There are two great and simple books, however, belonging here which are pure literature and worthy of a place among the twelve which I have chosen: the Journal of the Quaker, John Woolman, and the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the wise man of the world. Quakers may be wise, too, but for canny wit, common sense, humor, honesty and everything else you can think of, especially learning and industry, as making up the typical Yankee, you find them shaken down and running over in B. Franklin of Boston and Philadelphia, and the world, and all time. You must read this autobiography, though it is not in the list of twelve.
We really find the culture, the leisure, the perspective for literary work for the first time in America during the Period of the Republic, which follows the colonizing, the pioneering, and the fighting. We are still a westward-moving people, still on the frontier, spreading, multiplying, building, growing rich and strong and united. But we are a nation now; the spirit of democracy has taken hold on our social life; we have a social philosophy, a proud past, a thrilling present, and a mighty future. Now we can speak, for now we have something to say.
In the year following the adoption of the Constitution, when the young nation was getting its breath and bearings, our writers multiplied tremendously, especially the poets, long-winded, pony-gaited mavericks, who should have been hitched to the plow. But that was the trouble with American literature, everybody had been hitched too much to the plow and too little to the pen. Yet how could it be otherwise in a land so new, so hardly won? But all of this poor poetry was a preparation—first, of the minds of the people for the greater work to come; and, second, of the pens of the masters who were already in training and about to come. When a great wave breaks crashing on the shore, you know the swell started away off at sea. So with every great wave of literature. The Golden Age of American letters, beginning with Bryant and closing with the death of Oliver Wendell Holmes, took its very definite start in the tremendous years from 1789 to 1809. But those years themselves have left us almost nothing. The year 1809, however, is one to remember. Knickerbocker’s history of New York was published that year, and real literature in America began. Mark that date in red.
But meantime if everybody was writing, everybody was reading. The spread of the newspaper and the birth and growth of the magazine were two of the notable literary signs of these early years of the new Republic. The people were hungry for reading. The whole nation was like a man who has always been denied books and pictures and music, and who, at thirty-five or forty, wakes up to a keen realization of his loss.
The nation had dreamed and dared, had fought and plowed and broken trails, had leveled forests, peopled prairies, opened mines, built mills and roads, and now was pausing to look about and ask what it meant, and what it was all to mean. Bread the nation had. Now it wanted books. A body it had. But did it have a soul? To do and to have—that is first; to know, to feel, to be—that is second, but it is an even deeper need.
Along with the spread of periodicals came the drama, the short story, and the novel. Our first professional man of letters, the first American to devote all of his time to literary work, Charles Brockden Brown, published in 1798 a powerful and terrible novel called Wieland, which perhaps should be reckoned as the first piece of durable fiction done in our country. What a flood has followed it! Brown himself did ten such tales. And they are worth reading. If you want to feel your hair curl into barbed wire on your bare skull, and your spinal column walk off and leave the rest of your congealed anatomy, read Wieland or Edgar Huntley.
Washington Irving was our first international writer. With the publication of
The Sketch Book
in 1820, a certain Englishman’s contemptuous question “Who reads an American book?” was forever answered. Everybody read, and still reads, “Rip Van Winkle”[1] and “The legend of Sleepy Hollow,” two of the pieces in The sketch book. It is for these two stories particularly that I have chosen The sketch book as the first reading in this course.
I envy the man who has never read them. He has two evenings of pure chuckles in store for him. Shiftless, lazy Rip! The dear old toper is as real a person as George Washington, and so much more human! “There is no finer character-sketch in our literature than the lovable old vagabond, as he goes slouching through the village, his arms full of children, a troop of dogs at his heels, and the shrill pursuing voice of Dame Winkle dying away in the distance.” I lived long enough ago to see Joseph Jefferson play the part of Rip—one of the sinful sweet memories of my Methodist youth! Rip made it hard for Mrs. Van Winkle, and she made it hard for him—and there is much to be said on both sides.