Chapter II (3)

The Scioto Company turned out to be a swindling land-company, the precursor of many that have resembled it. The lands they offered had been bought of the Ohio Company, but were never paid for. When the poor French barbers, fiddlers, and bakers, as they are called in a contemporary narrative, reached the banks of _la belle rivière_, they found that their title-deeds were good for nothing, and that the woods produced savages instead of sugar. Some died of privation, some were scalped, and some found their way to New Orleans. The few who remained eventually obtained a grant of a few acres from the Ohio Company, by paying for them over again.

In the mean time the French Revolution had broken out, and Barlow saw the visions and dreamed the dreams of the enthusiasts of that day. He dropped the land business, and he dropped his New England prejudices, religious as well as political, and his New England common sense. Connecticut men who wander into other lands and other opinions seem peculiarly subject to such violent transformations. Some of the most ignivorous of our Southern countrymen are the offspring of Connecticut; and, strange as it may appear, the sober land of the pumpkin and onion exports more arbiters of elegance and punctilio, more judges without appeal of horses, wine, and beauty, more gentlemen of the most sensitive and demonstrative honor, than any other Northern State.

Inspired by the instincts of his race, Barlow fancied he saw the approach of a new era of perfection. To hasten its advent in England, he translated Volney's "Ruins," and went to London to publish his translation. There he wrote his "Advice to the Privileged Classes," a political pamphlet, and became an active member of the Constitution Society. The Society commissioned him as delegate to the French Convention, with an address of congratulation and a gift of a thousand pairs of shoes. The Convention rewarded him with the dignity of _Citoyen Francais_. Barlow adopted the character, and carried it out. He sang at a supper a parody of "God save the King," composed by himself.

"Fame, let thy trumpet sound!
Tell all the world around
How Capet fell!
And when great George's poll
Shall in the basket roll,
Let mercy then control
The Guillotine!

"God save the Guillotine,
Till England's King and Queen
Her power shall prove;
When all the sceptred crew
Have paid their homage to
The Guillotine!"

A few years before, Barlow had dedicated the "Vision of Columbus" to poor Capet, whose destruction he celebrates so pleasantly,--with many assurances of the gratitude of America, and of his own veneration. "_Coelum, non animum_," would never have been written, if Horace had properly understood Connecticut character.

Barlow's zeal was pleasing to the rulers of France. They sent him and the Abbé Grégoire to revolutionize Savoy, and to divide it into departments. After his return, he became rich by speculation, and lived handsomely in the Hotel de Clermont-Tonnerre. His reputation extended to his own country. The United States employed him to negotiate with the Barbary pirates,--that is to say, to buy off the wretched cutthroats who infested the Mediterranean. He went to Africa, and made arrangements which were considered advantageous then, and would be hooted at as disgraceful now. In the treaty with Algiers occurred a passage that gave great offence to his friends at home, and to Federalists in general. It was to this effect, if not in these words: "That the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

In 1805, after seventeen years of absence, Barlow returned to America, built himself a house near Washington, and called it Kalorama. Jefferson and the Democrats received him with open arms; he embraced them with equal warmth, and was a very great man for some time. A new edition of the "Columbiad" completed his fame,--an edition gotten up at his own expense, with engravings by his friend Robert Fulton; the paper, type, illustrations, and binding, far superior to anything as yet produced by American publishers. At the request of the President, Barlow went back to France as Minister, in the place of General Armstrong. It was the winter of the Russian campaign. A personal interview with the Emperor on the subject of the Berlin and Milan Decrees seemed necessary, and Barlow hurried to Wilna to meet him. The weather was unusually severe, the roads rough, and the accommodations wretched. Cold and exposure brought on a violent illness; and Barlow expired in a miserable hut near Cracow. The "Columbiad" is an enlargement, or rather a dilution, of the "Vision of Columbus," by the addition of some two thousand verses. The epic opens with Columbus in prison; to him enters Hesper, an angel. The angel leads Columbus to the Mount of Vision, whence he beholds the panorama of the Western Continent he had discovered. Hesper acts as showman, and explains the tableaux as they roll on. He points out the geographical features of America, not forgetting Connecticut River; relates the history of Mexico and of Peru, and explains the origin of races, cautioning Columbus against the theory of several Adams. Turning north, he describes the settlement of the English colonies, and narrates the old French War of General Wolfe and the American Revolution, with the customary episodes,--Saratoga, Yorktown, Major André, Miss McCrea, and the prison-ships. Finally, the angel predicts the glory of the world's future,--perpetual peace, unrestricted commerce, public works, health and longevity, one universal language. The globe, "one confederate, independent sway," shall

"Spread with the sun, and bound the walks of day;
One central system, one all-ruling soul,
Live through the parts, and regulate the whole."

There is evidently no room for the serpent Secession in Barlow's paradise. This grand federation of the terrestrial ball is governed by a general council of elderly married men, "long rows of reverend sires sublime," presided over by a "sire elect shining in peerless grandeur." The delegates hold their sessions in Mesopotamia, within a "sacred mansion" of high architectural pretensions.

"On rocks of adamant the walls ascend,
Tall columns heave, and sky-like arches bend;
Bright o'er the golden roof the glittering spires
Far in the concave meet the solar fires;
Four blazing fronts, with gates unfolding high,
Look with immortal splendor round the sky."

In the spacious court of the capitol of the world stands the statue of the Genius of Earth, holding Truth's mighty mirror in his hand. On the pedestal are carved the noblest arts of man. Beneath the footstool of the Genius,

"all destructive things,
The mask of priesthood and the mace of kings,
Lie trampled in the dust; for here, at last,
Fraud, folly, error, all their emblems cast.
Each envoy here unloads his weary hand
Of some old idol from his native land.
One flings a pagod on the mingled heap;
One lays a crescent, one a cross to sleep;
Swords, sceptres, mitres, crowns and globes and stars,
Codes of false fame and stimulants to wars,
Sink in the settling mass. Since guile began,
These are the agents of the woes of man."

It will be observed that Barlow improved slightly upon the old loyalist cry, "_Une loi, un roi, une foi._" One government, one reverend sire elect, and no religion, was his theory of the future of mankind.

Few men in these degenerate days have the endurance to read the "Columbiad" through; but "Hasty Pudding," which Barlow celebrated in verse as good sound republican diet, may be read with some pleasure. It belongs to the same class of poems as Philips's "Cider," Dyer's "Fleece," and Grainger's "Sugar-Cane," and is quite as good as most of them.

There is little to be said about Alsop. He was a scholarly gentleman, who published a few mild versions from the Italian and the Scandinavian, and a poem on the "Memory of Washington," and was considerate enough not to publish a poem on the "Charms of Fancy," which still exists, we believe, in manuscript. In some verses extracted from it by the editors of the "Cyclopædia of American Literature" we recognize with interest that traveller of the future who is to moralize over the ruins of the present,--known to all readers as Macaulay's New-Zealander, although Goldsmith, Kirke White, and others had already introduced him to the public. Alsop brings this Wandering Jew of literature from Nootka Sound to gaze on "many a shattered pile and broken stone," where "fair Bostonia," "York's proud emporium," or Philadelphia, "caught the admiring gaze."

The wild-eyed, excitable Dr. Hopkins had more vigor and originality than his brother stars. There is much rough humor in his burlesque of the essay of Brackenridge of Pittsburg on the Indian War:--

"As if our God
One single thought on Indians e'er bestowed;
To them his care extends, or even knew,
Before Columbus told him, where they grew";

and in his epitaph on the "Victim of a Cancer Quack":--

"The case was this:--a pimple rose
Southeast a little of his nose,
Which daily reddened and grew bigger,
As too much drinking gave it vigor";

and in the "Hypocrite's Hope":--

"Blest is the man who from the womb
To saintship him betakes;
And when too soon his child shall come,
A long confession makes";

and in the squib on Ethan Allen's infidel book:--

"Lo! Allen 'scaped from British jails,
His tushes broke by biting nails,
Appears in hyperborean skies,
To tell the world the Bible lies."

Dr. Hopkins published very little; he might be excused, if he had written more.

Addison said, he never yet knew an author who had not his admirers. The Connecticut authors were no exception to this rule. To begin with, they admired themselves, and they admired one another; each played squire to his gifted friend, and sounded the trumpet of his fame. It was, "See! Trumbull leads the train," or "the ardent throng"; "Trumbull! earliest boast of Fame"; "Lo! Trumbull wakes the lyre."

"Superior poet, in whose classic strain
In bright accordance wit and fancy reign;
Whose powers of genius in their ample range
Comprise each subject and each tuneful change,
Each charm of melody to Phoebus dear,
The grave, the gay, the tender, the severe."

Barlow is "a Child of Genius"; Columbus owes much of his glory to him.

"In Virgilian Barlow's tuneful lines
With added splendor great Columbus shines."

Then we have "Majestic Dwight, sublime in epic strain"; "Blest Dwight"; Dwight of "Homeric fire." Colonel Humphreys is fully up to the regulation standard:--

"In lore of nations skilled and brave in arms,
See Humphreys glorious from the field retire,
Sheathe the glad sword and string the sounding lyre."

Dwight thought "McFingal" much superior to "Hudibras"; and Hopkinson, the author of "Hail Columbia," mentions, as a melancholy instance of æsthetic hallucination, that Secretary Wolcott, whose taste in literature was otherwise good, had an excessive admiration for "The Conquest of Canaan." A general chorus of neighbors and friends rose in the columns of the "Connecticut Magazine and New Haven Gazette":--"It is with a noble and patriotic pride that America boasts of her Barlow, Dwight, Trumbull, and Humphreys, the poetical luminaries of Connecticut"; and all true New-Englanders preferred their home-made verses to the best imported article. The fame of the Seven extended into the neighboring States; Boston, not yet the Athens of America, confessed "that Pegasus was not backed by better horsemen from any part of the Union." But the glory grew fainter as the distance increased from the centre of illumination. In New York, praise was qualified. The Rev. Samuel Miller of that city, who published in 1800 "A Brief Retrospect of the Literature of the Eighteenth Century," calls Mr. Trumbull a respectable poet, thinks that Dr. Dwight's "Greenfield Hill" is entitled to considerable praise, and finds much poetic merit in Mr. Barlow's "Vision"; but he closes the chapter sadly, with a touch of Johnson's vigor:--"The annals of American literature are short and simple. The history of poverty is usually neither very various nor very interesting." Farther South the voice of the scoffer was heard. Mr. Robert Morris ventured to say in the Assembly of Pennsylvania, that America had not as yet produced a good poet. Great surprise and indignation, when this speech reached the eyes of the Connecticut men! Morris might understand banking, but in taste he was absurdly deficient. No poets! What did he call John Trumbull of Hartford, and Joel Barlow, author of "The Vision of Columbus"? "We appeal to the bar of taste, whether the writings of the poets now living in Connecticut are not equal to anything which the present age can produce in the English language."

Cowper showed excellent sense when he wrote,--"Wherever else I am accounted dull, let me at least pass for a genius at Olney." The Hartford Wits passed for geniuses in Connecticut, which is better, as far as the genius is concerned, than any extent or duration of posthumous fame. Let their shades, then, be satisfied with the good things in the way of praise they received in their lives; for between us and them there is fixed a great gulf of oblivion, into which Time, the merciless critic from whose judgment there is no appeal, has tumbled their works.

In 1793, a volume of "American Poems, Selected and Original," was published in Litchfield by subscription. A second volume was promised, if the first met with "that success which the value of the poems it contained seemed to warrant"; but no second volume appeared. When Hopkins died, in 1801, the constellation was sinking fast to the horizon; a few years later it had set, and only elderly inhabitants remembered when the Down-Eastern sky was made bright by it. Barlow's magnificent edition revived the recollection for a time, and the old defiant cry was raised again, that the "Columbiad" was comparable, not to say superior, to any poem that had appeared in Europe since the independence of the United States. But English reviewers refused to chime in. Their critical remarks were not flattering, although merciful as compared with the jeers of the "Edinburgh" at Byron's "Hours of Idleness," or the angry abuse with which the earlier productions of the Lake School were received. Nevertheless, Paulding, Ingersoll, and Walsh, indignant, sprang to their quills, and attacked the prejudiced British with the _argumentum ad hominem_, England's "sores and blotches," etc.; the _argumentum Tu quoque_, "We're as good a poet as you are, and a better, too"; and, lastly, pleaded minority in bar of adverse criticism, "We are a young nation," and so on. This was to yield the point. If a young nation necessarily writes verses similar in quality to those of very young persons, it would always be proper to take Uncle Toby's advice, "and say no more about it." Deaf to Walsh's "Appeal," and to Inchiquin's "Letters," Sydney Smith, as late as January, 1820, asked, in the "Edinburgh," that well-known and stinging question, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" Even at home, "Hesper" and "The Mount of Vision" soon faded out of sight. At that time, 1808-1810, readers of verse had, not to mention Cowper, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion," "Gertrude of Wyoming," "Thalaba," Moore's "Anacreon," and two volumes by William Wordsworth,--poems with which the American producer was unable to compete. In 1820 Samuel G. Goodrich of Hartford published a complete edition of Trumbull's works in two volumes, the type large and the paper excellent,--with a portrait of the author, and good engravings of McFingal in the Cellar, and of Abijah Mann bearing the Town Resolves of Marshfield to Boston. The sale did not repay the outlay. When Trumbull died, in 1831, he was as completely forgotten as any Revolutionary colonel or captain.

Humphreys once feeling, that, in spite of all his struggles, he was not doing much, exclaimed,--

"Why, niggard language, dost thou balk my soul?"

He did not see the reason why: his soul had not much to say. This was the trouble with them all. There was not a spark of genuine poetic fire in the Seven. They sang without an ear for music; they strewed their pages with faded artificial flowers which they mistook for Nature, and endeavored to overcome sterility of imagination and want of passion by veneering with magniloquent epithets. They padded their ill-favored Muse, belaced and beruffled her, and covered her with garments stiffened with tawdry embroidery to hide her leanness; they overpowdered and overrouged to give her the beauty Providence had refused. I say their Muse, but they had no Muse of their own; they imported an inferior one from England, and tried her in every style,--Pope's and Dryden's, Goldsmith's and Gray's, and never rose above a poor imitation; producing something which looked like a model, but lacked its flavor: wooden poetry, in short,--a genuine product of the soil.

Judging from their allusions to themselves, no one of the Seven mistrusted his own poetical powers or the gifts of his colleagues. They seem to have died in their error, unrepentant, in the comfortable hope of an hereafter of fame. Their works have faded out of sight like an unfinished photograph. It was a sad waste of human endeavor, a profitless employment of labor, unusual in Connecticut.[C]

But, although thus "wrecked upon the rock of rhyme," these bards of Connecticut were not mere waste-paper of mankind, as Franklin sneeringly called our poets, but sensible, well-educated gentlemen of good English stock, of the best social position, and industrious in their business; for Alsop was the only one who "left no calling for the idle trade." Hopkins stood at the head of his profession. Dwight was beloved and respected as minister, legislator, theologian, and President of Yale College. Trumbull was a member of the State Legislature, State's Attorney, and Judge of the Supreme Court. Humphreys served on Washington's staff, received a sword from Congress for his gallantry at Yorktown, was Secretary of Legation at Paris, Minister to Portugal and Spain, and introduced merino sheep into New England. Barlow, as we have already seen, was Ambassador to France at the time of his death. All of these, except Trumbull, had borne arms, and did not throw away their shields like Archilochus and Horace. They were sincere patriots, who honestly predicted a future of boundless progress in wealth, science, religion, and virtue for the United States,--the exemplar of liberty and justice to the world, "surpassing all nations that have ever existed, in magnitude, felicity, and duration." And on the other hand, every one of them believed in the decline and impending fall of their old enemy, Great Britain. Barlow's "Hesper" even hints that a Columbus from New England may one day rediscover the Old World.

After the peace, when the closer union of the States under one general government was proposed, the Hartford Wits worked hard to argue down and to laugh down the bitter and absurd opposition which sprang up. That great question was settled definitively by the adoption of the new Constitution, and another took its place: How is this document to be interpreted? The Hartford men, excepting, of course, Joel Barlow, the Lost Pleiad of the group, whose head had been turned by the bewildering theories of his French fellow-citizens, were warmly in favor of administering the new government on Federal principles. Were not the Federalists right? More than thirty years ago, De Tocqueville pronounced in their favor; De Witt, in his recent essay on Jefferson, comes to the same decision: both observers who have no party-feelings nor class-prejudices to mislead them. And have not the last few years given us all light enough to see that abstractly, as statesmen, the Federal leaders were right? As politicians, in the degraded American sense of the word, they were unskilful; they accelerated the downfall of their party by injudicious measures and by petty rivalries. But although their ruin might have been adjourned, it could not have been avoided; we now know that their fate was inevitable. The democracy must have run over them and trodden them out by the sheer brute force of numbers; no superiority in wisdom or in virtue could have saved them long.

In those hot and angry days a _mania politica_ raged among the inhabitants of the United States. One could no longer recognize the sensible people who had fought the British stoutly for seven years, without the slightest idea that they were struggling for anything more than independence of foreign rule. Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow, graduates of the great French Revolution University, had come to teach them the new jargon: the virtue and wisdom of the people; the natural rights of man; the natural propensity of rulers and priests to ignore them; and other similar high-sounding words, the shibboleth and the mainstay of the Democratic party to this day. The Anti-Federalists were as much pleased to learn that they had been contending for these beautiful phrases as was Monsieur Jourdain when told he had been speaking _de la prose_ all his life. They assumed the title of Citizen, invented that of Citess to please strong-minded sisters, and became as crazy as Monsieur Jourdain when invested with the dignity of Mamamouchi. They proclaimed that the government of the United States, like all other governments, was naturally hostile to the rights of the people; France was their only hope; if the leagued despotisms succeeded against her, they would soon send their engines of destruction among them. They planted trees of liberty, and danced about them, and sang the Carmagnole with variations from Yankee Doodle; they offered their lives for liberty, which was in no danger, not even from their follies; and swore destruction to tyrants, as if that unpopular class of persons existed in the United States. They were the people,--the wise, the pure,--who could do no wrong. The Federalists were aristocrats, monocrats,--lovers of court ceremonies and levees, chariots and servants and plate. The distinguished chief of the French party, whose "heart was a perpetual bleeding fountain of philanthropy," was not above pretending to believe that his opponents were striving to "establish the hell of monarchy" in this republican paradise, and were "ready to surrender the commerce of the country, and almost every privilege as a free, sovereign, and independent nation, to the British." Even such a man as Samuel Adams, at a dinner on board of a French frigate, could put the _bonnet rouge_ on his venerable head, and pray that "France alone might rule the seas."

The New-Englanders laughed at the charge of monarchical predilections, so absurdly inconsistent with their history, their laws, habits, and feelings. Before the war, leading men in other Colonies had affected to dread their levelling propensities; and General Charles Lee had said of them, with some truth, that they were the only Americans who had a single republican qualification or idea. Freedom was an old fireside acquaintance; they knew that the dishevelled, hysterical creature the Gallo-Democrats worshipped was a delusion, and feared she might prove a snare. Their common sense taught them to pay little attention to _a priori_ disquisitions on natural rights, social compacts, etc.,--metaphysics of politics, nugatory for all practical American purposes,--and to reject as ridiculous the promised millennium of supreme reason and perfected man. From a long experience in the management of public affairs, they learned that our new government was in danger from its weakness rather than from its strength; hence they rejected the fatal doctrine of State rights, the root of the greatest political evil, Secession. In the theories and in the measures of the Democrats, in the very absurdity of the accusations made against themselves, they thought they perceived a reckless purpose to relax authority for the sake of popularity, which would lead to mob-rule, more distasteful to the orderly Yankee than any other form of tyranny. Moreover, in the Eastern States most of the Anti-Federalists belonged to the lowest class of society; and, not content with urging their pernicious public policy, the more turbulent of the party showed a strong inclination to adopt French principles in religion and morals, as well as in government. Robespierre had announced pompously, "_L'Atheisme est aristocratique._" New England Federalists thought it democratic on this side of the ocean. If they must choose between the Tri-Color and the Cross of St. George, they preferred the Cross. There was no guillotine in Great Britain,--no capering about plaster statues of the Goddess of Reason; people read their Bibles, went to church, and respected the holy sacrament of matrimony. But they wished for neither a France nor an England; they desired to make an America after their own hearts,--religious, just, orderly, and industrious; they believed that on the Federalist plan such a nation could be built up, and on no other; they opposed Jeffersonian politics then as they oppose Jeffersonian-Davis politics now, and they were as heartily abused then as they have been since, and as foolishly.

It must be confessed that the Hartford Wits did ample injustice to their antagonists. Mr. Jefferson was certainly not an Avatar of the enemy of mankind, nor were his followers atheists, anarchists, and rogues. But in 1799 there were no shabbier Democrats than those of Connecticut. If we may judge of the old race by a few surviving specimens, we may pardon our poets, if they added contempt to theoretical disapprobation, and, in their eagerness to

"Confound their politics"

and

"Expose their knavish tricks,"

allowed their feelings to exaggerate the unpleasant traits of the master and of his disciples.

The Hartford men were on the losing side. Federalism expired with the election of Monroe. Its degenerate successor, Whiggism, had no principles of value, and only lagged in the rear of the Democratic advance. Statesmanship and good sense went hopelessly down before the discipline of party and the hunger for office; and with each year it became easier to catch a well-meaning, but short-sighted public in any trap baited with the usual _ad captandum_ commonplaces. We are very frequently told that "History is philosophy teaching by example,"--one of those copy-book apophthegms which people love to repeat as if they contained important truth. But the teachings of history or of philosophy never reach the ears of the multitude; they are drowned by the din of selfish rogues or of blind enthusiasts. Poor stupid humanity goes round and round like a mill-horse in a dreary ring of political follies. The cast-off sophisms and rhetorical rubbish of a past generation are patched up, scoured, and offered to the credulous present as something novel and excellent. People do not know how often the rotten stuff has been used and thrown away, and accept it readily. After a while, they discover to their cost, as their ancestors did before them, that it is good for nothing. But even if it were possible to have a grand international patent-office for political devices, where the venerable machines, so often reinvented to break down again, could be labelled worthless, and exhibited to all the world, I fear that the newest pet demagogue would persuade the voters of his district, in spite of their eyes, that he had contrived an improvement to make some one of the rickety old things work. No wonder that Dr. Franklin lost patience, when he saw how sadly reason was perverted by ignorance, selfishness, and wickedness, and wished "that mankind had never been endowed with a reasoning faculty, since they know so little how to make use of it, and so often mislead themselves by it, and that they had been furnished with a good sensible instinct instead of it."

Connecticut should be proud of her poets: not as literary luminaries of the first magnitude, but as manly citizens, who sincerely loved justice, order, self-control;--in two words, genuine freedom; as cultivated gentlemen, who belonged to a class no longer numerous.

"This small, this blest secluded State
Still meets unmoved the blasts of Fate."

Unmoved, indeed, as in Federal times, but suffering sadly from depletion. The great West and the city of New York have sucked her best blood. There still remain inventive machinists, acute money-changers, acutest peddlers; but the seed of the Muses has run out. No more Pleiades at Hartford; no three "mighties," like Hosmer, Ellsworth, and Johnson; no lawyers of infinite wit, like Tracy and Daggett; no Wolcotts or Shermans: but the small State can boast that she has still within her borders many sons full of the spirit shown by Comfort Sage and by Return Jonathan Meigs, when they marched for Boston at the head of their companies as soon as the news of Lexington reached Connecticut.

FOOTNOTES:

[B] It may interest temperance men to learn that somewhat later than the period alluded to above, Connecticut paid excise on 400,000 gallons of rum yearly,--about two gallons to each inhabitant, young and old, male and female.

[C] Philip Freneau, whose Jacobin newspaper was despised by all good Federalists, wrote better verses than the All Connecticut Seven. His "Indian Burying-Ground" is worthy of a place in an anthology. This stanza has often been ascribed to Campbell; it is as good as any one in Schiller's "Nadowessie Death-Lament,"--

"By midnight moons, o'er glistening dews,
In vestments for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues;
The hunter and the deer a shade."

ICE AND ESQUIMAUX.