Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
to pick or choose. Yet even in his amazing copiousness there is vigor;
a well-stocked mind is pouring out the gatherings of years. When he
pauses to give advice--as he was fond of doing--his abundant sense
is worth listening to; the homely wisdom of his talk to the farmers
in the sixth part of _Greenfield Hill_ is not unlike Franklin. As a
satirist he belongs to the Churchill school; he is downright, abusive,
often violent, quite lacking the lightness of touch and the easy gayety
that runs so pleasantly through _M’Fingal_. His _Triumph of Infidelity_
is solid old-fashioned pulpit-thumping. The spirit of toleration was
withheld from him by his fairy godmother, and he knew no other way of
dealing with those who persisted in disagreement after their mistakes
had been pointed out, than the cudgel. In this tremendous poem he lays
about him vigorously. On Hume and Voltaire and Priestley, and all their
followers, his blows fall smartly. Bloody crowns ought to be plentiful,
but--though he does not seem to know it--the blows fall on straw men
and none proves mortal. On the whole one prefers him in the pastoral
mood when he lays aside his ministerial gown, and _Greenfield Hill_,
unless one excepts the _Travels in New England and New York_, remains
his most attractive work. Yet even that is sadly in need of winnowing.
A great college president Timothy Dwight may very well have been; he
was worshiped by his admirers only this side idolatry; but a great
thinker, a steadfast friend of truth in whatever garb it might appear,
a generous kindly soul loving even publicans and sinners, regardful of
others and forgetful of self, he assuredly was not.
2. “The Anarchiad”
Most of the political satire of the Wits was done in collaboration,
and consists of occasional sketches contributed to newspapers--with
explanatory comments and notes--dealing with matters of current
interest. Of the major works thus produced, _The Anarchiad_, _The
Echo_, and _The Political Greenhouse_, the first will suffice to reveal
the political sympathies of the Hartford group. _The Anarchiad_ is a
mock epic designed to counteract the populistic tendencies of post-war
times. It was published in _The New Haven Gazette_ between October 26,
1786, and September 13, 1787. In 1861 it was resurrected from a long
sleep by Luther G. Riggs, and reissued with an introduction and notes.
“This fearless satire,” according to the editor, “is supposed to have
exerted great and beneficial influence upon the public mind, and to
have tended in no small degree to check the leaders of insubordination
and infidel philosophy”; and it must be regarded as “a _national Poem_,
battling nobly for the right universal, for the majesty of law, and for
the Federal government.” The idea was got from a contemporary English
screed entitled _The Rolliad_, one of the numerous political satires
of which the late eighteenth century was so fond. Probably most of the
members of the group had a hand in it, but the acrid quality of its
comment owes more to Hopkins than to the others.
For such work the angular Connecticut physician was admirably fitted.
The son of a Waterbury farmer. Dr. Lemuel Hopkins was the most
picturesque member of the Hartford Wits, the most characteristically
Yankee. Brought up at the plow-tail, he received nevertheless an
excellent education, and because of a hereditary predisposition
to consumption turned to the medical profession. After serving
his apprenticeship at Wallingford he entered upon his practice at
Litchfield in 1776. During the Revolution he served for a short time
as a volunteer, but soon returned to his lancet and medicine case. In
1784 he removed to Hartford where he spent the remainder of his life.
In person he was tall, lean, stooping, rawboned, with coarse features
and large brilliant eyes. His uncouth appearance and eccentricity of
manner made him a striking figure, and his caustic wit rendered him
a redoubtable antagonist. As a physician he stood at the head of the
Connecticut profession. He was one of the founders of the Medical
Society of Connecticut, and as a frequent contributor to professional
literature he exerted a wide influence on the current practice.
The eccentric doctor seems to have been as honest as he was outspoken.
He was uncompromising in his warfare on all quacks, both medical and
political. For a time as a young man he was a disciple of French
infidel philosophy, but he cured his mental indisposition by a severe
Biblical regimen, and having restored himself to the robust health of
Calvinistic Christianity, he devoted himself to the work of curing
others. He became in consequence a specialist in the treatment of the
ravages caused by the _bacillus gallicus_. For every sort of humbug
he had a hearty contempt, and any political nostrum not listed in the
Federalistic materia medica he regarded as arrant quackery. He thought
no better of old wives’ remedies in government than in medicine,
and when the Rhode Island legislature passed its paper-money act in
1785, and six months later Shays’s Rebellion broke out, and mobs were
besieging the legislature of New Hampshire, he proposed to speak
plainly to the good people of Connecticut on the follies of popular
delusions. This would seem to have been the origin of _The Anarchiad_.
It sprang from the indignation of Dr. Hopkins, when, to quote from the
poem,
In visions fair, the scenes of fate unroll,
And Massachusetts opens on my soul.
There Chaos, Anarch old, asserts his sway,
And mobs in myriads blacken all the way.
The sardonic temper of Dr. Hopkins fitted him for virulent satire,
and in this bitterest of the productions of the Wits, the reins were
on the neck of the muse. Scarcely another New England satire reflects
so sharply the class consciousness that underlay the bitter struggle
between agrarianism and capitalism. It is a slashing attack upon
agrarian economics and democratic liberalism, a versified echo of
the anger of creditors who were fighting the measures of populistic
legislatures. The staple of the satire is the wickedness of all
paper-money issues, with the State of Rhode Island as the chief of
agrarian sinners. About this main theme is gathered a miscellany
of Federalist shibboleths--the godlessness of Shays and his crew,
the seditious spirit of all who oppose the new Constitution, the
demagoguery of democratic politicians--and the satire rises to a
patriotic crescendo in declaiming against the folly of the democratic
ideal. So tremendous a work, however, cannot be adequately described;
the lines must speak for themselves. The following bits may serve in
lieu of the whole, the first of which is a comment on Rhode Island, the
pariah of States:
Hail! realm of rogues, renown’d for fraud and guile,
All hail! ye knav’ries of yon little isle.
There prowls the rascal, cloth’d with legal pow’r,
To snare the orphan, and the poor devour;
The crafty knave his creditor besets
And advertising paper pays his debts;
Bankrupts their creditors with rage pursue,
No stop, no mercy from the debtor crew.
Arm’d with new tests, the licens’d villain bold,
Presents his bills, and robs them of their gold;
Their ears, though rogues and counterfeiters lose,
No legal robber fears the gallows noose.
Look through the State, the unhallow’d ground appears
A pen of dragons, and a cave of bears;
A nest of vipers, mix’d with adders foul;
The screeching night-bird, and the greater owl:
For now, unrighteousness, a deluge wide,
Pours round the land an overwhelming tide;
And dark injustice, wrapp’d in paper sheets,
Rolls a dread torrent through the wasted streets;
While net of law th’ unwary fry draws in
To damning deeds, and scarce they know they sin.
New paper struck, new tests, new tenders made,
Insult mankind, and help the thriving trade.
Each weekly print new lists of cheats proclaims,
Proud to enroll their knav’ries and their names;
The wiser race, the snares of law to shun,
Like Lot from Sodom, from Rhode Island run....[376]
Nor less abhorr’d, the certain woe that waits
The giddy rage of democratic States,
Whose pop’lar breath, high-blown in restless tide,
No laws can temper, and no reason guide:
An equal sway, their mind indignant spurns;
To wanton sway, the bliss of freedom turns;
Led by wild demagogues, the factious crowd,
Mean, fierce, imperious, insolent and loud,
Nor fame, nor wealth, nor power, nor system draws--
They see no object, and perceive no cause;
But feel, by turns, in one disastrous hour,
Th’ extremes of license, and th’ extremes of power....
Will this vain scheme bid restless factions cease,
Check foreign wars, or fix internal peace?
Call public credit from her grave to rise,
Or gain in grandeur what they lose in size?...
But know, ye favor’d race, one potent head
Must rule your States, and strike your foes with dread.
The finance regulate, the trade control,
Live through the empire, and accord the whole.
Ere death invades, the night’s deep curtain falls,
Through ruin’d realms the voice of +UNION+ calls; ...
On you she calls! attend the warning cry;
+Ye live united, or divided die!+[377]
But chief the race allured by fleeting fame,
Who seek on earth the politicians name;
Auspicious race! whom folly joys to bless,
And wealth and honor crown with glad success;
Formed, like balloons, by emptiness to rise
On pop’lar gales, to waft them through the skies ...
See, from the shades, on tiny pinions swell
And rise, the young +DEMOCRACY+ of _hell!_
Before their face the _powers of Congress_ fade,
And _public credit_ sinks, an empty shade;
Wild severance rages, wars intestine spread,
Their boasted +UNION+ hides her dying head;
The forms of government in ruin hurl’d,
Reluctant empire quits the western world.[378]
Amid such democratic welter and mortal confusion the sole hope of
safety lies in Federalism, and the sapient leader who shall bring order
out of the wild misrule is thus greeted:
Ardent and bold, the smiling land to save,
In council sapient as in action brave,
I fear’d young Hamilton’s unshaken soul,
And saw his arm our wayward host control; ...
Fire in his eye, and thunder on his tongue.[379]
Other work the Hartford Wits did, but none which need detain us. Soon
changes and removals broke up the coterie, and they went diverse ways
to diverse rewards: Timothy Dwight to safeguard Yale undergraduates in
New Haven, Humphreys to the American legation at Paris, Trumbull to
the Michigan frontier, and Barlow to his notable career in Europe. But
happily not before they had contributed their portion of sweetness and
light to the great debate. The Wits were no skulkers in presence of
“insubordination and infidel philosophy,” when their economic interests
were touched.
II • The French Group
The Wits were not devoid of cleverness, but they were wanting in
ideas. They were partisans rather than intellectuals. In the rôle of
self-appointed custodians of Federalist moralities they were rather
tedious fellows, who substituted fustian for creative thought, and blew
up their verses with flatulent rhetoric. They sealed the windows of
their minds against the disturbing winds of doctrine that were blowing
briskly; they inspected the family tree of every new idea to determine
its respectability. An occasional fresh idea is necessary to keep one
from falling into staleness and mediocrity; but the Wits chose to
remain too ignorant to be interesting, and it is a relief to turn from
them to the more stimulating company of the French partisans. Here at
least there was intellectual sincerity: a genuine desire to understand
what was going on in the larger world of thought; to use what brains