III | Franklin's Literary Theory and Practice [i-121]
Uniting the "wit of Voltaire with the simplicity of Rousseau," Franklin achieved a style "only surpassed by the unimprovable Hobbes of Malmesbury, the paragon of perspicuity." Characterized by simplicity, order, and a trenchant pointedness, his prose style was "a principal means" of his "advancement."[i-122]
He was "extreamly ambitious... to be a tolerable English writer." In the Autobiography he recalls that he read books in "polemic divinity," Plutarch's Lives (probably Dryden's translation), Pilgrims Progress, Defoe's Essays upon Several Projects, Mather's Essays to do Good, Xenophon's Memorabilia,[i-123] the Spectator papers, and the writings of Shaftesbury and Collins.
Born in Boston, he knew the Bible,[i-124] characterized by the apostle of Augustan correctness, Jonathan Swift, as possessing "that simplicity, which is one of the greatest perfections in any language." If Franklin did not achieve its "sublime eloquence," he approximated at intervals its directness and simplicity. In reading Defoe's Essays he learned that Queen Anne's England urged that writers be "as concise as possible" and avoid all "superfluous crowding in of insignificant words, more than are needful to express the thing intended." (It is possible that Defoe's efforts "to polish and refine the English tongue," to avoid "all irregular additions that ignorance and affectation have introduced," influenced Franklin in favor of "correctness" and against provincialisms.) Defoe's "explicit, easy, free, and very plain" rhetoric is Franklin's.
After Franklin's father warned him that his arguments were not well-ordered and trenchantly expressed, he desperately sought to acquire a convincing prose style. In 1717 James, Franklin's elder brother, returned from serving a printer's apprenticeship in London. James had known and been attracted to Augustan England, the England of the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian. Familiar is Franklin's narrative of how he patterned his fledgling style on the pages of the Spectator papers, and learned to satisfy his father—and himself. Like the neoclassicists, Franklin learned to write by imitation, by respectfully subordinating himself to those he recognized as masters, and not, like the romanticists, by expressing his own ego in revolt against convention and conformity to traditional standards. The group who supplied copy for James's New England Courant, we are told, were trying to write like the Spectator. "The very look of an ordinary first page of the Courant is like that of the Spectator page."[i-125] In the Dogood Papers (1722) and the Busy-Body series (1728) Franklin's writings show a literal indebtedness to the style and even substance of the Spectator.[i-126] If, after the Busy-Body essays, Franklin's writings bear little resemblance to the elegance and glow of the Spectator, he did learn from it a long-remembered lesson in orderliness. From the Spectator he may have learned to temper wit with morality and morality with wit; he may have learned the neoclassic objection to the "unhappy Force of an Imagination, unguided by the Check of Reason and Judgment";[i-127] he may have acquired his distrust of foreign phrases when English ones were as good, or better, insisting on the use of native English undefiled. It is interesting but perhaps futile to conjecture to what degree Franklin at this time, on reading Spectator No. 160, "On Geniuses" (warning against a servile imitation of ancient authors, a warning which anticipates the cult of original geniuses of later decades), would have been predisposed against ancient literature and languages. If the Spectator was partially responsible for his pleasantries at the expense of Greek in Dogood Paper No. IV, his attitude toward the ancients is more ostensibly the result of his later preoccupation with the sciences,[i-128] and of contact with representatives of the deistic time-spirit whose faith in progress led them to underrate the past.
When Franklin went to live in London in 1724-1726, and became familiar with such men of science as Dr. Henry Pemberton and others, he must have become aware of ideals of prose style not a little unlike those practised by the preachers of his Boston. In Boston he had heard (and in the polemical works in his father's library, read) sermons couched in a style satirized in Hudibras as a "Babylonish dialect... of patched and piebald languages" (ll. 93 ff.). Sensing the disparity between the seventeenth-century prose styles and the empirical, logical, and orderly method of science, the Royal Society not long after its inception inaugurated a campaign for a clarity akin to the pattern urged by Hobbes: "The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, Reason is the Pace, Encrease of Science the way; and the benefit of man-kind the end. And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering among innumerable absurdities."[i-129] Summarizing the intent of the stylistic reformations instituted by the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat urged writers "to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words... a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars."[i-130] It is asserted that the program of the Royal Society "called for stylistic reform as loudly as for reformation in philosophy. Moreover, this attitude was in the public mind indissolubly associated with the Society."[i-131] It is only reasonable to infer that Franklin (as a member of the Royal Society and as founder of the American Philosophical Society) was alive to the movement toward "undefiled plainness" which had for half a century been gathering momentum.[i-132]
Even as Cartesianism[i-133] in France is said to have fostered logic and lucidity of detail, and that which is universally valid and recognized by all men, and that art which is aloof to the non-human world, so in England may Newtonianism (which overthrew Cartesianism) have conditioned writers to develop a uniform style, purged of tenuous rhetorical devices. An age characterized by a worship of reason, which was supposed to be identical in all men, an age deferring to the general mind of man, would be hostile to the rhetorical caprices of those expressing their private, idiosyncratic enthusiasms. If the neoclassic apotheosis of simplicity and freedom from intricacy was the result of a "rationalistic anti-intellectualism,"[i-134] expressed in terms of hostility to belabored proof of ideas known to the general will, then it would seem that one of the factors sturdily conditioning this hostility was Newtonian science. Admitting that reason leads to uniformitarianism, one may recall that the processes of science are discoverable by reason, and that such a cosmologist as Newton illustrated mathematically and empirically a system, grand in its lucidity, and capable of being apprehended by all through reason. If the deistic fear of "enthusiasm" in religion—the individual will prevailing against the consensus gentium—parallels, according to Professor Lovejoy, the neoclassic fear of feeling and the unrestrained play of imagination in art, then Newtonian science, as it reinforced deism, was no negligible factor in discrediting enthusiasm, and hence indirectly militating against originality, emotion, and the unchecked imagination. Is it not conceivable that the Newtonian[i-135] cosmology, popularized by a vast discipleship, challenged the scientists and men of letters alike to achieve a corresponding order, clarity, and simplicity in poetry and prose?
After Franklin's return from London, he reinforced his Addison-like style with the rhetorical implications of science and Newtonianism: in his Preface (1729) to the Pennsylvania Gazette he observed that an editor ought to possess a "great Easiness and Command of Writing and Relating Things clearly and intelligibly, and in few Words."[i-136] Good writing, in Franklin's opinion, "should proceed regularly from things known to things unknown [surely the method of all inductive reasoning and science] distinctly and clearly without confusion. The words used should be the most expressive that the language affords, provided that they are the most generally understood. Nothing should be expressed in two words that can be as well expressed in one; that is, no synonyms should be used, or very rarely, but the whole should be as short as possible, consistent with clearness; the words should be so placed as to be agreeable to the ear in reading; summarily it should be smooth, clear, and short, for the contrary qualities are displeasing."[i-137] Like the members of the Royal Society, Franklin would bring the words of written discourse "as near as possible to the spoken."[i-138] In 1753 he observed: "If my Hypothesis [concerning waterspouts] is not the Truth itself it is [at] least as naked: For I have not with some of our learned Moderns, disguis'd my Nonsense in Greek, cloth'd it in Algebra or adorn'd it with Fluxions. You have it in puris naturalibus."[i-139] He briefly summarized his rhetorical ideal, in a letter to Hume: "In writings intended for persuasion and for general information, one cannot be too clear; and every expression in the least obscure is a fault."[i-140]
Unlike Jefferson, "no friend to what is called purism, but a zealous one" to neology, Franklin had an inveterate antipathy toward the use of colloquialisms, provincialisms, and extravagant innovations.[i-141] In another letter to Hume, he hoped that "we shall always in America make the best English of this Island [Britain] our standard."[i-142] If he did not hold the typical eighteenth-century view that "English must be subjected to a process of classical regularizing,"[i-143] neither did he, with his friend Joseph Priestley, espouse the idea of correctness, dependent only on usage. In general, he seems to have had a tendency toward purism; it is not unlikely that as a youth he was influenced by Swift's Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue.[i-144] Striving for correctness, and the avoidance of "affected Words or high-flown Phrases"[i-145] he approximated the curiosa felicitas of the neoclassicists.[i-146]
A solid neoclassicist[i-147] in style. Franklin accepted the canon of imitation as it was imperfectly understood in the eighteenth century. To the extent, however, that the models were conceived of as approximating the consensus gentium, fragments illustrating universal reason, there may be little disparity between neoclassic imitation and Aristotle's use of the term in the sense of imitating a higher ethical reality. His own life, Franklin thought, (with the exception of a few "errata") was "fit to be imitated."[i-148] A. H. Smyth notes, perhaps extravagantly, "Nothing but the 'Autobiography' of Benvenuto Cellini, or the 'Confessions' of Rousseau, can enter into competition with it."[i-149] This may suggest a clue to the durable nature of Franklin's life-tale. Cellini, it is true, was tremendously alive to Benvenuto, even as Michel de Montaigne was interested in his own whims, but neither Cellini, nor Montaigne, nor Franklin, could have penned the Confessions, the thesis of which is that if Rousseau is not better than other men at least he is different. Cellini, Montaigne, and Franklin, on the other hand, while allowing us to see their fancies and singular biases, tended to emphasize those qualities which they held in common with their age, nation, and even the continuity of mankind. Montaigne, it will be remembered, sought to express la connaissance de l'homme en général. With no aspirations to become an original genius, Franklin, both in his prose style and his yearning for perfection, sought the guidance of models, which he conceived as embodying universal reason. Had he been a writer of epics[i-150] he would with Pope have acquired "from ancient rules a just esteem"—when the rules were, in his mind, "according to nature."
Likewise Franklin is representative of the Enlightenment in his description of the province of the imagination. It is an axiom that "the belief that the imagination ought to be kept in check by reason, pervades the critical literature of the first half of the eighteenth century."[i-151] Franklin observes that poetasters above all need instruction on how to govern "Fancy [Imagination] with Judgement."[i-152] He implies that imagination is a power lending an air of unreality to a creation, often like "the Effect of some melancholy Humour."[i-153] He feared that the unchecked fancy would vitiate his ideals of simplicity and correctness, and a sober and practical argument.
Posing as no original genius independent of the wisdom of the ages,[i-154] confessing that "from a child" he "was fond of reading" and that as a youth "reading was the only amusement" he allowed himself, Franklin was not backward in cataloguing many of the authors who helped to motivate his thought. He seems to have been acquainted with portions of Plato, Aesop, Pliny, Xenophon, Herodotus, Epictetus, Vergil, Horace, Tacitus, Seneca, Sallust, Cicero, Tully, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Bacon, Dryden, Tillotson, Rabelais,[i-155] Bunyan, Fénelon, Chevalier de Ramsay,[i-156] Pythagoras, Waller, Defoe, Addison and Steele, William Temple, Pope, Swift, Voltaire, Boyle, Algernon Sidney, Trenchard and Gordon,[i-157] Young, Mandeville, Locke, Shaftesbury, Collins, Bolingbroke, Richardson, Whiston, Watts, Thomson, Burke, Cowper, Darwin, Rowe, Rapin, Herschel, Paley, Lord Kames, Adam Smith, Hume, Robertson, Lavoisier, Buffon, Dupont de Nemours, Whitefield, Pemberton, Blackmore, John Ray, Petty, Turgot, Priestley, Paine, Mirabeau, Quesnay, Raynal, Morellet, and Condorcet, to suggest only the more prominent.[i-158] Such a catalogue tends to discredit the all too common idea that the untutored tradesman was torpid to the information and wisdom found in books.
If his prose style shows none of the delicate rhythms and haunting imagery of the prose born of the romantic movement, it is nevertheless far from pedestrian. If it seems devoid of imaginative splendor, it is not lacking in force and persuasion.[i-159] After one has noted Franklin's canon of simplicity and order, his insistence on correctness, his assumed role as Censor Morum, his acceptance of the doctrine of imitation and the use of imagination guided by reason, one returns to the question of the degree to which the ideals of rhetoric fostered by the men of science may have helped to motivate Franklin's prose style, and to what degree his acceptance of deism augmented by Newtonianism may have furnished him with a rationale which lent sanction to his demand for a simple style.
Sir Humphrey Davy found in Franklin's scientific papers a language lucid and decorous, "almost as worthy of admiration as the doctrine"[i-160] they contain. S. G. Fisher buoyantly maintained that Franklin's "is the most effective literary style ever used by an American." After reading Franklin's paper on stoves he was "inclined to lay down the principle that the test of literary genius is the ability to be fascinating about stoves."[i-161] Whether he writes soberly (albeit tempered by Gallic fancy) of the mutability of life, as in The Ephemera, or of sophisticated social amenities, as in the letters to Madame Brillon and Madame Helvétius, or in his memoirs, in which solid fact follows solid fact, sifted by the years of good fortune, Franklin's style never loses its compelling charm and vigor. If he never wrote (or uttered) less than was demanded by the nature of his subject, neither would he have disgusted the Clerk of Oxenford who
Nought o word spak he more than was nede.
He was no formal literary critic such as Boileau, Lessing, or Coleridge, and no acknowledged arbiter of taste, such as Dr. Johnson. Yet Franklin, in voluminous practice, enjoying tremendous international vogue, proved that his theories bore the acid test of effectiveness. Indirectly he challenged his readers to honor principles of rhetoric which could so trenchantly serve the demands of his catholic pen, and make him one of the most widely read of all Americans.