A Manual of American Literature. Various
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the first decade of American literature a little book was written in Virginia, which, as is believed by some authors, soon rendered an illustrious service to English literature by suggesting to Shakespeare the idea of one of his noblest masterpieces, The Tempest. It was in May, 1610, that Sir Thomas Gates, with two small vessels and 150 companions, had at last found his way into the James River after a voyage of almost incredible difficulty and peril. Among those who had borne a part in this ghastly and almost miraculous expedition was William Strachey, of whom but little is known except what is revealed in his own writings. He was a man of decided literary aptitude. Soon after his arrival here he was made secretary of Virginia, and in July, 1610, he wrote at Jamestown and sent off to England A True Reportory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas. Whoever reads this little book will be quite ready to believe that it may have brought suggestion and inspiration even to the genius of William Shakespeare. It is a book of marvellous power. Its account of Virginia is well done; but its most striking merit is its delineation of his dreadful sea-voyage, and particularly of the tempest which, after the terror and anguish of a thousand deaths, drove them upon the rocks of the Bermudas. Here his style becomes magnificent; it has some sentences which for imaginative and pathetic beauty, for vivid implications of appalling danger and disaster, can hardly be surpassed in the whole range of English prose.
George Sandys.—The last one of this group of early writers, George Sandys, was perhaps the only one of all his fellow-craftsmen here who was a professed man of letters. He was well known as a traveller in Eastern lands, as a scholar, as an admirable prose-writer, but especially as a poet. His claim to the title of poet then rested chiefly on his fine metrical translation of the first five books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This fragment was a specimen of literary workmanship in many ways creditable; and that he was able, during the next few years, robbing sleep of its rights, to complete his noble translation of the fifteen books, is worthy of being chronicled among the heroisms of authorship. In 1626, he brought out in London, in a folio volume, the first edition of his finished work. The writings which precede this book in our literary history were all produced for some immediate practical purpose, and not with any avowed literary intentions. This book may well have for us a sort of sacredness, as being the first monument of English poetry, of classical scholarship, and of deliberate literary art, reared on these shores. And when we open the book, and examine it with reference to its merits, first, as a faithful rendering of the Latin text, and, second, as a specimen of fluent, idiomatic, and musical English poetry, we find that in both particulars it is a work that we may be proud to claim as in some sense our own, and to honour as the morning-star at once of poetry and of scholarship in the New World.
The Burwell Papers.—In the year 1676 there occurred in Virginia an outburst of popular excitement which, for a hundred and fifty years afterward, was grotesquely misrepresented by the historians, and which only within recent years has begun to work itself clear of the traditional perversion. This excitement is still indicated by the sinister name that was at first applied to it, Bacon’s Rebellion. With this remarkable event the literary history of Virginia now becomes curiously involved.
In the spring of 1676, at the very moment when the minds of men were torn by anxieties at the lawless interference of the King and Parliament with their most valuable rights, suddenly there swept toward them the terror of an aggressive Indian war. The people called upon the royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley, to take the necessary measures for repelling these assaults. For reasons of jealousy, indolence, selfishness, and especially avarice, this Governor gave to the people promises of help, and promises only. Then the people arose in their anger, and since their Governor would not lead them to the war, with unanimous voice they called upon one of their own number to be their leader, Nathaniel Bacon, a man only thirty years of age, of considerable landed wealth, of high social connections, a lawyer trained in the Inns of Court in London, an orator of commanding eloquence, a man who by his endowments of brain and eye and hand was a natural leader and king of men. He obeyed the call of the people and led them against the Indians, whom he drove back with tremendous punishment. But by the jealous and haughty despot in the governor’s chair, he was at once proclaimed a rebel; a price was set upon his head; and the people who followed him were put under ban. Then followed a series of swift conflicts, military and political, between Bacon and the Governor; and at last, in that same year, Bacon himself died, suddenly and mysteriously, and twenty-five persons were hung or shot.
Shortly after our Revolutionary War, it was discovered that in an old and honourable family in the Northern Neck of Virginia, some manuscripts had been preserved, evidently belonging to the seventeenth century, evidently written by one or more of the adherents of Nathaniel Bacon. These manuscripts are sometimes called the Burwell Papers, from the name of a family in King William County by whom they were first given to the public. The author of the prose portion of these manuscripts reflects, on this side of the ocean, the literary foibles that were in fashion on the other side of the ocean. But apart from the disagreeable air of verbal affectation and of effort in these writings, they are undeniably spirited; they produce before us departed scenes with no little energy and life; and the flavour of mirth which seasons them is not unpleasant.
As the cause of Bacon’s death was a mystery, so a mystery covered even the place of his burial; for his friends, desiring to save his lifeless body from violation at the hands of the victorious party, placed it secretly in the earth. And the love of Bacon’s followers, which in his lifetime had shown itself in services of passionate devotion, and which, after his death, thus hovered as a protecting silence over his hidden grave, found expression also in some sorrowing verses that, upon the whole, are of astonishing poetic merit. Who may have been the author of these verses, it is perhaps now impossible to discover. They are prefaced by the quaint remark that after Bacon “was dead, he was bemoaned in lines drawn by the man that waited upon his person as it is said, and who attended his corpse to their burial-place.” Of course this statement is but a blind; the author of such a eulogy of the dead rebel could not safely avow himself. But certainly no menial of Bacon’s, no mere “man that waited upon his person,” could have written this noble dirge, which has a stateliness, a compressed energy, and a mournful eloquence, reminding one of the commemorative verse of Ben Jonson.
Early Literature in Virginia and New England.—During the first epoch in the history of American literature, there were but two localities which produced in the English language anything that can be called literature—Virginia and New England. As we have seen, there were in Virginia, during the first twenty years of its existence, authors who produced writings that live yet and deserve to live. But at the end of that period and for the remainder of the century, nearly all literary activity in Virginia ceased; the only exception to this statement being the brief anonymous literary memorials which have come down to us from the uprising of the people under Nathaniel Bacon. Even of those writers of the first two decades, all excepting one, Alexander Whitaker, “the Apostle of Virginia,” flitted back to England after a brief residence in Virginia: so that besides Whitaker, the colony had during all that period no writer who gave his name to her as being willing to identify himself permanently with her fate, and to live and die in her immediate service. This, as we shall see, is in startling contrast to the contemporaneous record of New England, which, even in that early period, had a great throng of writers, nearly all of whom took root in her soil.
New England Traits in the Seventeenth Century.—Did the people of New England in their earliest age begin to produce a literature? Who can doubt it? With their incessant activity of brain, with so much both of common and of uncommon culture among them, with intellectual interests so lofty and strong, with so many outward occasions to stir their deepest passions into the same great currents, it would be hard to explain it had they indeed produced no literature. Moreover, contrary to what is commonly asserted of them, they were not without a literary class. In as large a proportion to the whole population as was then the case in the mother-country, there were in New England many men trained to the use of books, accustomed to express themselves fluently by voice and pen, and not so immersed in the physical tasks of life as to be deprived of the leisure for whatever writing they were prompted to undertake. It was a literary class made up of men of affairs, country-gentlemen, teachers, above all of clergymen; men of letters who did not depend upon letters for their bread, and who thus did their work under conditions of intellectual independence.