AN errant perusal of half the pages of this little volume once caused me to determine to eschew literary criticism in the preface I was asked to write, and to speak of the book solely according to its historical and hence its intrinsic value.
Continual reading here and there, and, at length, a careful examination of the work as a whole have convinced me that several merits may be attributed to the book which range themselves separately in my mind and which are distinct and wholly unique characteristics. They seem to me to be as follows: the bare antiquarian value—as a relic, rare, and old; the historical-literary value, as an expression of the times in which it was written; and its purely artistic worth, as a specimen of English novel writing.
The book was published, as the title page shows, early in 1789, and the self-acknowledged author was Mrs. Perez Morton whose maiden name was Sarah Wentworth Apthorp. Miss Apthorp was born in Braintree in 1759, and had, before her marriage in 1777 with Mr. Morton, gained something more than a local reputation as a clever maker of rhymes, having contributed many poems to the early New England Magazine—the first periodical published in America. These, with additional verses and short didactic essays, were together brought out in 1823, under the title of “My Mind and Its Thoughts.” The edition was small, and sold entirely by subscription. Miss Apthorp wrote over the pseudonym of “Philenia.” Her longer poems, epics, are “Ouabi, or The Virtue of Nature: an Indian Tale in Four Cantos,” and “Beacon Hill,” in which is told the story of the American Revolution. This last is said to have moved Robert Treat Paine to designate her as the “American Sappho.”
In 1788, while Mr. and Mrs. Morton were occupying the historical Taylor mansion in Dorchester, a painful domestic tragedy occurred, which, taken in connection with similar contingencies that were happening in the society in which they moved, doubtless gave “Philenia” the impetus and raison d’être for the “Power of Sympathy,” published anonymously the following year.
Although evidently written with the purest motive, the good people of that day were not anxious to receive the lesson, probably because many of them figured as examples. The edition was bought up and destroyed,—as Drake remarks in his “History of Roxbury”, “so effectually suppressed that no copy is now known to exist.” With the exception of the book now before me, I believe this to be true.
The condition of affairs in America, immediately following the Revolution, was not what many suppose. The people were not completely united in raving against John Bull and his institutions. It is true the lower classes and those of the middle class, who had been excited into believing that delusive and, for them, hypocritical motto; “No taxation without representation”, or who had gained or lost all through the late fratricidal struggle, were thriving wonderfully on “spread eagle” patriotism stimulated by “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia”—which, today, unfortunately bandage the eyes of America’s native civilization—and entertained a cordial hatred of England and all things English. Later they were to sympathize with Mirabeau, with Robespierre and others, and cry death to that French King who had so lately saved them from the dismal caprices of George III and his ignorant and haughty ministers. Politically, they gloried in the name of Democrat.
Nevertheless, there existed an aristocracy in America; an aristocracy that had refrained from becoming Tory solely because personal interest demanded that it should become rebel. Its members were English in taste and manner, in their hearts they were Royalists. They called themselves Federalists. To this category belonged the Hancocks, John Adams, Hamilton, perhaps even Washington himself; and here we find the Apthorps and the Mortons. They had a fondness for court and ceremony—thought and culture were still colonial; they talked of the American gentleman, while they dreamed of the English nobleman; for all that, there was a rapidly growing strain of independence, of confidence in self. All of which qualities have today evolved the best type of the American lady and gentleman.
Early in the second half of the eighteenth century, a literary revolution was in progress in England: sentimentalism, which so long had been mistaken for sentiment, was given its proper place; knightly romance was sneered at and shelved, the hale hearty laughter of Fielding disturbed the spinsters and gossip mongers sipping their tea in the corners; Laurence Sterne, that sentimentalist in realism, condemned in caricature what the foolish thought he defended in truth; and Sheridan, the hater of sham and conventionality, satirized the social deformity of the times in drama, drawing scenes and characters from real life as found in the famous Pump-room at Bath.