Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
relished his ample store of old-fashioned prejudices, cherished them
carefully, and prided himself on the wit with which he set them forth.
If he was not the repository of all political wisdom that he believed
himself to be, he was at least no demagogue, and in honoring him the
Boston of the year 1800 was but painting its own portrait. It would be
ungracious, perhaps, to add that Fisher Ames and Boston Federalism,
defeated in their cherished projects, were both suffering from an
extraordinarily aggravated case of the political spleen.
III • Robert Treat Paine, Jr. • Wit
Young Tom Paine, who took his brother’s and his father’s name--partly
because a certain other Tom Paine had achieved a fame that Boston did
not regard as enviable--shared with Fisher Ames the literary renown
of the New England capital, a renown so great that Boston paid him
quite astonishing sums for such couplets as his indolence suffered him
to turn off. The popularity of his wares was a notable instance of
the working of the law of supply and demand. The patriotism of Boston
preferred domestic to imported goods, and he offered his verses to a
public not very critical of quality. Boston had never had a poet of her
own, while Connecticut with her Hartford Wits was the envy of all New
England. Certain poetesses to be sure, had tried with “hallowed hands”
to “attune Columbia’s lyre”--to quote Paine’s eulogy of Mrs. Sarah
Wentworth Morton, “blest Philenia, noblest of the choir” (_Works_,
“Menander to Philenia,” p. 129)--but their sentimentality was a bit
cloying, and when genius appeared in the person of a Harvard graduate,
graced with wit and adorned with all the learning of the schools,
Boston was quick to acclaim him as her own.
The young man thus seized upon, and as it were raped by fame, was
the last of the eighteenth-century wits, the most dashing product of
a generation that patched its verse with tags of the classics and
called it lisping in numbers. In temper and manners he belonged wholly
to the tie-wig school that swaggered till the War of 1812 and then
became obsolete overnight. As a young man about town he displayed
the latest London clothes and set himself up as the very glass of
fashion. Although he wore his own hair, he clung to smallclothes and
like an honest Federalist refused to adopt Jacobin trousers. He was
indisputably clever and he cultivated a pretty wit as assiduously
as any Augustan. He talked in epigrams, and a convivial evening--of
which he was quite too fond for his own good--was a failure that did
not produce a _bon mot_ to run through the town. His biographer has
preserved a number of such for the amusement of posterity, and one
at least deserves to be remembered by our younger critics. When the
prohibition against the theater was repealed in 1793, he remarked, “The
Vandal spirit of puritanism is prostrate in New-England.” In cleaving
to wit and abandoning Puritanism, Paine broke with sober Boston
convention, and soon all respectable folk began to shake their heads.
A thriftless fellow, he played with the devil openly in the eyes of
all Boston. He drank too much, he gambled, he haunted the theater and
was a favorite of the greenroom, he became the first dramatic critic
born and bred in New England, and when he married the daughter of an
English actor, his father disowned him. Quite naturally he came to
poverty, dissipated his strength, suffered many a humiliation, and died
at the age of thirty-seven, leaving his widow and young children to be
provided for by a public benefit at his beloved Federal Street theater.
Little of his wit, unfortunately, found its way into his verse, which,
modeled ostensibly on Dryden and Pope, lacks their vigorous common
sense, and laboring to be sublime succeeds in being heavy. His couplets
swell sonorously, but his thought does not keep pace with his rhetoric.
He follows his recipe carefully; adjectives duly support the nouns;
the caesuras are justly spaced and the balance of the parts is as nice
as if weighed in an apothecary’s scales. He seasons the whole with
the staples of personification and poetic diction; everything has
been provided for, and yet the cake is fallen that he takes from the
oven. Something is lacking to lighten the sodden mass. A contemporary
critic, viewing the finished product, expressed his judgment thus:
Of Mr. Paine, as an author, we cannot speak in terms of unmingled
praise. His verse, indeed, seldom loiters into prose; but it
must be confessed, that his prose is here and there “tricked and
frounced, till it outmantles all the pride of verse.” His numbers
are, perhaps, never feeble or faultering, but a wild and frolic
imagination, occasionally, wantons through his periods, and
sometimes displays itself in contemning the chaster elegancies,
and sometimes in neglecting the severer decencies of thought and
diction. (_Works_, Introduction, p. lxxviii.)
It is certainly a partial eye that discovers a wild and frolic
imagination in these lumbering imitations of Pope, or in the occasional
excursions into the languorous fields of Della Cruscan sentiment.
When Paine ceases to be a wit he becomes an offense. To his admiring
contemporaries his poetry seemed to be pure metal, but to later
generations it is only plate, with the brass showing through the worn
spots. _The Ruling Passion_, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa
Society in 1797, is perhaps the first poem of Paine’s that is much more
than vacuous and turgid rhetoric; and this is redeemed, in spite of
liberal helpings from Pope, by a certain vivacity of satire, phrased
with Augustan smartness. Such couplets as these still preserve a jaunty
literary swagger for later ears; how they tickled the more susceptible
ears of our grandfathers must be imagined:
Where you send genius, send a fortune too;
Dunces by instinct thrive, as oysters woo!
For ne’er were veins of ore by chymist found,
Except, like Hebrew roots, in barren ground!
Paine early grew old, and before he had reached his thirties his mind
had taken a rigid conservative bent. His affections were fixed upon a
past that was visibly falling into decay, and its ways were endeared
to him in the measure that they decayed. It was a matter of personal
pride with him to embody in his own manners the aristocratic bearing of
pre-Revolutionary times.
Mr. Paine [says his biographer] attached great consequence to
_manners_.... He was modelled upon the _old school_. Without being
familiar, he was easy among friends, and courtly to strangers.
In colloquial discussions, he rigidly adhered to the law of
politeness; and in mixed society, he neither courted the _high_,
nor avoided the _low_.... He frequently deplored a supposed decay
of _manners_. With concern, he used to inquire “_In manners,
where is the successor of Gen. Knox to be found?_” It was with
him a constant topick of complaint, that “_The old, genteel, town
families, had been elbowed out of house and home, by newcomers_;”
that “_instead of the polished manners of a city, we should soon
exhibit that growth of gentility, which is produced by ingrafting
dollars upon village habits and low employments_.” (_Works_,
Introduction, p. lxix.)
Affecting an aristocratic bearing, Paine was as complete a Tory as
the republican environment permitted. If he despised the new, pushing
middle class that had risen since the Revolution, he held in contempt
the numerous company of those he dubbed the yokel, the peasant, the
hind, or the plow-tail. Under the circumstances the best that he
could do politically was to turn Federalist, and he embraced the
principles of Fisher Ames with genteel conviction. “In politics,”
says his biographer, “Mr. Paine was a disciple of the old federal
school. He understood the constitution, as Washington administered,
and as Hamilton had expounded it” (_ibid._, p. lxxvii). During his
undergraduate days he had dabbled in French revolutionary philosophy,
and “the fanatic Atheism of France, decorated in all the meretricious
charms of eloquence and philosophy, took a transient possession of his
mind” (_ibid._, p. lxxviii). At graduation in 1792, he read a poem
entitled _The Nature and Progress of Liberty_, in which he eulogized
“liberal thought,” proposed to follow “Reason,” declared that “the
rights of man” are a gift from heaven, proffered the hand of fellowship
to France--
May struggling France her ancient freedom gain,
May Europe’s sword oppose her rights in vain--
and launched a devastating couplet at the great English opponent of the
Revolution--
The fame of Burke, in dark oblivion rust,
His pen a meteor--and his page the dust.
Three years later, on proceeding Master of Arts, he presented a poem in
very different vein. Three years were a generation in those stirring
times, and by 1795 the penetrating vision of this genius of twenty-two
had discovered the atheist poison in the cup of French democracy. _The
Invention of Letters_ rises to a climax in a satirical elaboration
of a line from the poem of 1792--“Licentious morals breed disease of
state.” Having learned his lesson from Fisher Ames, the sapient young
Federalist announces that democracy is the mother of faction, and
faction leads on to anarchy. In this poem for the first time Paine’s
wit runs freely, and certain lines are as jaunty as he ever penned.
For place or power, while demagogues contend,
Whirled in their vortex, sinks each humbler friend.
See Crispin quit his stall, in Faction’s cause,
To cobble government, and soal the laws!
See Frisseur scent his dust, his razor set,
To shave the treaty, or to puff Genet!
In doubtful mood, see Mulciber debate,
To mend a horse-shoe, or to weld the state!
The whip’s bold knight, in barn, his truck is laid,
To spout in favour of the carrying trade!
While Staytape runs, from hissing goose, too hot,
To measure Congress for another coat;
And still, by rule of shop, intent on pelf,
Eyes the spare cloth, to cabbage for himself!
Envy, that fiend, who haunts the great and good,
Not Cato shunned, nor Hercules subdued.
On Fame’s wide field, where’er a covert lies,
The rustling serpent to the thicket flies;
The foe of Glory, Merit is her prey;
The dunce she leaves, to plod his drowsy way.
Of birth amphibious, and of Protean skill,
This green-eyed monster changes shape at will;
Like snakes of smaller breed, she sheds her skin;
Strips off the serpent, and turns--Jacobin.
In view of the fact that Governor Samuel Adams, chief of the New
England Jacobins, was to occupy the stage, President Willard had
diplomatically struck from the manuscript the ten lines last quoted;
but Paine had the audacity to re-insert them in speaking, and the
tumultuous applause was sufficient proof that it was not from a Harvard
audience that Sam Adams got the votes that annually returned him
governor.
Verse imposed some slight restraint on Paine’s rhetoric, but in prose
when he was in full career--as in the grotesque eulogy of Washington
which stirred the patriotism of Boston Federalists--the reins are
on the neck of his eloquence, and he takes all barriers with fiery
abandon. Fact troubles his wild and frolic imagination not at all, but
like any plebeian demagogue--whose factional appeals he so furiously
condemned--he blew the bellows of Federalist partisanship with
extraordinary vigor, stoking his fire with rumor and misrepresentation
and party spleen. No slander was too gross, no lie too palpable to
serve his end. He baited the democrats quite shamelessly, and aroused
the mob of Boston gentlemen like a true Tory. One of his political
orations has been preserved by his editor in the collected edition of
his works, for the enlightenment of posterity--an oration delivered