American Literature Lectures, Part I

The following lecture notes are based on Professor Walter Fuller Taylor's notes and lectures. They are supplemented with information drawn from a variety of sources; these are noted in the text. Many of the supplemental links can be found on the research links on the www page.

Michael S. Seiferth

P A R T O N E

The Seventeenth Century

Echoes of the Renaissance and Reformation

I. Travel Literature in Early Virginia

The Twofold Origin of American Literature The story of American letters has its beginnings in Europe, for the roots of our culture are grounded in the life of the Old World. Only in their surroundings were the seventeenth-century immigrants American. In race and in civilization they were merely transplanted Europeans, who brought to the colonies unchanged Old World speech, manners, politics, and religion. The Colonists thought as Europeans; and, when they wrote, they discussed issues of interest in europe, and followed European models of style. Yet from the very beginning, their Old World manner of life was modified by their new environment. Distinctions in social rank, which were taken for granted in Europe, had soon to be maintained by conscious effort in the colonies; and, as the settlements moved westward, they tended to disappear. In such ways as this the influence of the New World surroundings was constantly at work, molding the immigrant material into American forms.

Colonial literature was, therefore, the product of two basic forces: the European cultural heritage and the American environment. To follow the story of colonial writing, we must first seek out the principal interests of seventeenth-century Europe, and then inquire how these interests were echoed in the American wilderness.

The Vogue of Travel Literature. When Jamestown and Plymouth were being settled, Europe was still undergoing the rapid changes wrought by the Renaissance and the Reformation. Of these two movements, it was the Renaissance that fostered the earliest American Writings. By the term Renaissance is meant not merely a revival of learning, but a tremendous liberation of energy into all forms of secular enterprise--commerce, creative literature, science, and by no means least, exploration. {You may refer to the Lecture Notes on THE RENAISSANCE FOR A FULLER EXPLORATION OF THIS SUBJECT. See WWW Research Links.} Voyages of exploration like those of Raleigh and Gilbert awakened intense interest; and this interest naturally stimulated a literature devoted to recounting the explorers' adventures and to describing the strange countries beyond the sea. Throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, the popularity of the travel book was European-wide. In England, after seventy years of occasional production, this literary form reached its highest merit in the noble Elizabethan prose of Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589).

John Smith (1580?-1631) and the Virginia Settlement. To this popular type of Renaissance literature--the travel book--the first American writing is closely akin. Captain John Smith, who saved the Jamestown settlement by his boisterous method of enforcing labor, found time to write an account of the colony for its English sponsors, the Virginia Company of London. By some member of the corporation Smith's report was given to a printer in 1608 for publication. It duly appeared under the quaintly Elizabethan title, A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of note as hath happened in Virginia since the first planting of that colony, which is now resident in the south part thereof, till the last return from thence. In this narrative Smith relates the search of the colonists for a place of settlement, their early skirmishes with the Indians, their explorations, their petty quarrels, and their first desperate struggles with illness. Naturally there is no lack of adventure, particularly in those portions that tell of the capture of Smith by the Indians.

Smith's next work of importance, A Map of Virginia with a description of the country, the commodities, people, government and religion (1612) [Published in 1612, it was written shortly after A True Relation] was written apparently with the object of attracting colonists to Jamestown. Smith's descriptions 0f the bays, large rivers, isles, forests, springs, and mountains of Virginia are singularly attractive. The life of the natives Smith portrays with a remarkable abundance of concrete detail. The Indians' agriculture, their fishing and hunting, their tribal government, their wildly barbaric religious ceremonies, their childish curiosity and love of ornaments--all these are set forth in a style that is matter-of-fact, yet vivid.

These first American writings, obviously, are of that extensive literature of travel which produced Hakluyt's Principal Navigations; they are no unworthy examples of their kind. It must be admitted that Smith's composition, done amid the hardships of a pioneer camp, was rough and hasty; yet his work possesses important literary virtues. With singular directness he penetrates to the essential facts and discards the nonessential. His vocabulary is broad, forceful, aptly employed, and pithily idiomatic. On his plain, direct pages the love of wordplay and excessive ornament which distorts so much Elizabethan prose has fortunately left little mark. Moreover, though he was not of the caliber of Raleigh or Philip Sidney, his writings show that he belonged to their sane and vigorous type--that of Elizabethan soldier
who was also a man of letters. As Smith himself put it, "What their sword did, their pens writ." [Smith wrote extensively in areas other than travel. His principal work, The General History of Virginia (1624), which was written in England, and which is famous chiefly for the dubious story of his rescue by Pocahontas, is well known.]

HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard. The two interpretations of American history that have so far shaped our evaluation of the American past have been those of Frederick Jackson turner and charles A. Beard. According to the former, the greatest single factor in determining the character of American life has been the democratizing effect of a continually expanding frontier. The prospect of opportunity for all caused the United States to drive westward, and this expansion brought the pioneer into contact with a primitive environment which, while encouraging individualism, at the same time had a levelling effect which tended to erase distinctions of birth, social status, and education.

On the other hand, the interpretation of Charles A. Beard stresses the almost inexorable pressure of economic self-interest in determining the course of our history from its inception. To Beard, the motives of the original colonists, of the Revolutionary leaders, and even the framers of the Constitution were predominantly those of economic opportunism rather than of religious and democratic conviction, and he believed that this spirit of self-seeking perpetuated itself through all the subsequent problems of the young nation.

The weakness of the Turner thesis is that it places almost exclusive emphasis on the romantic idealism engendered by frontier conditions, and minimizes the powerful urbanizing influences of the Eastern seaboard; whereas that of Beard is questionable in its negativity, which subordinates the actions of human beings to those of blind economic forces and which regards any form of idealism or moral principle as sentimental and irrelevant. Placing both of these theories together, however, gives us a clue to the American character: the two voices, Idealism and Opportunity. [Horton and Edwards]

II. The Puritans: The Immigrant Generation

William Bradford (1590-1657) and Plymouth Plantation. The earliest writings done in Virginia are, as we have seen, products of the Renaissance. The earliest writings of New England are products of the Reformation as well. Like smith, the authors in the Pilgrim colony of Plymouth describe the impact of expanding Europe on primitive America. Unlike him, they are concerned chiefly with a people whose thought was shaped in the heat of the Protestant revolt
against priesthood and ceremonialism, and whose urge to colonization was less economic than religious. The Mayflower Pilgrims belonged to the Separatist class of English Puritans--that is, to the class which broke away entirely from the communion of the church of England. Originally an obscure village people, they had been forced by persecution out of England into Holland. dissatisfied with the economic hardships of their new home, they re-emigrated and planted the colony of Plymouth in 1620. Among those who had persistently urged emigration was a young man named William Bradford, who was later to govern the struggling colony for thirty years and to record its fortunes in the most attractive of early New England histories.

The earliest piece of formal writing produced at Plymouth is, like Smith's A True Relation, a history of the new colony during its birth year. This work, published anonymously as Mourt's Relation {so called from a prefatory note signed "G. Mourt"} in 1622, was probably the joint work of Bradford, Edward Winslow, and others. Though Mourt's Relation is both interesting and authentic, its fame has been overshadowed by that of Bradford's more extensive work, the History of Plymouth Plantation (written 1630-1650). The scope of Bradford's History is large. Beginning with the rise of the Separatists in England, Bradford follows the Pilgrims through their vicissitudes in Holland, their voyage to America, the founding of Plymouth, and the slow growth of their colony during its first quarter-century. the author's style--homely, deliberate, and lucid--is well suited to his subject. His phrasing reflects perfectly the sober, unpretentious matter-of-fact heroism of the simple, unimaginative, colonists. From Bradford's picture the traditional hell-fire and bigotry of Puritanism are conspicuously absent. There is no posing for posterity, no flow of self-conscious heroics, no spectacular disembarkation on the mythical Plymouth Rock. The Puritans of Bradford's account are sturdy, honest, sensible folk who seek out their building site and construct their village with methodical energy. They are, moreover, folk with a deep substratum of simple heroism--a heroism that faces the stormy Atlantic, the terrible first-winter plague, and the savage Pequod warriors with the same stoical strength and endurance. Nor do these people lack in tenderness, in the most trying duties of the support and care of the sick. They are plain-minded withal, devout in worship, and quite certain that God is constantly directing their lives by special providences, for chastisement, punishment, or reward.

Though the obscure Pilgrims never made such a great figure in American history as their later neighbors at Massachusetts Bay, their history as written by Bradford comes near being the literary classic of the American seventeenth century. The situation of civilized people struggling with a savage environment has proved perennially attractive in literature; consequently, despite many an arid stretch, Bradford's history abounds in material of rich human interest. And the story is admirably told with a biblical simplicity that rises at times to restrained and solemn eloquence.

John Winthrop (1588-1649) and Massachusetts Bay. The humble Pilgrim colony at Plymouth was not, however, the main fountainhead of American Puritanism. That distinction was reserved for the Pilgrims' more powerful neighbor, Massachusetts Bay. The Massachusetts Bay people were ten times as numerous as those at Plymouth; they had considerable wealth; they enjoyed the most competent and liberally educated leadership that English Puritanism could furnish. Devoted to the Puritan way of life, and strong even from the beginning, they succeeded remarkably in making their Puritan ideals prevail in the New World. To study the Massachusetts Bay colony is therefore to study some of the basic conceptions of life which underlie American literature.

The most nearly complete representative of this strong immigrant group is the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop. Winthrop is known to us chiefly through his Journal, a private diary which contains so complete a record of colonial affairs that in its first complete edition it was called The History of New England. Judged by Winthrop's Journal, the ideal Puritan regarded a spiritual life as of paramount importance; and he conceived of the spiritual life in terms of constant self-study, much wrestling in prayer, and continuous struggle against even the most remote inclinations to evil. In theology, Winthrop accepted, along with the other Puritans, the teachings of John Calvin, a Protestant thinker whose system was founded on the premise of the absolute sovereignty of God. And God's absolute sovereignty was, to the Puritans, not a sovereignty of law so much as a sovereignty of individual acts--or, as the Protestants called them, special providences. The will of an immanent God lay heavily on humanity; the influence of God moved mysteriously about the life even of the humblest believer, warning, chastising, and punishing him. To the Puritan mind, moreover, God was less often a Lord of love than a Lord of capricious cruelty and vengeance. For instance, in relating how the only boy of a Puritan couple broke through the ice and was drowned while his parents were at church, Winthrop overlooks the immediate cause of the tragedy--the parents' neglect of the child. Instead, he records with entire approval the parents' confession that they were being punished for too great indulgence toward the child. And just as this passage in Winthrop's Journal shows the Puritan belief in God's absolute sovereignty, exercised through special providences, it shows also a complementary trait--an acute consciousness of sin. To the typical Puritan, the struggle with sin was unremitting, and live, was, accordingly, a stern affair.

The Puritans, however, had secular concerns as well as religious. As portrayed by Winthrop, they were neither visionaries nor self-conscious heroes, but a prosaic, practical folk, concerned with the solid work of home-building, farming, trading, and government. And, sternly as they looked on many pleasures, they found no objection to one of the most fundamental sources of human contentment--the affections of the home. If Winthrop worshipped a vengeful God, he was himself a man of deep personal tenderness. That man was not merely an iron-hearted Puritan, but a lover and poet as well, who wrote to his wife, "It grieves me that I have not liberty to make better expression of my love to thee, who art more dear to me than all earthly things; but I will endeavor that my prayers may supply the defect of my pen....Go thou on cheerfully, in obedience to His holy will, in the course He hath set thee. Peace shall come."

Given his distinctive ideals, such a Puritan as Winthrop did not feel that his whole duty lay in achieving them as an individual. those ideals must be made to prevail in general, civil affairs as well. Government must be an agent of religion, operating under the influence of religious leaders. The Massachusetts Bay people wished to establish, in short, a kind of Puritan theocracy, and they carried out their plans with admirable strategy. their leaders, including Winthrop, chartered the enterprise in England as a trading corporation. then the members of the corporation, removing to Massachusetts, so restricted the suffrage by religious qualifications as to admit to influence only those men whose aims coincided with their own. By these methods they founded the theocracy so securely that it was little impaired for seventy years. The magistracy, however, was recurrently under attack from non-voting landholders and heretics like Roger Williams. In 1645, to defend his policies against criticism, Winthrop defined in a public speech the limitations of popular liberty:

There is a twofold liberty, natural (I mean as our nature is now corrupt) and civil and federal. The first...is a liberty to evil as well as good....The exercise and maintaining of this liberty makes men grow more evil, and in time to be worse than brute beasts....That other kind of liberty I call civil or federal....It is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest.

Evidently the Puritans wished to hold under close restraint both the moral laxity (as they regarded it) of the natural man, and the intellectual freedom of colonists whose opinions might differ from theirs. Citizens were to have liberty only to that which was "good, just, and honest"; and the decision as to what was good, just, and honest was to rest wholly with a small party of magistrates like Winthrop. From Winthrop's Journal, therefore, it is plain that he, along with other Puritan leaders, strove to enforce the Puritan ideals by government sanction; that he sought earnestly to found in Massachusetts a fixed, unchanging order of religious belief and political conduct. In this, as in other respects, Winthrop was an orthodox Puritan. Indeed, the chief value of his writings is that they so fully embody, so adequately portray, the orthodox Puritan way of life.

Roger Williams (1603-1683), A Puritan Radical. But not all Puritans were orthodox. Puritanism really brought to America two opposed tendencies, the one toward orthodoxy, the other toward nonconformity. Out of the differences between the orthodox and the unorthodox arose an extensive literature of controversy, which continued throughout the seventeenth century, and which formed a phase of the great European controversies over the Protestant Reformation. Just as we have found in Winthrop an embodiment of the orthodox Puritan ideals, so we shall find in another Puritan immigrant a type of Puritan independence and originality of thought. As Winthrop is pre-eminent among the orthodox, Roger Williams is pre-eminent among the unorthodox.

Williams was a voluminous author, but the gist of his thinking is expressed in a pamphlet argument over religious toleration with John Cotton, a contemporary and friend of Winthrop's. Happening in England on a tract of Cotton's against liberty of conscience, Williams replied to it in The Bloody Tenant of Persecution for cause of Conscience, discussed in a Conference between Truth and Peace (1644). Cotton's answer, The Bloody Tenant washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb, appeared in 1647; and Williams's final rejoinder, The Bloody Tenant yet More Bloody, by Mr. Cotton's effort to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb, followed in 1652.

These arguments for religious toleration were in Williams's mind only parts of a much larger political philosophy. With the democratic church management of the Separatists before him, Williams could hardly fail to reject wholly the absolutism of the English kings, and adopt instead the Compact theory of government. He conceived of the social compact, not as a prehistoric affair entered into while men were still in a mythical "State of Nature," but as a constant working agreement among the members of civil society. Governmental sovereignty, therefore, lies not in some absolutist king, but in the citizens, in the people who engage in the governmental compact.

A fundamental matter in the social contract is the degree to which people surrender their natural liberties to civil regulation. To Williams, it was inconceivable that the right to think and believe as one wishes should ever be so surrendered. The mind should be swayed only by persuasion, not by authority or coercion. Nor need the safety of the state require any coercion in religious belief. Just as scores of mercantile corporations compete peaceably within a single state, so may scores of religions exist side by side. On religious freedom there should be no limitations; the same privilege should be granted to the elect and to the heathen:

It is the will and command of God, that..a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all Nations and Countries; and they are only to be fought against with...the sword of God's spirit, the Word of God.

In his advocacy of complete freedom in relition, Williams was generations ahead of his time. A hundred and forty years were yet to elapse before this principle completed its conquest of American thought.

Williams's style, in striking contrast with the originality of this thought, is curiously antique. His writing suffers form the seventeenth-century fondness for cumbersome, involved sentences, for far-fetched similes, and for laborious puns. It suffers also from the early Protestant habit of supporting all arguments by references to the letter, rather than to the spirit, of the Bible. But the quaintness of Williams's manner should not blind us to the importance of the issues which he discussed. What is the proper relation of church and state? Within the state, who is sovereign, and what are the proper functions of sovereignty?--these are the questions he tried to answer. They are questions of permanent importance, and the answers which Puritan nonconformity returned to them have deeply influenced American civilization. In the long perspective of three centuries, the unorthodox Puritans appear no less essential than the orthodox to the forming of American culture, and by consequence of American literature.

THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

[See also the WWW Research Links]

A too-simple, but convenient summary of Calvinist theology is contained in the famous Five Points which are given below:
The Five Points

1. TOTAL DEPRAVITY. This asserts the sinfulness of man through the fall of Adam, and the utter inability of man to work out his own salvation. God is all; man is nothing, and is the source of all evil. God meant all things to be in harmony; man, by his sinful nature, creates disharmony, and deserves nothing but to be cast away.

2. UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION. God, under no obligation to save anyone, saves or "elects" whom he will, with no reference to faith or good works. Since all things are present in the mind of God ag once, He knows beforehand who will be saved; and thus election or reprobation is predestined. but no man can share in this foreknowledge, and all must assent to the Divine Will.

3. LIMITED ATONEMENT. Christ did not die for all, but only for those who are to be saved. If he had not died on the cross, none could be saved; and thus we have another evidence of God's love toward mankind.

4. IRRESISTIBLE GRACE. God's grace is freely given, and can neither be earned nor refused. Grace is defined as the saving and transfiguring power of God, offering newness of life, forgiveness of sins, the power to resist temptation, and a wonderful peace of mind and heart. It is Augustine's concept of the "restless soul having found rest in God," and is akin to Luther's insistence on a sense of spiritual union with Christ as the prime requisite to salvation.

5. PERSEVERANCE OF THE SAINTS. Those whom God has chosen have thenceforth full power to do the will of God, and to live uprightly to the end. It is the logical and necessary conclusion to the absolute Sovereignty of God. If man could later reject the gift of Grace having once felt its power in his life, he would be asserting his power over that of God, and in Calvinism this is impossible.

Commentary

Thus, we see the cardinal points of Calvin's theology. God is all-powerful. His hand is ever at work in the world, and He is the First Cause of everything that happens in the world. His true nature is incomprehensible to man, and yet he left many clues and hints of his own holy world, the Bible, and it is the duty of man to search the Old and New Testaments for a more exact knowledge of the will of God toward man, as interpreted by competent theologians. Daily life is to be lived in strict conformity to the rules and regulations to be found in the Bible, and all that man does, even to the conduct of routine business affairs, is to be done with the utmost intensity and zeal to the greater glory of God.

Ann Bradstreet (1612-1672), a Puritan Poetess. The works of Smith, Bradford, Winthrop, and Williams were not, in their original intent, literary. These men wrote for purposes of history or controversy, and their place in literature is not due to any conscious
literary effort on their part, but to their vital positions as representatives of the earliest colonial life and thought. But the poetry of Anne Bradstreet was produced for its own sake, as literature. Apparently it was written solely because the author delighted in poetic creation, and not because she expected from it either money or fame. The mother in a pioneer household, with eight children under her care, she had little leisure for cultivating the graces of art.

Anne Bradstreet's passion for literary creation was forced, moreover, to operate within the restraints and inhibitions of Puritanism. Her Puritan outlook governed even her reading and choice of literary models. The dramatists, Shakespeare, Johnson, and Fletcher, were to her forbidden; even the works of Chaucer were unknown. For poetic models she turned to the English metaphysical school, including Herbert and Quarles; to Sylvester's translation from the French Protestant poet Du Bartas; and, more fortunately, to Edmund Spenser. From Raleigh's History of the World and North's translation of Plutarch's Lives she got an extensive, though imperfectly assimilated, knowledge of history. Shaped by these models, Mrs. Bradstreet's mind was that of a belated Elizabethan Puritan.

A collection of Mrs. Bradstreet's poems was published in England in 1650 by her brother-in-law. The pretentious title, for which he is responsible is a virtual summary of the book: THE TENTH MUSE Lately sprung up in America. Several Poems, compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, full of delight. Wherein especially is contained a complete discourse and description of the Four Elements, Constitutions, Ages of Man, Seasons of the Year. Together with an Exact Epitome of the Four Monarchies viz. The Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman. Also a Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning the late troubles. With divers other pleasant and serious Poems. By a Gentlewoman in those parts. The first poem in this collection describes a contention among the four primary elements--fire, earth, water, and air--as to which should be chief. The "Constitutions" is a treatment of the four temperaments of mankind--choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic, and sanguine--as they were conceived by medieval and Renaissance physiology. The meaning of the four "Ages of Man" and "Seasons of the Year" is of course obvious. The "Four Monarchies," the longest division of the book, is a rhymed chronicle of ancient history based on Raleigh's History of the World.

Such material appears unsuited to poetry; yet Mrs. Bradstreet's poetic treatment of prosaic subjects has many Elizabethan parallels, and is characteristic of that youthful age when experience has not yet sharply delimited the fields of poetry and prose. In her numerous classical allusions, Mrs. Bradstreet is likewise Elizabethan; the poetic names of ancient mythology--Mars, Thesis, Neptune, Philomel--flow easily from her pen as from that of Spenser. Her literary sophistication produces better art, however, than when she goes beyond the bookishness of much of The Tenth Muse and speaks her own feelings directly and plainly. In a few domestic poems she celebrates unpretentiously the deep affections of the patriarchal Puritan household; and in "Contemplations" (1678), a melange of descriptions and discursive musings, her style has gained in felicity and in sensuous response to Nature. Occasionally she strikes off lines not unworthy of Spenser himself:

O Time, the fatal wrack of mortal things,
That draws oblivion's curtain over kings!
Their sumptuous monuments men know them not,
Their names without a record are forgot....
But he whose name is graved in the white stone
Shall last and shine when all of these are gone.

III. The Later Puritans: The Drift Toward Secularization

Edward Taylor (1642-1729). The poetry of Anne Bradstreet, while valuable in its own right, is still more valuable in its illustration of the Puritan's awareness of Renaissance culture, and especially of their response to a literary style and tradition more fully realized in the poetry of Spenser and Milton. Another tradition--that of the English "metaphysical" poets, including John Donne--helped shape the writings of a more ingenious if not more imaginative poet, the village minister Edward Taylor. Because their author forbade publication, these poems were not generally known until the nineteen-thirty decade, when, fortunately, and audience had already been prepared for them by a revival of interest in the metaphysical style. That style, much more than that of Milton or Spenser, is formed upon a special type of language art--upon metaphor, simile, and paradox, upon unexpected plays on words, and upon those ingenious comparisons the elizabethans called "conceits."

In the poems of Edward Taylor, the metaphysical style is clothed rather curiously upon the theme of deep, intense religious devotion. His is the poetry of worship, an expression of the feelings of religious wonder, of aspiration of surrender to the divine will, or a mystical sense of communion with God. His expression is often richly sensuous; it is quite as often uneven and strained, inasmuch as he cannot always bring to bear that powerful, fusing imagination without which the metaphysical style lapses into mere perversity. Both his strength and his weakness appear in such lines as those on the wonder of the Creation:

Upon what base was fixed the lath wherein
He turned this globe and regaled it so trim?...
Who laced and filleted the earth so fine
With rivers like green ribbons maragdine?

Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705). In spite of occasional protests, the orthodox leaders maintained their sway in Massachusetts till the close of the seventeenth century. With the passing of the immigrant generation, however, the leadership devolved upon lesser men. The immense vitality of the age of Bradford and Winthrop disappeared or was directed toward trivial or petty objects. this change was in part the natural result of a narrow, provincial environment, in part the result of the suppression of the fresh and challenging criticism. To the crabbedness of this era between 1650 and 1700 is owning much of the odium that has attached itself to the Puritan tradition. The most popular and representative poet of this half-century was Michael Wigglesworth, whose Day of Doom (1662) was probably read by a larger proportion of New England's people than any other poem before or since.

The Day of doom is a versification of that Puritan damnatory theology which had descended from the teachings of John Calvin. God, Calvin maintains, is an absolute sovereign, responsible for the evil in his universe as well as for the good. Yet he punishes the evil with inconceivable severity. The human race, through Adam's choice
in the Garden of Eden, has submitted itself to evil. Inheriting their evil nature from Adam, men are justly condemned to torment. Solely out of his free grace, however, God has elected, or chosen, a few men to an undeserved salvation. The object of this scheme of punishment and reward is the enhancing of God's glory. God's mercy is to be shown in the salvation of the elect, his justice in the punishment meted out to all others. This terrible theology, supported as it was by an apparently infallible logic and justified by a literalist interpretation of isolated Bible texts, captured the British mind. It wielded a strong influence on the Anglican and Presbyterian creeds, and it proved even more congenial to the American Puritans.

To express the horrors of the Calvinistic conception of the final judgment, Wigglesworth chose a verse form which, though grotesquely inappropriate to his theme, was admirable adapted to his provincial readers. This form is the old septenary ballad meter with interlinear rhyme, a jigging measure that flows with the rattling facility of a Mother Goose jingle. Wigglesworth's poem opens with a picture of the unsuspecting world peacefully sleeping in carnal satisfaction. Suddenly the last trump is blown, the fleeing mortals are sought out by the angels, and the elect are immediately separated from the damned. Various classes of damned are then brought before the Almighty--the hypocrites, the hardened reprobates, the heathen, and the infants. All plead their case, and all in turn are refuted by Jehovah, who unites the functions of prosecuting attorney and judge. Finally the damned are carried off to Hell, while the saints, rejoicing in the just punishment meted out by their god, are received into the undeserved joys of Paradise. From beginning to end the narrative is supported by a battery of Scripture references.

The immense popularity of this frightful poem was due in part to its expression of "sound" doctrine on a subject of fundamental importance to its Puritan readers. It was due also to the fact that the jingling meter concealed the crude horror of Wigglesworth's conceptions, and that he failed to realize with any imaginative power, the real terrors of his Hell. The argumentative passages aside, the poem sticks in one's memory as a picturesque but somewhat meaningless spectacle, a panorama of the rending of elements the beauties of Paradise, and the lurid flames of torment. But Wigglesworth's skill in panoramic descriptions and rhythmic jingles does not atone for the narrowness of his mind and the barrenness of his culture. His thought patrolled only the narrow beat of Calvinistic Puritanism, never venturing without. Upon him, the broad secular culture of the Renaissance was lost. Good poetry is seldom made from the scant materials of a single creed; and Wigglesworth's dubious literary fame is based, not upon artistic merit, but upon his doggerel facility in expressing a historically important, though unlovely, theology.

The Mathers and the Decline of the Theocracy. The leading champions of Puritan orthodoxy at the close of the seventeenth century were father and son: Increase Mather (1639-1723) and Cotton Mather (1663-1728). The career of the Mathers was shaped by their efforts to uphold the old-fashioned theocracy at a time when it was manifestly doomed. The colony was rapidly changing from a simple agrarian social order to a complex commercial one. Worldly prosperity, founded on the fisheries, the carrying trade, and commerce in rum and slaves, was beginning to distract men's attention from an over absorption in theology. The new royal charter, moreover, struck at the power of the ministry by replacing the religious with a property qualification for suffrage. And beneath these external causes of the Puritan decline lay the fact that the theocracy, by rigorously suppressing criticism and opposing change, had estopped itself from growth. It had failed to change with a changing world, and was rapidly becoming an anachronism. to save the crumbling power of the ministry, no one labored harder than the vigorous Increase Mather. He thundered from the pulpit, he discussed in the council chamber, he called a reforming synod to re-purify the backslidden churches, and he waged literal war with the demons that had been let loose in Salem. His efforts failed, and in the crux of the struggle in 1701, he was forced to resign from the presidency of Harvard College.

In upholding the theocracy, the Mathers made themselves the principal supporters of the Puritan belief in special providences. Increase Mather in his Brief History of the War with the Indians in New England (1676), maintains that the Indian wars were sent on New England as a divine punishment for negligence of duty. In the better-known Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (1684), he recounts many incidents designed to show how the wicked are punished, and the good chastised or rewarded, by immediate personal acts of God. In the very act of swearing, Mather tells us, a certain man was struck dead by Jehovah. Another man, while drunk, fell into a fire and was fatally burned, obviously by divine guidance. In the same work Mather argues the literal, personal presence of demons in the world. "The Lord doth, for wise and holy ends, sometimes lengthen the chain the infernal lions are bound fast in." Moved by this absolute literal belief in demonology, the Mathers naturally became involved in the Salem witchcraft episode; and though they were more lenient than were some of their colleagues, they suffered disfavor when sentiment turned against the witchcraft trials.

Both Increase and Cotton Mather were learned men; both were prolific writers, Increase having produced a hundred and fifty separate works and Cotton over four hundred and fifty. Of Cotton Mather's works the book most fully representative of the author's mind is the Magnalia Christi Americana or Ecclesiastical History of New England (1702). The seven books of this literary leviathan are devoted to bolstering the prestige of the declining theocracy by relating its former glories. To achieve this end, Mather relates in succession the founding of the colonies, the lives of the governors, the lives of forty ministers, the history of Harvard College, the history of the churches proper, the special providences of God in New England, and the Indian wars. As history the work is injured by the author's credulity and his partisanship for the orthodoxy, but it preserves much material that might otherwise have perished. As literature it is at least a sincere, earnest piece of writing, done for an object to which Mather was passionately devoted. It is memorable also as the last great effort of that type of Puritan leadership which was at once political and religious, and which, though narrow and austere, had done its work with immense energy.

The chief obstacle to a present-day reading of Cotton Mather is his style. Just as Mather himself was egotistic and pedantic, so his style is pompous and overelaborate, full of recondite allusions supplied by his laborious readings, and distorted by a heavy handed and misdirected emphasis. when, for instance, he wishes to say that the discover of America may have been foretold in Scripture, and that he proposes to recount that discovery, the result is as follows:

It is the opinion of some, though 'tis but an Opinion, and but of some Learned Men. That when the Sacred Oracles of Heaven assure us, The Things under the Earth are some of those, whose Knees are to bow in the Name of Jesus, by those Things are meant the Inhabitants of America, who are Antipodes to those of the other Hemisphere. I would not Quote any Words of Lactantius, tho' there are some to Countenance this Interpretation, because of their being so Ungeographical: Nor would I go to strengthen the Interpretation by reciting the Words of the Indians to the first White Invaders of their Territories, We hear you are come from under the World, to take our World from us. But granting the uncertainty of such an Exposition, I shall yet give the Church of God a certain Account of those Things, which in America have been Believing and Adoring the glorious Name of Jesus; and of that country in America, where those Things have been attended with Circumstances most remarkable.

Cotton Mather's life was fulfilled in opposition to , rather than in conformity with, the main drift of his times. Although he was a pioneer in accepting certain scientific theories usually associated with deism, his energies were given, in overwhelming proportion, to the support of a declining way of life. On him had devolved the support of a theocracy whose foundation in religious qualification for suffrage had been hewn away. Within his nature remained many of the superstitions which the good sense of the eighteenth century was about to cast aside. Given his heritage, he inevitably wrote into his voluminous pages the values of the theocratic past rather than those of the liberal and secular future.

Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) Puritan Bourgeois. The social and economic changes which were transforming Massachusetts are unconsciously portrayed in the Diary of Samuel Sewall, businessman who repented of the Salem witchcraft trials, or as an early opponent of slavery, or as the belated wooer of Madam Winthrop but the real significance of his Diary lies in none of these things. Sewall's record covering as it does more than half a century from 1673-1729 (Except for eight years, 1677-1685) is chiefly valuable for the intimate view it affords of the humdrum daily life of Boston and of the bourgeois mind of its author. Sewall is the American counterpart of the English Samuel Pepys. Both diarists reveal a society emerging from the world of the Renaissance and Reformation into that of the eighteenth century--a society in which the small bourgeois, the middle class capitalist, was to become increasingly important. Sewall, as revealed by his Diary, was typically bourgeois in his concern for the minor comforts and luxuries for the accumulation of a safe, if moderate, fortune. Possessed of a native sense of justice, and tempered by much kindliness of soul, he was undoubtedly a good man, but he lacked the force of the earlier Puritans. In him, Puritanism had become conventional and worldly.

Correspondingly, the Boston society photographed in Sewall's pages with such minute unconscious fidelity impresses one as narrow, petty, and provincial. The largeness, the vigor, the intellectual drive of the age of Winthrop and Williams is gone; the once powerful current has become a stagnant wayside pool. While Europe was progressing into the eighteenth century, provincial Boston divided its attention between tradesmanship and the reassertion of a declining theology. When the literary impulse of Boston Puritanism expired in the fantastic periods of Cotton Mather, nothing was at hand to replace it; and the leadership of American letters passed to other regions.

A SUMMARY:
CHARACTERISTICS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE DURING THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The American writings of the seventeenth century possess as a whole no great artistic merit. They are valuable chiefly as a study in origins and as a complex mirror of early American experience. The world which they reflect is that of the Renaissance and Reformation, of Raleigh and Calvin and Cromwell, modified by its contact with the American wilderness. With the Renaissance vogue of travel literature the writings of Smith are intimately connected; to Renaissance poetic models the poetry of Anne Bradstreet owes at least its form and probably its existence. The main current of early American literature, however, originated in the Puritan branch of the Reformation. With unconcsious faithfulness this Puritan literature reflects the Puritan mind: its rigid Calvinism, its morbid consciousness of sin, its superstition, its austerity, its stoical bravery, its vein tenderness, its preference of morality to beauty, its contradictory tendencies toward orthodoxy and nonconformity. Puritan literature is antique in manner and often in matter; yet it treats profoundly a few subjects of universal and permanent importance, such as the relation between church and state, and the source and functions of governmental sovereignty. And, what is more important, the Puritan tradition established itself as one of the major influences on our nation. For better or for worse, it has modified the whole development of our life and literature, and its influence is still discernible in twentieth-century America.