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CHAPTER II

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

SUGGESTED READINGS

WILLIAM BRADFORD. Of Plimoth Plantation. 1628.

BOYNTON, P. H. Milestones in American Literature, pp. 3-8. Ginn and Company.

CAIRNS, W. B. Early American Writers, pp. 27-44. The Macmillan Company.

CALHOUN, M. E., and MACALARNEY, E. L. Readings from American Literature, pp. 8-14. Ginn and Company.

THOMAS MORTON. The New English Canaan, Book III. 1637.

BOYNTON. Milestones, pp. 9-13.

CAIRNS. Early Writers, pp. 60–72.

In reading these two men notice the contrasting and hostile points of view. See if you get the impression that all the truth is on one side. Read Hawthorne's "Maypole of Merry Mount," in "Twice-Told Tales" (written two centuries later), and decide how far you might have sympathized with Morton's attitude toward the Puritans.

What are the differences, suggested by Thomas Morton, between the way in which the writer of history must employ facts and the way in which the writer of fiction may use them? In what respect are their duties alike? Read the preface to Percy Mackaye's "Washington" for the interview about this between the spirit of the Theater and the Inhibitors.

NATHANIEL WARD. The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America. 1647. BOYNTON. Milestones, pp. 14-17.

CAIRNS. Early Writers, pp. 112-124.

CALHOUN and MACALARNEY. Readings, pp. 28-33.

Notice whether there is any natural connection between Ward's hostility to toleration, his contempt for fashionable dress, and his attitude toward the Irish.

ROGER WILLIAMS.

Although Roger Williams is mentioned in this chapter as an influential writer in his day, no readings are assigned, because the modern schoolpupil would find them too laboriously dull.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

The earliest colonial literature

The scarcity of writings in the Royalist colonies
The Puritan belief in the "ultimate truth"

William Bradford, a Puritan historian
Thomas Morton, a satirist of Puritanism
Nathaniel Ward, a champion of Puritanism
Roger Williams, a dissenter from Puritanism

The earliest colonial literature. In dealing with the earliest expressions of any literature wise historians and critics are always very charitable. Rough, uncouth, fragmentary pieces are taken into account, because they serve as bridges to the remoter past. Harsh critics of American colonial literature seem to forget this practice when they rule out of court everything produced in this country before the days of Irving and Cooper. A great deal of the early writing should, of course, be used only as source material for the historian; but some of it has the same claim to attention as the old chronicles, plays, and ballads in English literary history. It deserves study if it portrays, or criticizes, or even unconsciously reflects, the life and thought of the times, and it is properly regarded as American if in form or content or point of view it clearly belongs to this side of the Atlantic.

The scarcity of writings in the Royalist colonies. The nature of settlement and the neglect of popular education in the South resulted in so little authorship in the colonial times that in any brief survey the Southern writers hardly come into view before the nineteenth century. Their narratives and descriptions of colonial life, as long as they wrote them at all, were quite like most of the earliest Northern writings of the sort.

The one outstanding difference is that they did not make so much of religion and the belief in a personal Providence as the Puritans did. Thus, when John Smith at Jamestown was content with the general phrase "it pleased God," Anthony Thacher, saved from shipwreck in Boston Harbor, wrote devoutly, "the Lord directed my toes into a crevice in the rock"; and where Smith's companions hoped for the general blessing of God, Thacher's fellow worshipers were perfectly certain that every step they took was foreordained by the Most High, so that even their apparent misfortunes were his punishments for misconduct.

The Puritan belief in the "ultimate truth." In all the great mass of Puritan writings in the first century of residence in America one definite current appears, and that is the quiet but irresistible current of change in human thought. The Puritans had made the profound but constantly repeated mistake of assuming that after thousands of years of groping by mankind they alone had at last discovered the "ultimate truth," and that for the rest of time men need do nothing but follow the precepts that God had revealed to them about life here and life hereafter. They were, in their own serious way, happy in their confident possession of truth1 and sternly resolved to bestow it, or, if necessary, impose it, on all whom they could control. Their failure was recorded with their earliest attempts, and it came, not because of their particular weakness or the strength of their particular adversaries, but because they were trying to obstruct the progress of human thought, which is as irresistible as any other force of nature. They might as well have entered into an argument with gravitation or the sunrise. The fact is, if one stop to think but a moment, that truth naturally is unchanging,

1 A truth is a general statement about mankind and man's surroundings that may be applied to any number of separate cases. In distinction from this, a fact is a particular statement about one case or one set of cases. Thus it is a truth that a whole is equal to the sum of its parts. It may be a fact about a given whole-a measured bushel, for instance- that it is made up of three lots of seven, eleven, and fourteen quarts.

but that man's understanding of the truth changes as the progress of science and the alterations in social and industrial and international life create new problems and new solutions. Yet the most interesting and the best-written pieces of seventeenthcentury New England literature all reveal the Puritans' vain effort to hold back the steadily rising tide of human thought.

William Bradford, a Puritan historian (1590-1657). The Puritanism against which this rising tide of dissent crept in

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was admirably embodied in William Bradford, the Mayflower Pilgrim, who was more than thirty times governor of his colony and the author of a history of Plymouth Plantation. He was a brave, sober, devout leader and stanchly loyal to his religious sect. His history and his detailed journal of the first year in America are clearly and sometimes finely written and give ample proof of his stalwart character-"fervent in spirit, serving the Lord"; and they are free from the personal narrowness which is often mistakenly charged against all Puritans. His account, for example, of the reasons for the Pilgrims' departure from Leyden tells of the hardships they had endured there, the oncoming of old age, the effects on the children of living among

foreigners, and, lastly, the great hope they cherished of advancing the Church of Christ in some remote part of the world. It recounts many of the objections advanced against attempting settlement in America and concludes:

It was answered, that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages. It was granted the dangers were great, but not desperate; the difficulties were many, but not invincible. For though there were many of them likely, yet they were not certain; it might be sundry of the things feared might never befall; others, by provident care and the use of good means, might in a great measure be prevented; and all of them, through the help of God, by fortitude and patience, might either be borne or overcome. True it was, that such attempts were not to be made and undertaken without good ground and reason; not rashly or lightly, as many have done for curiosity or hope of gain, etc. But their condition was not ordinary; their ends were good and honorable; their calling lawful and urgent; and therefore they might expect the blessing of God in their proceeding. Yea, though they should lose their lives in this action, yet might they have comfort in the same, and their endeavors would be honorable.

Unhappily this heroic trait of Puritanism was coupled with a desperate religious harshness which the world is even yet slow to forgive.

Thomas Morton, a satirist of Puritanism (1590?-1646). One of the earliest local dissenters was Thomas Morton, author of the "New English Canaan," published in Amsterdam in 1637. It is a half-pathetic fact that this should stand out today as the most striking thing written in its decade in America, for the third book, which is quite the best of it, is a biting satire1 on the Puritans in Massachusetts. Morton, it is needless to say, was not a Puritan himself. He was a restless, dishonest, unscrupulous gentleman-adventurer from London, who gave the

1 A satire is a kind of composition, in prose or verse, in which vice, folly, insincerity, inefficiency, stupidity, or other defects are held up to ridicule.

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