Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
God had given them to better the lot of the American people. Philip
Freneau, Joel Barlow, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge were not intellectual
giants, but they represent the best intelligence then being devoted to
literature in America, and their work retains a suggestiveness today
far beyond that of the Hartford Wits.
1. Philip Freneau • Poet of Two Revolutions
It is fitting that our first outstanding poet should have been a
liberal. The idealist has always seen deeper into the spirit of America
than the realist, and been less complacent with halfway achievement.
And it is equally fitting that his idealism should have got him into
trouble with the dominant group of his generation. Philip Freneau
was a volunteer in two revolutions, a color-sergeant carrying the
newly unfurled flag of democracy in the thick of civil strife. He
was a lifelong rebel, whose rebellions turned out to be patriotic or
seditious as they went with or against the purpose of the victorious
party. In the Revolution of ’76 he fought shoulder to shoulder with
John Adams and Hamilton and Washington, and his services were accorded
high praise. His poems inspired patriotic enthusiasm, greatly aided the
national cause, and won wide approval. But in the Revolution of ’93 he
parted company with Adams and Hamilton and Washington. When the old
leaders turned back in fear at the unloosing of democratic aspirations,
he went forward to new battles. He served the cause of ’93 with the
same ardor that had inspired his pen in ’76. It was not a new cause in
his eyes, but the old; not a different war, as Federalists asserted,
but other battles of the same war--the never ceasing struggle for human
freedom.
In thus breaking with the party of Federalism and casting his lot with
the democratic Jacobins, Freneau contracted a serious _mésalliance_
that destroyed his good name. Thereafter he was marked as a vulgar
democrat, a disseminator of insubordination and infidelity, an evil
influence among a respectable, God-fearing people. The further he went
in his new crusade, the lower he sank in decent opinion, until the
poet of the American Revolution came to be regarded as the hireling
mouthpiece of Jefferson, a writer of wretched and insolent doggerel,
an incendiary journalist--a mean and paltry figure beside the stately
forms of the Fathers of the Constitution. Gentlemen exhausted the
resources of ample vocabularies to express their detestation of his
leveling ways. To Timothy Dwight he was “A mere incendiary, or rather
... a despicable tool of bigger incendiaries, and his paper ... a
public nuisance.” To the gentle-natured Irving he was “A barking cur,”
and to Washington, whose words were accorded a quasi-royal respect,
he was “That rascal Freneau”: rather loose expressions, certainly,
for cultivated gentlemen to apply to another cultivated gentleman,
the friend of Madison and Brackenridge. It is evident that Freneau
and the great Federalist leaders disagreed somewhat violently in
their interpretations of the purpose and scope of the new venture in
republicanism.
The source of their disagreement lay in divergencies of social
philosophy too great to be bridged. In his republicanism Freneau
had gone far in advance of the Federalists. He was a democrat while
they remained aristocrats. He had rid himself of a host of outworn
prejudices, the heritage of an obsolete past, which held them in
bondage. He had read more clearly the meaning of the great movement
of decentralization that was shaping a new psychology, and must
lead eventually to democratic individualism. He had no wish to stay
or thwart that development; he accepted it wholly with all its
implications. He had freed his mind from the thralldom of caste; he
was impelled by no egoistic desire to impose his will upon others;
he was wholly free from the lust of economic aggression, either for
himself or for his class. He was an idealist who cared only for the
_res publica_, the common well-being, and he desired chiefly that the
new American government should serve the needs of a free people. There
was no envy in the soul of Freneau, and no self-seeking. He was the
friend of civilization rather than the advocate of particular forms
of government. He put his trust in local self-rule rather than in a
coercive state. Like Paine he distrusted all centralizing power. Like
Franklin he regarded the every-day world of business and politics as
a preposterous arrangement, unconcerned with justice; and he took it
on himself to do what he could to make it over. All his life he was an
unmuzzled advocate of whatever new movements gave promise of lessening
the old tyrannies. In championing the cause of democracy, he championed
a score of lesser causes: Unitarianism, deism, antislavery, Americanism
in education: thereby bringing down on his head the resentment of
all the conservatisms, religious, political, economic, social, then
prospering in America. Nevertheless he went his way through a sordid
world of politicians and speculators, feeding upon whatever shreds of
beauty he met with, a dreamer and an idealist sneered at by exploiters,
a spirit touched to finer issues than his generation cared for.
The chief desire of Freneau’s life was to be a poet, and if the country
had not been turmoiled by revolution, doubtless he would have been
content to “live unpromoted and write poems.” But revolution and not
poetry was the serious business of the age, and he chose to have a hand
in that business. Many later critics have lamented his choice. They
regret that he did not turn aside from the battle-ground to wander in
pastoral fields; that he was not content with the _noctes coenaeque
deum_ where the minstrel’s song is sufficient passport to hospitality.
It is a nice question of literary ethics. The raw material of poetry
was in Philip Freneau; there was need only of calm years to master
his art and clarify the vague romanticism of his nature. He had only
to stand apart from the turmoil, refusing to soil his hands with
politics, and cultivate his faculty for verse, to have made himself the
indisputable founder of American poetry. He was endowed with a romantic
imagination and love of natural beauty, a generation before the
romantic revival, and he might well have become a notable contributor
to that revival.
But he refused to stand apart. He would not hire a substitute to
defend the cause of freedom. There was rough work to be done, and
the democrats were too few to spare so competent a workman. So when
poetry proved unequal to the task he turned journalist, and set to
work in a field unclaimed by the muses. It was an immense sacrifice,
bringing disaster to all hope of contemporary fame, and tarnishing his
reputation in after years. His place in American letters was fixed by
a Federalist verdict, and he has since remained obscure and neglected
by all, save an occasional historian who dips into a few poems, regrets
that the smell of revolution is so rank, and dismisses him with the
comment that Campbell and Scott did him the honor to appropriate a
figure of speech without acknowledgment. Only within recent years
has a collected edition of his poems been accessible, and his prose
writings still remain buried in newspaper files. In consequence the
literary critics have echoed the political critics, and given new
life to the old partisanship. Thus Professor Wendell remarks that
“a considerable part of his poetry ... consists of rather reckless
satire, not conspicuously better or worse than much other satire of the
period.”[380] Even Professor Tyler, usually so generous in sympathy for
our early writers, dismisses Freneau with these words:
The poor old man, thus found dead on the lonely New Jersey moor,
had undoubtedly some sweetness in his heart; but he permitted
very little of it to work its way down to the tip of his pen.
With that pitiless pen of his he had fought many a fierce fight
in his day.... He was the poet of hatred, rather than of love....
Among all his verses, the reader finds scarcely one lyric of
patriotic enthusiasm, nor many lines to thrill the hearts of the
Revolutionists by any touch of loving devotion to their cause, but
everywhere lines hot and rank with sarcasm and invective against
the enemy.... Like Odell, Freneau was a good hater; his was the
wrathful muse; his chosen warfare was grim, unsparing, deadly. He
was the satirical gladiator on behalf of the Revolution, even as
Odell was the satirical gladiator in opposition to it.[381]
Such commentary is neither discriminating nor just. That the ways of
Freneau were often ruthless it needs only a casual reading of his
satire to perceive; that he was a good hater is quite as apparent;
but that the deeper springs of his nature were bitter is not true. He
was no satirist like Churchill to love filth and delight in venom.
It was an age of partisan ruthlessness, and if Freneau was a fierce
partisan it was because the new hope then whispering to liberals was
in danger of being stifled by selfish men who feared it. The vision of
a free republic arising on the ruins of colonial monarchy had taken
possession of his imagination; a republic admirable in justice and
righteous in all its ways. That vision, he believed, might be realized
if the republicans stood firm in its defense. A thousand perils beset
it. The lingering colonial traditions--the ties of old custom--were
powerful advocates of the old inequality; the greed of profit and
power--the ambitions of a monied aristocracy--were equally powerful
advocates of new tyrannies. Not only must George III and his Tory
supporters be driven from the land, but the work thus begun must be
carried through. An army of domestic enemies must be dealt with--a
formidable aristocracy of wealth and family. Naturally it would be no
holiday task. The King had no mind to be driven out of his American
dominions, and the Federalists had no mind to surrender control of the
new American state. And so no choice remained to the republicans but
to make the advocates of monarchy and aristocracy appear so hateful in
the eyes of the people that they would rise and destroy them.
In times of profound upheaval the demands of partisanship are stern
and exacting. The gray-goose quill may serve the cause of peace, but
the porcupine quill stings and rankles more; and if Freneau was given
to using the latter it was because he cared greatly for the ends to
be achieved. “How oft has rugged nature charged my pen with gall,”
he lamented late in life as he contemplated the enemies he had made.
Sensitive and proud, he had a Gallic impetuosity of onset. If he
plundered the broadsides of their store of abuse and ransacked the
dictionaries of their wealth of scurrility, it was not because he loved
abuse and scurrilities. If like Sam Adams, he was given to robbing men
of their characters, it was due to no personal or selfish motives;
those great ones whom he lampooned so fiercely, he believed were
enemies of the new order. If “his chosen warfare was grim, unsparing,
deadly,” as Professor Tyler asserts, it was because he was fighting for
a great ideal against men who were equally grim, unsparing, deadly.
Unembittered laughter had little opportunity to try its sanative
qualities in that long warfare of bushwhackers.
During the last quarter of the century the writings of Freneau in verse
and prose constitute an abstract and brief chronicle of the times. If
they seem old-fashioned to us today, they were quite new-fashioned
to the men who first read them. The early satires, printed in 1775
must have fallen upon American ears with almost startling effect.
A revolutionary change had come over Freneau; he had broken wholly
with the colonial temper and turned nationalist a year before the