Not only slavery, but every other form of oppression and wrong received his condemnation. He wrote boldly against intemperance in a day when the use of intoxicating liquors was well-nigh universal and wholly uncriticised; he spoke eloquently on cruelty to animals; and he was one of the earliest to demand equal rights for man and woman.
Freneau's religious inclinations have been sometimes harshly criticised by those of puritanic creed. The school of Dr. Dwight could speak of him only in contempt, yet it is true that the poet was a deeply religious man. His love of freedom and his perfect sincerity affected his creed. He had an intense dislike for hollow formalism. In his "Jamaica Funeral" he has pictured a hypocritical priest in colors as vivid almost as Chaucer's. He detested
"The holy man by Bishops holy made."
He loved sincerity, and the creed that came not from dry formalism, but from reason and from an honest heart.
It has often been overlooked by his critics that Freneau was a widely read and thoroughly cultured man; that he was a linguist of more than ordinary powers; and that he knew intimately the chief writings in Latin, Italian, French, and English. He was no ignorant, careless scribbler, tossing into the ephemeral columns of the press hasty rhymes of which he never thought again. He revised and corrected with patient care, and he took a deep interest in the children of his pen, rescuing at one time or another almost every one of them from the oblivion of the newspaper.
VIII.
As to the absolute literary value of Freneau's literary remains, there is room for honest difference of opinion. He is certainly not, if we judge him from what he actually produced, a great poet. But he must in fairness be viewed against the background of his age and his environment. Nature had equipped him as she has equipped few other men. He had the poet's creative imagination; he had an exquisite sense of the beautiful; and he had a realization of his own poetic endowments that kept him during a long life constantly true to the muse. Scarcely a month went by in all his life, from his early boyhood, that was not marked by poetic composition. Few poets, even in later and more auspicious days, have devoted their lives more assiduously to song.
Freneau was the first to catch what may be called the new poetic impulse in America—the new epic note. Previous to the Revolutionary era, America was destitute even of the germs of an original literature. Before she could produce anything really strong and individual, there was necessary some great primal impulse that should stir mightily the whole people; that should strike from their hands the old books and the old models; that should arouse them to a true realization of themselves; and that should clear the atmosphere for a new and broader view of human life. Such new forces are always needed by society, but they stalk with long strides over the centuries.
In pre-Revolutionary America such an upheaval was near at hand. It came with appalling suddenness. The colonists had had no gradual preparation for the idea of separation from England. As late as 1775, Franklin declared before the House of Commons that in all of his journeyings up and down the colonies he had not heard expressed one single wish for complete independence. Even after Concord and Bunker Hill, Freneau, the radical, could write: