THE SPIRIT AND POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND

It is, I know, the teaching of a certain school of scientific historians that the changes of civilization are produced by large impersonal laws under whose sway the will of the individual sinks into insignificance. That theory is, perhaps, not quite so common now as it was a few years ago. And surely, if any great event can be referred to the character of individual men, it was the crime of the seventeenth century in England, with its consequent train of evils. In that month of spring in the year 1603 when James Stuart was riding south to take up his crown in London, a prophetic eye might have foreseen the troubles he and his son were to cause. On the way the so-called Millenary Petition was presented to him by a band of moderate and conforming Puritans, who desired only a few unimportant changes in the service and Prayer Book; one of the first acts of James at Hampton Court was to deny the Petition and to abuse the petitioners with a threat to "harry them out of the land." After that the history of England for two generations was a series of ifs, depending on the actions of a small group of men. Thus, if Prince Henry, with his objection to a Catholic marriage, had not imprudently overheated himself on the tennis court, and so left the throne to his brother Charles; if Charles at the beginning of his reign had not been bribed to accept the Petition of Right and so to bind his hands; if Wentworth had been kept in England to raise a standing army, instead of being called back from Ireland when too late, and if Henrietta Maria by meddling with the soldiers had not brought him to the scaffold; if Charles had married a Protestant instead of a Bourbon princess; if he had chosen a wiser prelate than Laud; if he had not attempted to seize the five members of Parliament, or had planned the attempt more secretly; if the navy had not been wantonly alienated;- If, in a word, James and Charles had not been at once so obstinate and so weak, either they might have succeeded in establishing, for a time at least, a monarchy like that raised in France on the ruin of the Fronde and the Reformation, or they might have guided their people through a bloodless and healthy revolution. But for the fanaticism of the King the opposing fanaticism of Pym and Lilburne and Cromwell would never have come to the top, crashing between them the moderate men who were the real strength and, in the end, the salvation of England. And so I, for one, cannot look back upon that period without shuddering at its passion of violent extremes, and without a feeling of amazement that so much evil in the world can be traced to the temper of a few fanatics who, by the whim of Fortune, had the destiny of the English people in their hands.

Old England, though her richer and completer development was perhaps forever marred by the harsh divisions of that age, did nevertheless in a manner quickly shake herself into balance. But we must remember that the New England colonists, driven from their homes by the Laudian persecution, came almost exclusively from one of the national factions. They did not bring with them the full temper of the English people, or even that part of its character which has given us Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dryden and Swift and Johnson and Byron and Tennyson. Their poetry therefore must be criticised, not as belonging to the main current of English literature, but as a slender branch, so to speak, running to one side, and deprived of the broader nourishment of tradition. It is the prolongation of a mood that had been tortured into excess by the goading stings of Accident; nor must we forget that at home under the sway of this same mood the imagination was distrusted, the theatres were closed, the picture collections of Charles dispersed or destroyed, the churches made barren of their beauty, the courtly poets silenced or driven into obscure places - that the land was for a time, in the language of Stratford, "frequent in combustions, full of massacres and the tragical ends of princes."

It would be unjust, of course, to say that with this iconoclasm all the charm of life was banished by the Puritans. Even leaving out of account the supreme achievement of Milton, no one can go through the writings of these men without finding passages that have a grace entirely their own. One recalls, for instance, the scene in Bunyan's pilgrimage, when Christian, having twice climbed the Hill Difficulty, comes to the Palace Beautiful, and is there entertained by the maidens Piety, Prudence, and Charity. "Thus they discoursed together till late at night," the narrative proceeds, "and after they had committed themselves to their Lord for protection, they betook themselves to rest. The Pilgrim they laid in a large upper chamber, whose window opened towards the sunrising; the name of the chamber was Peace, where he slept till break of day; and then he awoke and sang." I shall not repeat the words of the Pilgrim's song, for Bunyan, with all his genius, endured the confinement of Bedford Gaol better than the shackles of rhyme; but no candid reader will fail to respond to the peculiar beauty of that chamber of peace. In this chastened loveliness, won by the exclusion of a whole half of life, the Puritan literature is not wanting. One foresees in it much that long afterwards will charm the ear in the poems of Longfellow and Whittier.

And in one respect the Puritans brought no diminution to the field of art and literature, but effected rather a return to the main line of tradition from which England for a while had been partially diverted by the seductions of the Renaissance. I mean that sense of something central and formative in man, of character as distinguished from the mere portrayal of unrelated passions, which was so lamentably lacking in most of the dramatists, and which since the advent of Puritanism has been the chief honour of British letters.... it is highly important to remember this positive side of Puritanism when reckoning up the devastating effects of its rigid and combative morality on the imagination.

Now the very conditions of existence in New England exaggerated the seclusions of the half-civilization which the people brought over with them in their exile. Not only were the colonists withdrawn from contact with the secular tradition which makes itself so deeply felt in the art of a Milton, but the inevitable hardships of their state intensified their belief that life is a perpetual battle with the powers of evil, to whom no concession must be granted. In the dark unredeemed forests that surrounded them there lurked tribes of savage people whose appearance and habits were such as to warrant the notion that here indeed Satan was unchained and held undisputed sway. One of the first voyagers to the new continent, William Strachey, carried back this report of devil worship to credulous ears. "There is yet in Virginia," he wrote in 1618, "no place discovered so savadge and simple, in which the inhabitants have not a religion and the use of bow and arrows. All things they conceive able to do them hurt beyond their prevention, they adore with their kind of divine worship, as the fire, water, lightning, thunder, our ordinaunce pieces, horses, etc.; but their chief god they worship is no other, indeed, than the devill, whom they make presentments of, and shadow under the form of an idol, which they entitle Okeus." Naturally the settlers, looking out into the infinite wilderness, saw visions of dread and heard sounds of preternatural portent. Even the redoubtable Captain John Smith was sufficiently troubled to express his apprehensions in doggerel rhyme:

But his waking mind in hideous dreams did oft see wondrous shapes
Of bodies strange, and huge in growth, and of stupendous makes.

Meanwhile we can see something of its influence in contracting the poetry of the colonists within still narrower bounds of religions sentiment. The first volume printed in this country, was the Bay Psalm Book, translated from the Hebrew by Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, and John Eliot in 1640. In the preface Mather made this candid statement: "If therefore the verses are not alwayes so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect, let them consider that God's altar needs not pollishings." And indeed the polishings are conspicuous by their absence, as any specimen of this notable book will show. For instance, the great nineteenth Psalm is thus rendered for the satisfaction of the faithful:

The heavens doe declare
The majesty of God:
also the firmament shows forth
his handy-work abroad.
Day speaks to day, knowledge
night hath to night declar'd.
There neither speach nor language is
where their voyce is not heard.

Then might you hear them rend and tear
The air with their outcries;
The hideous noise of their sad voice
Ascendeth to the skies.
They wring their hands, their caitiff-hands,
And gnash their teeth for terror;
They cry, they roar, for anguish sore,
And gnaw their tongues for horror.

But get away without delay;
Christ pities not your cry:
Depart to hell, there you may yell
And roar eternally.

With iron bands they bind their hands
And cursed feet together;
And cast them all, both great and small,
Into that lake forever;
Where day and night, without respite,
They wail and cry and howl,
For torturing pain which they sustain,
In body and in soul.

For day and night, in their despite,
Their torment's smoke ascendeth;
Their pain and grief have no relief,
Their anguish never endeth.
There must they lie and never die,
Though dying every day;
There must they, dying, ever lie,
And not consume away.

You sinners are, and such a share
As sinners, may expect;
Such you shall have, for I do save
None but mine own elect.
Yet to compare your sin with their
Who lived a longer time,
I do confess yours is much less,
Though every sin's a crime.

A crime it is; therefore in bliss
You may not hope to dwell;
But unto you I shall allow
The easiest room in hell.

But if the older theological taste had about it a prevailing odour of the pit, we must not infer that life in the colonies, gray in colour though it may have been, was entirely bleak and without those chambers towards the sunrise. Much of the verse produced may have been of the kind described by Captain Edward Johnson:

From silent night true Register of moans,
From saddest soul consum'd in deepest sin,
From heart quite rent with sighs and heavy groans,
My wailing muse her woful work begins,
And to the world brings tunes of sad lament,
Sounding naught else but sorrow's sad relent-

If to have solid judgment, pregnant parts,
A piercing wit, and comprehensive brain;
If to have gone the round of all the arts,
Immunity from death could gain; . . .

If holy life, and deeds of charity,
If grace illustrious, and virtue tried,
If modest carriage, rare humility,
Could have bribed Death, good Shepard had not died ...

Farewell, dear Shepard! Thou art gone before,
Made free of heaven, where thou shalt sing loud hymns
Of high triumphant praises evermore,
In the sweet choir of saints and seraphims....

My dearest, inmost, bosom-friend is gone!
Gone is my sweet companion, soul's delight!
Now in an huddling crowd I'm all alone,
And almost could bid all the world Good-night.
Blest be my Rock! God lives; O let him be,
As He is All, so All in All to me!

... solemn troops, and sweet societies,
That sing, and singing in their glory move,

Parvum parva decent, sed inest sua gratia parvis.

The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America; or Several Poems, compiled with great variety of wit and learning, full of delight; wherein especially is contained a complete discourse and description of the four elements, constitutions, ages of man, seasons of the years; together with an exact epitome of the four monarchies, viz., the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman; also, a dialogue between Old England and New concerning the late troubles; with divers other pleasant and serious poems. By a gentlewoman in those parts. Printed at London, for Stephen Bowtell, at the sign of the Bible, in Pope's Head Alley, 1650.

Virtue ne'er dies: time will a poet raise,
Born under better stars, shall sing thy praise.
Praise her who list, yet he shall be a debtor;
For Art ne'er feigned nor Nature framed, a better.
Her virtues were so great, that they do raise
A work to trouble fame, astonish praise.

All, indeed, that we know of Anne Bradstreet from contemporary sources and from her own autobiographical sketch justifies us in revering her as one of those large-minded women of the seventeenth century who managed somehow, in ways that seem inexplicable to their daughters, to combine the manifold cares of a household with indefatigable study and sober unhurried reflection. But the outpourings of her muse, it must be acknowledged, remind us too forcibly of one of her own aphorisms: "A ship that bears much sail, and little or no ballast, is easily overset." She is seen perhaps at her best in such stanzas as these:

I heard the merry grasshopper then sing,
The black-clad cricket bear a second part,
They kept one tune, and played on the same string,
Seeming to glory in their little art.
Shall creatures abject thus their voices raise?
And in their kind resound their Maker's praise:
Whilst I, as mute, can warble forth no higher lays.

When I behold the heavens as in their prime,
And then the earth (though old) still clad in green,
The stones and trees, insensible of time,
Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen;
If winter come, and greenness then do fade,
A spring returns, and they more youthful made;
But man grows old, lies down, remains where once he's laid.

O Time, the fatal wrack of mortal things,
That draws oblivion's curtains over kings,
Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,
Their names without a record are forgot,
Their parts, their ports, their pomps all laid in th' dust,
Nor wit, nor gold, nor buildings 'scape time's rust;
But he whose name is grav'd in the white stone
Shall last and shine when all of these are gone.

The names of Mrs. Bradstreet's more poetical descendants serve to remind us how intimately all this New England society was knit together, and how its spirit was handed down from generation to generation as a kind of family possession. Her own contemporary fame may call our attention to the fact that women played no inconsiderable part in creating the peculiar tone of the New World literature. And their influence was felt in two ways. In the first place that sturdiness and uprightness of character, which was one of the great, the very great, compensations of Puritanism, not only made itself heard in the eulogies pronounced over those who died in the harness of virtue, but was active in the family relations of the living. Saintliness, I know, does not invariably make for comfort. Sometimes the Puritan hardness of character dominated too tyranically the softer traits of affection and compliance, bringing what might be called a desolation of sanctity into the home. But there were other households - and these I believe the majority - in which the tenderness to every duty, the sense of due subordination, the competence of training, the repose of a clear conscience, must have evoked an atmosphere of serene and equitable joy. The very discipline of the passions, the renunciation of the wider sweep of human experience, would put a stamp of sacredness on those chaster pleasures which knit a family together in contented unison. In a way all of New England may be said to have been snow-bound, in creed as well as in climate, but in the shelter of the hearth there was warmth for the body and there was comfort for the soul. Whittier was recalling a the incident of his childhood, and was writing also an allegory of New England's inner life, when he described that night of storm and snow:

Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north-wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat.

Now in the making of this home spirit the women naturally played an important role. Thomas Shepard, for example, he whose own elegy was sung so enthusiastically by Urian Oakes, had written a Character of Mistress Joanna Shepard, his wife, wherein he had portrayed her as "a woman of incomparable meekness of spirit, toward myself especially, and very loving; of great prudence to take care for and order my family affairs, being neither too lavish nor sordid in anything, so that I knew not what was under her hands. She had an excellency to reprove sin, and discern the evils of men." Incomparable meekness of spirit may not be precisely the sort of eulogy a modern wife would desire in her epitaph, however some husbands might desire it in her life - but, again, other times other manners. And if one is inclined to shudder a little at the thought of her excellency to reprove sin and discover the evils of men, one may suspect that this sharp-edged knowledge was useful in protecting her bookish and busy husband from the inroads of fraudulent beggars and evil mischief-makers. At any rate one may be certain that the house of Mistress Joanna Shepard much resembled the Palace Beautiful of Bunyan, where the maidens Piety, Prudence, and Charity kept watch and ward, and where there was a large upper chamber of peace whose window opened towards the sunrising. Certainly also the peaceful affections of home, the cool and quiet places of rest out of the turmoil of the world's contentions, came to be a marked trait of New England literature. There are traces of it in the early poets; in the works of Whittier and Longfellow it was to blossom into something exceedingly precious, however it may lack the more dazzling qualities of the imagination. The other side of this truth is that you will find no love poetry, as the word is commonly understood, in those primitive days - at least I know of none - and there is a minimum of it in the later age. That is an extraordinary fact, when you stop to think of it, and to some may seem a sad lack. Let such critics turn elsewhere; heaven knows the erotic Muse has been vocal enough in other sections of the world. For my part I still prefer James Russell Lowell's Under the Willows to the self-advertised passion of a certain living poetess who bears his family name.

That was one way in which the influence of women was felt. In another way they brought not peace but conflict into colonial life. The orthodoxy of the New England church was of a hard Calvinistic hue; it was eminently logical and intellectual, the creation and delight of strong men who, however they may have been possessed by a "boiling zeal" for saving souls, yet, like John Cotton, thought twelve hours of continuous study a "scholar's day" and true service to God. Against the virility, and one must add rigidity, of this religious dominion there were inevitably, almost from the beginning, movements of revolt. And it was natural that the good women of the colony should be conspicuous in rebellion as well as in meekness. Not all the great men of the land were as fortunate in their helpmates as were Thomas Shepard and John Eliot. In Winthrop's History of New England from 1630 to 1649 there is an amusing story of one woman to whom much, and not a little, learning was a dangerous thing. "Mr. Hopkins, the governor of Hartford upon Connecticutt," we there read, "came to Boston, and brought his wife with him (a godly woman, and of special parts), who was fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, which had been growing upon her divers years, by reason of her giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books. Her husband, being very loving and tender of her, was loath to grieve her; but he saw his error, when it was too late. For if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper to men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits." I do not know by what stages this learned lady fell into her sad infirmity, but I suspect she betook herself to her books as a refuge from her spouse, the worthy governor, of whom it is related "that he frequently fell a bleeding at the nose, through the agony of spirit with which he laboured in them [his prayers]." Neither do I know what was in her many books - even the all-embracing Tyler does not mention them - but my guess is that she wrote verse and tampered with the man-made mysteries of religion.

At least this second form of audacity was what brought trouble between another "godly woman" and the rulers of the State. The story of the conflict may be read in Thomas Welde's Heresies of Anne Hutchinson, from which it would appear that this strong-minded female had the pious, and in those days obligatory, habit of going regularly to meeting, but added the very bad habit of collecting a company of critical folk after service and of expounding to them the sermon in a spirit of contumely and contradiction. Now the colonists had a high sense of the value of liberty, as was natural in men who had suffered so much in its cause - so high a sense that, in the words of Governor Winthrop, they would have it only "maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority." But this was not the view of Anne Hutchinson and her coterie. Liberty to them meant the freedom of the individual, not to follow the truth, but to choose the truth; it was the kind described by Winthrop as making "men grow more evil, and in time to be worse than brute beasts: omnes sumus licentia deteriores," and as "that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which all the ordinances of God are bent against, to restrain and subdue it."

We will not now enter into the question of truth as it lay between the preachers of the Commonwealth and Mistress Hutchinson, but there is no doubt of the fact that her manner of prophesying did not bring peace. The result of her lectures among the women is thus denounced by Thomas Welde:

Now, oh their boldness, pride, insolency, alienations from their old and dearest friends, the disturbances, divisions, contentions they raised amongst us, both in church and State, and in families, setting division between husband and wife! . . .

Now the faithful ministers of Christ must have dung cast on their faces, and be no better than legal preachers, Baal's priests, popish factors, scribes, Pharisees, and opposers of Christ himself.

Lowell remembered these passages at arms when, in his Biglow Papers, he described the troubles caused by the townswomen of the good pastor of Jaalam:

The painful divisions in the First Parish, A.D. 1844, occasioned by the wild notions of (what Mr. Wilbur, so far as concerned the reasoning faculty, always called) the unfairer part of creation, put forth by Miss Parthenia Almira Fitz, are too well known to need more than a passing allusion. It was during these heats, long since happily allayed, that Mr. Wilbur remarked that "the Church had more trouble in dealing with one sheresiarch than with twenty heresiarchs," and that the men's conscia recti, or certainty of being right, was nothing to the women's.

She shook the dust from her naked feet,
And her sackcloth closer drew,
And into the porch of the awe-hushed church,
She passed like a ghost from view.

They whipped her away at the tail o' the cart
Through half the streets of the town,
But the words she uttered that day nor fire
Could burn nor water drown.

And now the aisles of the ancient church
By equal feet are trod,
And the bell that swings in its belfry rings
Freedom to worship God!

Poetry's a gift wherein but few excel,
He doth very ill, that doth not passing well.