In his use of his native land and his familiar surroundings as a background for art, Freneau discovered the poetical side of the Indian, and thus became the literary father of Brockden Brown, Cooper, and the little school of poets which in the early years of the century fondly believed that the aboriginal American was to be the central figure in the poetry of the new world. To the little real poetry that there is in the Indian, Freneau did full justice, but he went to no such absurd lengths as did Eastburn and Whittier. The "Indian Death Song," if it indeed be his, is full of the wild, stoical heroism of the brave who is dying beneath the torture of his enemies. In "The Indian Student" he has covered fully the Indian's love for the pathless forest, and to the untamable wildness of his nature. "The Dying Indian" and "The Indian Burying-Ground" sum up what is essentially poetic in Indian legend and all that is pathetic in the fate of the vanishing race. Poetry, if it is to confine itself to the truth, can do little more for the Indian.
Such was Philip Freneau, a man in every respect worthy to bear the title of "the father of American poetry." He was the first true poet born upon our continent; he realized in his early youth his vocation; he gave himself with vigor and enthusiasm to his calling; he fitted himself by wide reading and classic culture; he received the full inspiration of a great movement in human society; he lifted up his voice to sing, but he was smothered and silenced by his contemporaries. He was all alone; he had about him no circle of "Pleiades" to encourage and assist; he had no traditions, religious or otherwise, that would compel silence. He was out of step with the theology of his generation; he was out of tune with the music of his day; he was beating time a half century ahead of the chorus about him. The people have to be educated to revolution, and America had not yet learned to take the initiative in things intellectual and æsthetic. She must follow the literary fashions beyond the sea. Freneau was for breaking violently away from England and for setting up a new standard of culture and literary art on this side the water.
"Can we never be thought
To have learning or grace
Unless it be brought
From that damnable place?"
he cried. But he reckoned without his countrymen. Not until Emerson's day did it dawn upon America that it was possible for her to think for herself and make poetry that did not echo the English bards. Thus did America reject her earliest prophet; thus did she stop her ears and compel him to lay aside his seven-stringed lyre for the horn and the bagpipes.
Freneau lived to see his discarded harp in full tune in other hands, first in England and then in his own land. There is something truly pathetic in the figure of the old minstrel, who had realized almost nothing of his early dreams, and yet who had been told by the great Jeffries that the time would surely come when his poems would command a commentator like Gray, who had been extravagantly praised by such masters as Scott and Campbell, who had written to Madison as late as 1815, "my publisher tells me the town will have them [his verses] and of course have them they will," it is pathetic to see this poet, in his hoary old age, for he lived until 1832, realizing that he had been utterly forgotten, witnessing the triumph of the very songs that had haunted his youth, and seeing those who had not half his native ability crowned by those who had rejected and forgotten him. Such ever is the penalty of being born out of due time.
The present age has also been unjust to Freneau. It has left his poems in their first editions, which are now extremely rare and costly; it has scattered his letters and papers to the winds; it has garbled and distorted his life in every book of reference; it has left untold the true story of his career; it has judged him from generalizations that have floated from no one knows where. But time works slowly with her verdicts; true merit in the end is sure to receive its deserts; and Freneau may even yet be given the place that is his.
[1] Ann Maury's Memoirs of a Huguenot.
[2] In the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
[3] Madison Papers, Vol. XIII. p. 9.
[4] Introduction to the 1846 edition of "Modern Chivalry."