Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
I have, by my provoking Plainness and Freedom, in telling this
_Ahab_ of his wickedness, procured myself to be left out of his
Invitations. I rejoiced in my Liberty from the Temptations, with
which they were encumbred, while they were _eating of his Dainties_
and durst not reprove him. And, considering the Power and Malice of
my Enemies, I thought it proper of me, to be this day Fasting, in
Secret, before the Lord.
Ten years later there is a different story to tell. The minister has
left the opposition bench and gone over to the government. A note in
Sewall’s diary tells the tale:
March, 12. [1718/19] Dr. Cotton Mather prays again [in Council],
Preaches the Lecture from Prov. 29: 18. no Vision. [_Where there is
no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is
he._] The Govr., Lt. Govr., Mr. Dudley, Mr. Belcher press’d hard
that there might be an order of the Govr. and Council to print it.
Col. Tailor, Clark, Davenport, Sewall and others opposed it. For
my part, the Dr. spake so much of his visions of Convulsion and
Mutiny, mentioning our being a dependent Government, and the Danger
of Parliamentary Resentments: that I was afraid the printing of it
might be an Invitation to the Parliament to take away our Charter.
Govr. would have it put to the vote: but when he saw how hardly it
went, caused the Secretary to break off in the midst.[114]
Here is a party alignment that tells its own story, and it needs
no very lively imagination to fill out the meager note and reënact
the little drama. The minister, eager to make overtures of peace,
falls into the Tory note, talks about mob-rule and the sinfulness
of popular unrest, calls upon authority to maintain law and order,
and hints at the expediency of preserving due colonial subservience
in view of possible resentments on the part of certain great men in
England. Sewall, as a “true New-England man,” squirms somewhat under
the implications, but the little group of Tories are loud in praise.
Such a sermon, from so eminent a servant of God, would aid wonderfully
in strengthening the spirit of loyalty to the crown, and it must be
printed and circulated amongst the people. But the opposition proved
too spirited, and the manuscript was not dispatched to the printer, no
doubt to Cotton Mather’s chagrin.
It was easy for so reactionary a nature to slide over into the Tory.
There was not a grain of liberalism in his make-up. His antipathy to
all popular movements was deep-rooted, for he knew no other political
philosophy than that of the obsolete theocracy in which he had grown
up. He was a bourgeois soul who loved respectability and was jealous
of his social position; no fraternizing with the poor and outcast for
him, no profitless excursions into the realms of Utopian justice.
Though he might play to popular prejudices to serve his political ends,
he had scant regard for popular rights. The highest privilege of the
New England people, he believed, was the privilege of being ruled by
the godly. His real attitude towards the plain people is revealed in a
note by his son, that refers to the days following the overturn of the
Andros government:
Upon Discoursing with him of the Affairs he has told me that he
always pressed _Peace_ and _Love_ and _Submission_ unto a legal
Government, tho’ he suffered from some tumultuous People, by doing
so; and upon the whole, has asserted unto me his _Innocency_ and
freedom from all known Iniquity in that time, but declared his
Resolution, from the View he had of the fickle Humors of the
Populace, that he would chuse to be concern’d with them as little
as possible for the future.[115]
As he grew older and the shadow of failure fell across his life,
his bitterness towards a people that had rejected his admonitions
is revealed on many a page of his diary. It was a “silly people,” a
“foolish people,” “insignificant lice”--“The cursed clamour of a people
strangely and fiercely possessed of the Devil”--“My aged father laies
to heart the withdrawal of a vain, proud, foolish people from him in
his age”--“It is the Hour of ... Darkness on this Despicable Town.”
He could not easily forgive those who had wounded his love of power
and lust of adulation, and he was too aloof from the daily life of
men to understand the political and social movements of the times,
too self-centered to understand his fellow villagers. He possessed
none of the sympathetic friendliness that made Samuel Sewall a natural
confidant to every one in trouble. He loved the people when they
honored and obeyed him, but when they hearkened to other counsels he
would fall to scolding like a fishwife. Doubtless he was sincere in
thinking he would gladly die to save his people from their sins, but he
had no mind to neighbor with them or humor their wicked love of power.
He immured himself so closely within the walls of the old theocratic
temple that he never took the trouble to examine the groundsills, and
when the rotten timbers gave way and the structure came tumbling about
his ears, he was caught unprepared and went down in its ruins.
Happily most of the printed output of Cotton Mather has fallen
into the oblivion it deserved. It is barren of ideas, and marred
by pedantic mannerisms that submerge the frequent felicities of
phrase--old-fashioned on the day it came from the press. “In his
_Style_, indeed,” wrote his friend Thomas Prince, “he was something
singular, and not so agreeable to the Gust of the Age. But like his
_manner of speaking_, it was very _emphatical_.” Yet he possessed
very considerable gifts and under happier circumstances he might have
had a notable literary career; but he was the victim of a provincial
environment. He was the most widely read man of his generation in
America, and one of the few who followed sympathetically the current
scientific movement in England. Like old Increase he dabbled in
science; he was proud of his membership in the Royal Society, to which
he forwarded his characteristic _Curiosa Americana_--a hodgepodge of
those marvels in which his generation delighted. It was from an English
source that he got the idea of inoculation for smallpox, which he urged
upon Boston so insistently that a war of scurrilous pamphlets broke
out. He made use of the method in his own family, incurring thereby
much stupid abuse and at least one attack of violence. It was an
intelligent and courageous experiment, that is not to be forgotten in
casting up the accounts of Cotton Mather.
Of his major works two only call for brief consideration: the
celebrated _Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History
of New England_; and the less known _Wonders of the Invisible World_.
The latter is suggestive for the light it throws on the psychology of
the witchcraft mania. The fantastic devil-fear, which bit so deeply
into the imagination of Puritan New England, has already been commented
on. In that common seventeenth-century delusion, Cotton Mather not only
ran with the mob, but he came near to outdistancing the most credulous.
His speech and writings dripped with devil-talk. The grotesqueries that
marked the current marvel-tales crop out nakedly in his writings. “I
have set myself,” he wrote in the _Diary_, “to countermine the whole
_Plot_ of the Devil, against New-England, in every branch of it, as far
as one of my _darkness_ can comprehend such a _Work_ of Darkness.” His
conviction of the malignant activities of Satan was so vivid, that in
delivering a carefully prepared sermon on the _Wiles of the Divil_, he
was fain, he tells us, to pause and lift up his eyes and cry “unto the
Lord Jesus Christ, that he would rate off Satan,” who “all the Time of
my Prayer before the Lecture” had “horribly buffeted me”--by indicting
on the fasting priest certain qualms of the stomach. How tremendous he
conceived to be the battle over a human soul, he describes thus:
The _Wilderness_ through which we are passing to the Promised Land
is all over fill’d with Fiery flying serpents. But, blessed be
God, none of them have hitherto so fastned upon us as to confound
us utterly! All our way to Heaven lies by _Dens of Lions_ and the
_Mounts of Leopards_; there are incredible Droves of Devils in
our way.... We are poor travellers in a world which is as well the
Devil’s Field, as the Devil’s _Gaol_; a world in which every Nook
whereof, the Devil is encamped with _Bands of Robbers_ to pester
all that have their Faces looking Zionward.[116]
In the light of Mather’s logic, “That there is a _Devil_, is a thing
Doubted by none but such as are under the influence of the Devil,” and
“God indeed has the _Devil_ in a _Chain_, but has horribly lengthened
out the Chain,” his private comment on the work--“that reviled
book”--becomes comprehensible.
The _Magnalia_ is a far more important work, the repository of a vast
miscellany of information concerning early New England that his pious
zeal saved from oblivion. It is the _magnum opus_ of the Massachusetts
theocracy, the best and sincerest work that Cotton Mather did. The
theme with which it deals, and about which he accumulates marvels and
special providences together with historical facts, was the thing
which next to his own fame lay nearest his heart--the glory of that
theocracy which men whom he accounted foolish and wicked were seeking
to destroy. The purpose of the book has nowhere been better stated than
by Professor Wendell:
Its true motive was to excite so enthusiastic a sympathy with the
ideals of the Puritan fathers that, whatever fate might befall
the civil government, their ancestral seminary of learning should
remain true to its colours.... The time was come, Cotton Mather
thought, when the history of these three generations might be
critically examined; if this examination should result in showing
that there had lived in New England an unprecedented proportion
of men and women and children whose earthly existence had given
signs that they were among the elect, then his book might go far to
prove that the pristine policy of New England had been especially
favoured of the Lord. For surely the Lord would choose His elect
most eagerly in places where life was conducted most according to
His will.[117]
When old Increase was near the end of his many years, a friend wrote
to ask if he were still in the land of the living. “No, Tell him I
am going to it,” he said to his son; “this Poor World is the land of
the Dying.” The bitter words were sober truth. The New England of the
dreams of Increase and Cotton Mather was sick to death from morbid
introspection and ascetic inhibitions; no lancet or purge known to
the Puritan pharmacopeia could save it. Though father and son walked
the streets of Boston at noonday, they were only twilight figures,
communing with ghosts, building with shadows. They were not unlike
a certain mad woman that Sewall tells of, who went crying about the
town, “My child is dead within me.” The child of Cotton Mather’s hopes
had long been dead within him, only he could not bring himself to
acknowledge it. The fruit of the vine planted by the fathers was still
sweet to him, and when other men complained of its bitterness, and fell
to gathering from other vines, he could only rail at their perversity.
He would not believe that the grapes were indeed bitter and the vine
blighted; that the old vineyard must be re-plowed and planted to fresh
stock. All his life he had set marvels above realities and in the end
his wonder-working providence failed him. Prayers could not bring back
a dead past; passionate conjurations could not strike the living waters
from the cold granite of Puritan formalism. A New England flagellant,