What the Fathers Read
The later Elizabethans and the Jacobeans thought of the realm of Britain as comprising England, Scotland, Ireland, and Virginia—the fourth of these provinces being a more or less natural outlet for the energy of men who, cramped at home, had to seek gold or glory or adventure in wider regions. As the century advanced there grew up in the parent islands a party who felt no less cramped by theology than by geography, and they turned their imaginations to New England, where, it seemed, the faith might grow in the way they wanted. Certain of the proletarian members of this group went to Plymouth and a more prosperous body shortly afterwards to Boston, but neither they nor the sympathizers left behind understood that the saints had been really sundered by the emigration. Not for a century and more did the inhabitants of Boston and thereabouts, in Massachusetts, cease to look towards London as their cultural capital much as they had looked towards it while they lived in and near Boston in Lincolnshire; they were further removed, and that was all. The tongue that Shakespeare spoke, the faith and morals Milton held....
The Puritans in New England, indeed, knew or cared little enough about Shakespeare. The late Thomas Goddard Wright’s scrupulous researches have unearthed no signs that Shakespeare’s works reached the Puritan colonies before 1722, when the reprobated James Franklin announced that he had them at the office of the New England Courant for any writer who might want to use them; or before 1723, when Harvard, also under fire for its lack of orthodoxy, listed them in its library catalogue. Nor was even Milton greatly valued for his poetry, though four copies of Paradise Lost are known to have been shipped to Boston in 1683; though Cotton Mather clearly knew the epic; though Yale received a gift, among other books, of all Milton’s poetical works in 1714; and though Harvard in 1721-22 acquired “a new & fair Edicon” in two volumes (probably Tonson’s noble quartos of 1720). Mather once or twice quotes Chaucer, whose writings were in both the Yale and Harvard libraries by 1723; Anne Bradstreet makes a solitary—and conventional—reference to “Spencer’s poetry”; her father, Gov. Thomas Dudley, curiously enough, possessed the “Vision of Piers Plowman.” But on the whole there was scanty demand in New England for imaginative literature of any kind.
It is the contention of Mr. Wright, persuasively sustained, that while New England was no great country for poets it was a good country for scholars, and that it does not suffer by comparison with provincial Britain as regards its literary culture. The press at Cambridge was set up before the first one at Glasgow, or Rochester, or Exeter, or Manchester, or Liverpool. The ministers and magistrates of the colonies brought books with them, and regularly received more. Theologians and theological treatises flowed back and forth across the Atlantic in a consistent stream. “Old England,” says the Magnalia with pride, in 1702, after the founding of Harvard “had more ministers from New, than our New England had since then from Old.” The younger John Winthrop was one of the early fellows of the Royal Society, and but for the Restoration might possibly have drawn Robert Boyle and others like him to Connecticut to establish there a “Society for Promoting Natural Knowledge”; Jonathan Brewster of that colony was by 1656 already a practising alchemist who felt sure he could perfect his elixir in five years. Even scholarship, however, tended to fall into a lower status as the first generation passed; in 1700 Harvard had certainly a smaller prestige abroad than it had had in 1650. The distance from London and the English universities was beginning to have its effect, precisely as would have happened had any of the English counties suddenly been cut off from them by a thousand leagues of dangerous ocean. Irrepressible scholars like Cotton Mather kept up the European tradition, but learning can hardly have been so generally diffused as it was during the first half century.
The creative instincts underwent a similar decline. John Cotton and his contemporaries were as eminent in theology as the Puritan ministers in England, and the funeral elegies which were their sole contributions to belles-lettres can stand unashamed side by side with similar English performances. But as the Restoration succeeded the Commonwealth, and in turn was succeeded by “Anna’s reign,” New England neither evolved a literary class to follow, at a distance, the modes of the capital nor produced, as the English provinces were doing, an occasional wit who could leave home and make his literary fortunes in London. For that there was needed a stronger secular taste than New England had. Literature settled down to sermons. Instead of Marlowe’s tragedy, people read the prose History of the damnable Life and deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus; the earliest play printed in New England seems to have been Lillo’s edifying George Barnwell, issued by James Franklin in the Weekly Journal in 1732. And yet the importers’ lists which Mr. Wright has unearthed make it clear that for a long time such plays and romances as Sidney’s Arcadia, Head’s English Rogue, Pilgrim’s Progress, Guy of Warwick, and Reynard the Fox had been coming over in considerable numbers. John Dunton—an unreliable fellow, it is true—tells that during his stay in Boston in 1686 he had a customer who bought such books, “which to set off the better, she wou’d ask for Books of Gallantry.” In 1713 Cotton Mather was so much annoyed by the “foolish Songs and Ballads, which the Hawkers and Pedlars carry into all parts of the Countrey,” that he wanted, “by way of Antidote,” to issue “poetical Composures full of Piety”—including some of the “excellent Watts’s Hymns.” And shortly thereafter the influence of the English wits had become so strong that Benjamin Franklin is seen to begin his literary career with imitations of the Spectator and that Mather Byles,
Harvard’s honor, and New England’s hope,
Bids fair to rise and sing and rival Pope,
as a poetical friend neatly put it at the time.