each on the conquests of Mexico and Peru. It was our heroic era, but it yielded almost nothing of value. Mere exaltation availeth little unless it be grounded either upon genius or long-continued culture." "The Conquest of Canaan" was better, however, than "The Triumph of Infidelity," of which little good can be said. This was a prolonged attempt at scathing satire on the part of a man who had no native sense of humor. It is impossible that it can have amused anyone, though it doubtless gave grim satisfaction to other good folk who were no less devoted than he to old-fashioned orthodoxy. Far the best of Dwight's longer poems was "Greenfield Hill," published the year before he accepted the presidency of Yale. This poem had many such distinguished forerunners as Ben Jonson's "Penshurst," John Denham's "Cooper's Hill," and Pope's "Windsor Forest," the plan being simply to look out from some hilltop and derive a series of narrative and descriptive verse from what the views suggested. If the plan was an established one, Dwight's original scheme for working it out was even more frankly unoriginal, for he had at first, as the preface states, "designed to imitate, in the several parts, the manner of as many British poets, but finding himself too much occupied, when he projected the publication, to pursue that design, he relinquished it." This failure was altogether fortunate, for in the present form of the poem, Dwight's little flame shines stoutly from beneath the overshadowing bushels of Spenser, Thomson, Gay, Goldsmith, and others less easily recognizable. The whole is divided into seven parts, as follows: I, The. Prospect; II, The Flourishing Village, "Fair Verna! loveliest village of the west"; III, The Burning of Fairfield, an attempt to consign to "the most finished detestation" the memory of Governor Tryon, who, in 1779, bombarded the village from Long Island Sound; IV, The Destruction of the Pequods, an heroic chapter in Connecticut history, narrated in Spenserian stanzas; V, The Clergyman's Advice to the Villagers, Mr. Dwight's pulpit ethics in verse; VI, The Farmer's Advice to the Villagers, delivered "on a pleasant monday," an admirable example, taken with Part V, of how the Lord's anointed could combine worldliness and other-worldliness, and VII, The Vision, or Prospect of the Future Happiness of America. Thus, in scale, the poem had a sort of pocket-epic magnitude with a concluding burst of loyalty, but 1 F. L. Pattee, Introduction to "The Poems of Philip Freneau," Vól. I, pp. c and ci. it was genuinely local and concrete in character, and in point of view, as well as content, was essentially American. Even in the last part, where the temptation was greatest to identify the future of America with a vaguely glorious millennium, Dwight kept his head as he presented in rhythmic and sometimes poetical numbers the fair conclusions to be drawn from an honest survey of location, climate, property, government, and the advancement of the arts and sciences. "Greenfield Hill" is, therefore an interesting and readable document in literary history. It presents the workings of a sturdy, upright New England mind and conscience, its vigorous and narrow prejudices, its honest zeal for the country's good. It is very evidently an old document in some of its national concepts. It showed no prophetic sense of what the new industrialism and miscellaneous immigration were to bring about. In the remotest confines of Dwight's vista there was neither slum nor factory. But, if in this social blindness he seems remotely antiquated, he shared one other defect of vision with the America of only day before yesterday, for he was one of the earliest to rely on America's magnificent isolation: See this glad world remote from every foe, Here, without walls, the fields of safety spread, As poetry, it amounts to little more than "The Conquest of Canaan," or "The Triumph of Infidelity," but as a record of New England life and thought, it is immensely worth while, and deserves to be read side by side with an equally valuable treasure-house of fact and conviction, the four volumes of "Travels in New England and New York." To use a distinction of modern English politics, he was a conservative liberal, a compound of Yankee shrewdness and Puritan zeal. In the passage from the 18th century to the 19th he was a representative character who carried over the Calvinistic rectitude of Jonathan Edwards with the practical sagacity of Benjamin Franklin. He achieved no works or art, but he contributed to the collateral literature of American history, and stands out boldly in the history of American literature. JOEL BARLOW (1754-1813) Barlow was born in Redding, Conn., in 1754. He was graduated from Yale, after a year at Dartmouth, in 1778, reading a. Commencement poem on "The Prospect of Peace." From 1780 to 1783 he was chaplain in the Continental army. During this period, he brought to completion his "Vision of Columbus," which, after many delays, was published by subscription in 1787, and, twenty years later, appeared, revised and expanded, as "The Columbiad." Minor activities as a poet resulted in his official revision "Greenfield Hill," Part VII, lines 87-90. 2 Ibid., lines 321, 322. of the Book of Psalmody, in 1785; his participation, with Hopkins, Trumbull, and Humphreys, in "The Anarchiad," in 1786-1787; his "Hasty Pudding," in 1793, and his "Conspiracy of Kings," in 1796. These latter two were produced during his residence abroad, 1788-1805, when he became known, and was by many discredited, as a radical republican. His "Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government" (1792 and 1795), was fiercely condemned by all conservatives. In his latter years, however, he was in personal favor with Presidents Jefferson and Madison, who recognized him as an honest liberal. He lived until 1813. I. Texts. His epic is accessible only in early editions. The Vision of Columbus. A Poem, in Nine Books. 1787. (Four more editions by 1794.) The Columbiad. A Poem in Ten Books. Philadelphia, 1807. (A sumptuous quarto of 454 pages, with twelve full-page steel engravings.) Hasty Pudding; a Poem in Three Cantos with a Memoir on Maize, by D. J. Browne. New York, 1847. II. Biography. Life and Letters of Joel Barlow, by C. B. Todd. New York, 1886. III. Criticism. Three Men of Letters, by M. C. Tyler, pp. 131-180. Barlow was the most ambitious, laborious, and persistent of the 18th century American aspirants to epic fame. His final product, "The Columbiad," appeared in 1807, nearly thirty years after the idea first occurred to him. In 1787 he published "a sketch of the present poem," under the title of "The Vision of Columbus,” a sketch which ran to the modest proportions of nine books and nearly 5,000 lines. In its final shape, it was not only poetically enlarged, but was accordingly magnified in an elaborately embellished quarto, in the fashion of the Baskerville reprints of the classics, then in polite English vogue. The poem, whose earlier name is the more exact, is really the old-age vision of Columbus as seen from a mountain-top, to which he is led by the Titan Hesper, guardian genius of the western world. To him is exhibited the conquest of South America, the settling of the colonies in North America, the French and Indian Wars in brief, and the War of the Revolution in prolonged detail. Then follow a hymn to peace, an arraignment of slavery in the land of liberty, and a survey of the progress of the arts in America. This would seem to have been enough of a vision for the downcast discoverer; but the reader is further enlightened by two more books, which contain what proves to be the Vision of Barlow as shared by Columbus. The latter is somewhat perplexed at the slow progress of science and the apparent persistency of international warfare, until Hesper, with great erudition and fine optimism, expounds the law of progression in the physical, moral, and intellectual world, adorning his discourse with extended allusions, as the "Argument" to Book IX announces, to "the ancient and modern state of the arts and of society, Crusades, Commerce, Hanseatic League, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Galileo, Herschel, Descartes, Bacon, Printing Press, Magnetic Needle, Geographical Discoveries, Federal System in America." And he concludes that this system, extended to the whole world, will lead to the federation of nations, the Parliament of the World. "The Columbiad" is accompanied by a twelve-page preface, which is a significant piece of early American criticism. With reference to the form of the work, Barlow makes no mention of his adopting the heroic couplet, but takes some pride in his rigid observance of the classical unities of time, place, and action, and hopes for a favorable verdict upon "the disposition of the parts, the invention and application of incidents, the propriety of the illustrations, the liveliness and the chastity of the images, the suitable intervention of machinery," and the "language whose energy, harmony, and elegance shall constitute a style everywhere suited to the matter they have to treat." As to the contents, he is chiefly interested in the introduction of new poetic material through the invention of new machinery of warfare, and he exclaims at the hitherto neglected possibilities of naval combats, quite ignoring Freneau's fine account in the first canto of "The British Prison Ship." His chief object, he says, however, is of a moral and political nature; artistry is subordinate; and his epic, in its moral import, belongs to his enlightened age and embodies its newer ideals of peace. Homer taught "that conquest, violence, and war were the best employment of nations"; "Virgil wrote and felt like a subject, not like a citizen." Barlow's avowed and contrasted object was "to inculcate the love of rational liberty, and to discountenance the deleterious passion for violence and war." The temptation is obvious to hold Barlow up to scorn in the light of the comparison which he thus invites, but the attentive reader of his preface will come upon one passage which is far more profound than amusing: "I cannot expect that every reader, nor even every republican reader, will join me in opinion with respect to the future progress of society and the civilization of states; but there are two sentiments in which I think all men will agree: that the event is desirable, and that to believe it practical is one step toward rendering it so." The poem, of course, was not a popular success; such poems never are. Nor has it become a classic, for it had neither the primitive vigor of a folk epic nor the lofty perfection of a modern literary masterpiece. Its claims to the attention of the student are based chiefly on two facts: that it possessed the originalities in subject matter and viewpoint of which its author made note in the preface, and that it was the best of the colonial epic attempts, more sustained than Freneau's "Pictures of Columbus," more elevated than anything of Trumbull's, more reasonable and readable than Dwight's "Conquest of Canaan," and more universal than his "Greenfield Hill." In "Greenfield Hill," Dwight wrote a more successful poem, but in "The Columbiad" Barlow came nearer to achieving really epic breadth. But his reach did not always exceed his grasp. One wild flower he's plucked that is wet with the dew and that was his mock-heroic pastoral, "Hasty Pudding." Homesick in Savoy one December day in 1792 (he had been, writing to his wife in London that the very word America was sweetness to his soul), he and his fellow Commissioners of the National Convention were served mush and milk-Hasty Pudding. He had ordered it in vain in Paris and London, But here, though distant from our native shore, All during the meal he dwelt on the merits of the dish to his colleagues, and doubtless gave them disconnectedly what appears in this impromptu : the various names for it, its superiority to other foods, and then, after a long breath, instructions about the cultivation, of the grain, its harvesting, its husking, its preparation and serving, the rival claims of molasses and sugar, and even the choice in spoons. The whole episode was simple and genuine, like the dish and his verses on it. He was really enthusiastic, but he anticipated the polite derision of his colleagues by adroitly lapsing into mock-heroics. 'Mid eighteen years of roaming, sometimes among pleasures and palaces, and sometimes in "Alpine Snows" and "Turkey's morbid air," he sang with hearty zest this song of home, sweet home. This, naturally enough, was popular, and does deserve a reading to-day on directly literary grounds-not because it was well meant, though ineffectual, but because it was a simple, good-natured, clever bit of funmaking by a man who was himself simple, good-natured, and clever enough to write a mock-pastoral, 'even though he was a good deal lower than the angels, to whom alone the writing of epics should be delegated. JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE (1795-1820) Drake was born, in New York City in 1795. After a brief business life he studied privately and became a physician. As a boy he was a wide reader, and he early began writing verse under various assumed signatures. "The Culprit Fay" was written in 1816, before he was of age, though not published until "The Croaker" papers were written with Halleck in the spring of 1819. He died of consumption in September, 1820. I. Texts. The Culprit Fay and Other Poems. New York, 1835. No recent edition of Drake has appeared, but these two title poems have been reprinted in many collections. II. Criticism. Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. II, p. 326. (E. A. Poe.) |