Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of his early friend. Sprung from plain stock--whether English or
Dutch his son remained in doubt, although inclining to believe the
former--and cradled in the fierce partisanship of the Revolutionary
struggle, he never abandoned his inherited liberalism or found his
love of country growing less. To the end of his life he remained a
primitive American of an earlier generation, somewhat puzzled by the
ways of another age that speculated in prosperity by running in debt,
and measured a man’s wealth by the amount he owed. His father had been
an active Whig in a Tory neighborhood who did not stint his service
to the Revolutionary cause. He was a member of the local Committee of
Safety, and acted as State Commissary to the Revolutionary forces, a
post which in the end brought him to ruin. In the dark days of the
struggle he pledged his private credit for supplies, and was never
reimbursed by a negligent commonwealth. The outcome was financial
disaster. The father was imprisoned for debt and his courage broken,
and the family long suffered from want. “We were not only poor,” the
son wrote later, “but steeped in poverty.” But there was excellent
stuff in the awkward, dreamy country boy. He was “built of stubborn
oak,” he remarked whimsically, “seasoned in the school of poverty,
like an old chimney-piece in a log cabin.” When at the age of nineteen
he was suddenly plunged into the world of New York City, he was shy,
uncouth, self-educated, and felt himself an alien in Wall Street and
Broadway. For the Federalist upper class he seems to have felt the
instinctive hostility of the outsider; but through the agency of the
Irvings--an elder sister having married William Irving--he was brought
into the companionship of a group of clever young men, and under the
stimulus of high talk and exuberant pranks, the latent idealism of his
nature expanded freely. This was his university, and while it left
something to be desired in the way of discipline, suffering too free
a rein to his discursive fancy, it quickened his native wit, awakened
his creative imagination, and put him to school to the pleasant craft
of writing. The _Salmagundi Papers_ were the first fruits of the
literary apprenticeship of the group, and although Irving has come to
receive the chief credit for them, the wit of Paulding seems quite as
sprightly, and his gayety as fresh.
That his later career in letters was less notable resulted in part from
the fact that he was an inveterate rambler by nature, and partly from
the fact that writing with him was occasional, a pleasant relief from
humdrum duties, and he did not choose to lay a curb on his vagrant
ways. In letters as in life he was always discursive, forgetful of his
objective in his delight at the beauty of the countryside, loading
his pages down with nature descriptions and clogging the action
of his tales with somewhat tedious homilies. After forty years of
writing he remained still an amateur, incapable of pruning the wilful
tangle of his fancy--an essayist of the leisurely school who ventured
incautiously into the realms of verse and fiction without mastering the
technic of the business. There was perhaps too much of the homespun
in him to permit him to become an artist. The experience of his youth
marked him too deeply, and all his life he remained as conscious a son
of the people as Hamlin Garland was later, delighting to chronicle the
ways of the obscure, somewhat militant in proclaiming the excellence
of homely virtues. Formed in an environment that bred a spontaneous
democracy, he was a confirmed equalitarian, untroubled by the itch to
rise in the world or exploit his fellows. Alone among the Knickerbocker
group, he was a Jeffersonian in the fundamentals of his social creed;
not in the lesser matters of Kentucky Resolutions and the like, but in
his Physiocratic leanings, in his profound distrust of all middle-class
programs and his preference for the simple country ways over the city
economy; and it was this deep-rooted agrarianism that set him against
capitalism and made him a later Jacksonian. In him there spoke out the
authentic New York, not of Broadway merchants or Wall Street bankers,
but of the plain rank and file of the people. Untouched by foreign
travel but widely acquainted with his native America, he was fashioned
out of the wool from the fireside loom and domestic dye-pot.
A writer so consciously and completely American would find abundant
occasion to put his pen to the service of his country at a time when
every English traveler turned critic and on his return home published a
volume of truculent disparagement of ways and things American. For the
most part those volumes were a defense of Toryism by the easy method
of attacking democracy, and they annoyed Paulding beyond measure. He
would not let them go unanswered, and from _The Diverting History
of John Bull and Brother Jonathan_ (1812) to _John Bull in America_
(1825), he published five different replies, varying his attack from
argument to burlesque. Something more than loyalty to his country
seems to have spurred him on. His dislike of England was inveterate,
partly because of the old Revolutionary feud, partly because of later
antagonisms. Almost at the hour of his birth the Paulding family had
been forced to quit their home for fear of the British and Tories who
daily threatened them; and a deep hatred of the British Tory he drew
in with his mother’s milk. To him England was a Tory country, reeking
with social injustice, the home of ancient abuses, and necessarily the
implacable enemy of democratic America. He was convinced that want and
tyranny and subserviency dogged the daily life of the English common
people; and the English Reviews that attacked the ways of democracy
with caustic British superiority, filled his honest republican heart
with wrath, and he jabbed his quill into the tough skin of John Bull
with patriotic vigor. The shame of the burning of the capitol rankled
in the American heart, and Paulding discovered fresh grievances in
remembering that from England had come the banking system and the
“shin-plaster dynasty” that would breed in the new country the evils
of the old if they were not looked to. He was convinced that the mother
country wished ill to her offspring, and he thanked God in successive
volumes that democratic America was not what Tory England was.
For despite the English travelers--Weld, Parkinson, Ashe, Bradbury,
Hall, Trollope, and all the rest of the loquacious tribe--Paulding was
persuaded that America constituted the hope of the future. Here in
this land he believed that men should eventually achieve a measure of
well-being undreamed of in the old world; already the old tyrannies
had been destroyed, the ancient poverty abated. From this stubborn
idealism nothing could turn him aside. It finds expression in an early
poem, and it provides the theme for his last novel. _The Backwoodsman_,
published in 1818, is a rambling and somewhat plethoric idyll of the
West, the hero of which is an archetype of the oppressed and exploited,
who finds a generous asylum in the free land beyond the Alleghenies,
and like Crèvecœur’s Andrew the Hebridean, expands the horizons of
his mind under the beneficent touch of freedom. _The Puritan and His
Daughter_, written over thirty years later, deals with a different
phase of the same general theme. It is a vivid picture of the strife
engendered in America by immigrant families who bring hither their
old-world feuds and animosities, and the curative influence of the
free environment that, in discovering the good rather than the bad in
neighbors, draws together the younger generation despite the jealous
parental authority that would keep them apart. The bigoted fathers make
trouble enough--the fanatical Puritan who fought with Cromwell and the
headstrong Cavalier who defended divine right--wilful men whom even
the common frontier perils cannot reconcile or make tolerant; but they
are powerless to thwart the ways of nature. The son of the Cavalier
discovers an attractive woman in the daughter of the Puritan, and when
love walks in the twilight what matters theology or politics. Youth has
its own notions of divine right; in its creed the dogmas of John Calvin
and Robert Filmer have no place; and if the lovers are more tolerant
than the fathers it only proves that a freer environment will manage
to soften the traditional animosities and beget a kindlier race from
the merging of classes. Such at least is the characteristic thesis
that Paulding elaborates through two volumes of discursive narrative
interspersed with bits of vigorous action.
Of this kindly melting pot Paulding himself was a product. He had
rid himself wholly of all ties that would bind him to Europe. He was
partisan to no cause or party, literary or political, of the old world.
He was content to be American and suffer his native land to bound his
loyalties. In his own literary practice he refused to imitate the
current English fashions and he spoke his mind freely to the American
reading public for its greedy swallowing of cheap imported food. He did
not take kindly to the English romantic writers, and went often out of
his way to have a dig at his two pet aversions, Scott and Byron.[424]
His amusing tale of _Koningsmarke, the Long Finne_, is a good-natured
burlesque of certain romantic mannerisms of the Waverley novels, and
a defense of Cooper’s _Pioneers_ for its homely realism. Paulding’s
dislike of the “blood-pudding” fiction that had come over from England,
and that proved so disastrous to the genius of Gilmore Simms, was
inveterate, and in his whimsical dedication of _The Puritan and His
Daughter_ to the sovereign people he comments on the public taste thus:
I am not ignorant of your preference for high-seasoned dishes
of foreign cookery, most especially blood-puddings, plentifully
spiced and sauced with adultery, seduction, poisoning, stabbing,
suicide, and all other sublime excesses of genius. I am aware also
that Your Majesty, being yourself able to perform impossibilities,
believed nothing impossible. Possessing this clew to Your Majesty’s
royal approbation, I solemnly assure you I have gone as far as I
could to secure it, with a safe conscience. I have laid about me
pretty handsomely, and sprinkled a good number of pages with blood
enough, I hope, to make a pudding. If I have any apology to make
to Your Majesty, it is for permitting some of my people to die a
natural death, a thing so unnatural that it has been banished from
all works of fiction aiming at the least semblance to truth....
But, may it please Your Majesty, I am troubled with weak nerves,
and my great grandfather was a Quaker. I am, therefore, naturally
averse to bloodshed, and have more than once nearly fallen into
convulsions over the pages of Monsieur Alexandre Dumas, whom
I consider a perfect Guillotine among authors. In short, may
it please Your Majesty, I abjure poisoning, or smothering with
charcoal, and confess myself deplorably behind the spirit of this
luminous age, which is as much in advance of all others, as the
forewheel of a wagon is ahead of the hind ones.
In his politics--and as a good American of the times he took his
politics seriously--Paulding found in the popular drift towards
Jacksonian democracy an expression of his deepest convictions. It
was moving in the direction he had long faced, and he went with
it whole-heartedly, enjoyed some of the emoluments of office, and
eventually served as Secretary to the Navy in the cabinet of Van Buren.
With Jackson’s attack on the Bank he must have been in deep sympathy,
for his dislike of the new financial system was of long standing. His
father had suffered heavily from a depreciated Continental currency,