The American Spirit in Literature: A Chronicle of Great InterpretersPerry, Bliss
History
The American Spirit in Literature: A Chronicle of Great Interpreters
Perry, Bliss
American literature -- History and criticism
We can only glance in passing at the literature of the Lost Cause, the
Loyalist or "Tory" pleadings for allegiance to Britain. It was written
by able and honest men, like Boucher and Odell, Seabury, Leonard and
Galloway. They distrusted what Seabury called "our sovereign Lord the
Mob." They represented, in John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the
people of the colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate
was too low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the
majority. In all they were a menacing element, made up of the
conservative, the prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, of
course, of mere placemen and tuft-hunters. They composed weighty
pamphlets, eloquent sermons, and sparkling satire in praise of the old
order of things. When their cause was lost forever, they wrote gossipy
letters from their exile in London or pathetic verses in their new home
in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Their place in our national life and
literature has never been filled, and their talents and virtues are
never likely to receive adequate recognition. They took the wrong fork
of the road.
There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, endowed with delicate
literary gifts, but quite unsuited for the clash of
controversy--members, in Crèvecœur's touching words, of the "secret
communion among good men throughout the world." "I am a lover of peace,
what must I do?" asks Crèvecœur in his Letters from an American Farmer.
"I was happy before this unfortunate Revolution. I feel that I am no
longer so, therefore I regret the change. My heart sometimes seems tired
with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with
so many watchings." Crèvecœur, an immigrant from Normandy, was certainly
no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American
adventure--which he described so captivatingly in his chapter entitled
What is an American--was ending tragically in civil war. Another
white-souled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, whose
Journal, praised by Charles Lamb and Channing and edited by Whittier, is
finding more readers in the twentieth century than it won in the
nineteenth. "A man unlettered," said Whittier, "but with natural
refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart
enters into his language." Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York,
England, whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of
Friends.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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