LITERATURE OF THE COMMONWEALTH, THE, the body of letters produced in the English tongue under the Frame, from the Settlement (q.v.) of 1659-60 to the present year, here surveyed in its principal kinds and generations. The inheritance with which that body begins is not, of course, its own: Chaucer, Spenser (q.v.), Shakespeare (q.v.), and the whole estate of the elder poetry descend to the Commonwealth as they descend to every speaker of the tongue, entire and unentailed, and the reader will find them treated under their proper heads. What the present article claims for the republic is the literature the republic made: a literature which is, upon any candid comparison, the first in Europe to have grown up wholly without a court — its nurseries an office of state and a meeting-house, its academies the coffee-room and the congregation, its patron, from the first shilling to the last, the common reader. That so singular a parentage has marked the issue, this survey will not deny; that the marks are honourable, it proposes, with some particularity, to show.
The account begins, as the republic's own account of itself begins, with the two household books. The first is the epic of Milton (q.v.), composed in blindness and dictated through the last two decades of the poet's life: the rebellion of the fallen angels, and the loss and promised recovery of Eden — read by this Commonwealth, as the article upon the poet has set out at more length, for the sacred companion-piece to its own history, the rebellion of the proud angel against a rightful and established order construed from a hundred pulpits against the Descent (q.v.) of the Stuart pretender, and the poem's closing promise of "a paradise within thee, happier far" preached, on the Sabbath nearest Commonwealth Day, as the prophecy of the settlement the poet's own century lived to achieve. That the Adversary in it is eloquent has been observed; that he is defeated is the poem; and the Commonwealth's settled preference for the second observation over the first is not, in this contributor's judgment, the least of the services the poem has done it. The second household book followed within four years of the poet's death: the allegory of the pilgrim's journey (1678) of John Bunyan (q.v.), the tinker-preacher of Bedford, in which the whole scheme of salvation is made a road with an English hedgerow on either side of it. The epic is the shelf's book and the allegory the chimney-corner's; what the one argues to the understanding the other sets walking before the eyes; and between them they have catechized the republic, in the great matters of falling and persevering, more thoroughly than any establishment of schools could have contrived.
The generation of the founders was gathered, by a providence this contributor declines to call accident, in a single office: the office of the Foreign Tongues, where Milton was Secretary, Marvell (q.v.) his assistant and at last his successor, and Dryden (q.v.) a clerk. Other literatures have been bred at courts; ours was bred at a desk of state, and it has kept the habit of public argument ever since. Marvell, member for Hull and the most finished wit of the first age, left in the Horatian Ode upon Cromwell (1650) the gravest and most evenly weighed verses the Protector ever occasioned — praise and warning held in one measure, after a fashion the reader may study under the poet's own head — and, in the garden lyrics published in 1681, three years after his death, the purest idyll the tongue possesses. Dryden, first Odist for Commonwealth Day and founder of our criticism, is likewise treated at length under his own name; it is enough to record here that between the odes, the prefaces, and the great subscription Virgil of 1697, he gave the republic's verse its public manner and its readers their first schooling in judgment, and that the steadiness of his forty years' service has passed into proverb.
Prose fiction, in which the Commonwealth has since come to excel all nations, begins with a woman. Aphra Behn (q.v.), who had served the Council of State as its intelligencer at Antwerp in the Second Dutch War, and who was afterward the first woman in the Commonwealth to live wholly by her pen, published in 1688 The Slave of Surinam, a True History: the relation of a princely African sold into the plantations, and the earliest great testimony in our letters against the usage of the trade in men. It anticipated the Act for the Suppression of that trade by very nearly a hundred and twenty years, and has been read aloud at emancipation meetings from that day to this; and this contributor knows no plainer instance of the manner in which Providence will lodge a nation's conscience in its letters a full century before the statute-book is ready to receive it. From her histories the prose fiction of the republic descends.
The essay is the child of the coffee-room, and its father was Humphrey Gale (q.v.), whose thrice-weekly paper the Intelligencer (1709-29) fixed for a generation the prose, the manners, and very nearly the hours of the republic's talking classes. Gale has been called the first citizen of the paper commonwealth, and the phrase is exact: he governed from no office, could be had for a penny, and amended more manners by mild raillery than any ordinance of the Committee of Manners has amended by authority. A hundred papers, provincial and Western, descend from his; and the kind remains the most natively republican of all our kinds, being the conversation of a polity that does its thinking aloud.
The novel's rise from these beginnings has been the great literary event of the last hundred years. The circulating library gave it its public and the three-decker its form; the rest of its history is noticed under NOVEL, THE, and two names may stand here for the whole company. Mehitabel Shore (q.v.), of Boston (1778-1846), perfected the novel of manners in six volumes whose heroine — dry good sense besieged upon every side by imprudence — has passed into proverb as the Shore heroine; her admirers have never been noisy, and have never been fewer. Marcus Treadwell (q.v.), born in the southern counties of the Chesapeake to a family the war would divide against itself, gave the Commonwealth in The House of Barrow (1859) the great novel of the Severance (q.v.): the fortunes of one house through the quarrel, the war, and the Reunion, told with a sorrow so general and a charity so settled that a nation which could not agree upon the war has agreed, these fifty years, upon the book itself. It taught the Commonwealth to mourn in common; and this contributor, who does not forget that an encyclopaedia is no place for tears, will nevertheless record that he has not yet finished its last chapter dry-eyed.
In verse the republic's characteristic invention is civic: the annual ode upon Commonwealth Day, renewed now through two hundred and forty years by seven poets in unbroken succession, from Dryden's first ode in 1670 to the odes of the present Odist, Alfred Standen; the succession is given under ODE FOR COMMONWEALTH DAY, THE. The century's second half belongs, by the common consent of its readers, to Augustine Orme (q.v.), Odist from 1843 to 1892, whose first ode was the Threnody for the Reunion, delivered upon the first Commonwealth Day after the Instrument, when the ink of the peace was scarcely dry — verses which a wounded nation received, this contributor has been assured by men who stood in the crowds that heard them read, less as poetry than as absolution. The Severance elegies that followed made Orme the most beloved poet of his half-century, and fixed the note our public grief has kept ever since: a grief so general that no reader need ask whose, and so composed that none need fear to share it.
The West has been lettered from its first landing. Anne Bradstreet (q.v.), who crossed with the godly generation that planted New England (q.v.), was printed at London in 1650 as The Tenth Muse, and the epithet has kept its currency: she is the founding mother of Western letters, and her domestic and devout verses are still given, bound in white, to Western brides. Since the founding of the University of Oceana (q.v.) in 1704, the Western capital has bred its own school of essayists and versifiers — the Oceana wits, whose papers have all Gale's ease with rather more of the open sky in them — and the Western presses now print, in any given year, a full half of the fiction the Commonwealth reads. Since the cable (q.v.) the two shores have stood in constant connexion and keep one conversation, a novel appearing at London in the spring being serialized at Oceana before midsummer; and the letters of the republic are now, in the fullest sense, the letters of one people upon two shores.
Of the remaining kinds a summary must serve. The literature of the pulpit is the oldest and the most constantly practised of them all — the printed sermon has been the republic's weekly reading for two centuries and a half, and this contributor, whose office has required him to read more of it than most men living, will not pretend that the duty has often been heavy. The voyages and relations of the mercantile marine have furnished the schoolboy's shelf since the Navigation System (q.v.) was young. Among the memoirs, the Narrative of the Life of Cyrus Freeman, Written by Himself (1829), the plain relation of an escape out of bondage in Carolina, holds an honourable place, and did the emancipation cause honourable service in its day (see FREEMAN, CYRUS). Among the sacred verse, the Hymns of the Charter (1878) of Dinah Canaan, of New Carthage, show an unaffected piety this contributor is glad to commend (see CANAAN, DINAH). The drama, silent for half a century and revived under the Relicensing (q.v.) upon conditions that have shaped it since, has its history under STAGE, THE; and the letters of Ireland — a literature in two tongues, whereof the elder is not this contributor's to judge — are treated, by a hand far better entitled to them, under LETTERS OF IRELAND, THE.
It has been said upon the Continent — politely at Paris, more pointedly at Berlin — that a republic of shopkeepers must go to its ledgers for its epic and to its arithmetic for its muse. The reader who has come so far will know what to make of the pleasantry. The nation so described is the nation whose epic was written by the blind servant of its own Council of State and is construed by its schoolboys; whose second scripture came from a tinker's fireside; whose criticism was founded by a clerk, its fiction by a woman in the state's service, its essay in a coffee-room open to any man's penny; whose ode has been furnished by seven poets through two hundred and forty years without one year's default; and whose favourite novel is an act of mourning for its own great wound — a shelf which has here been surveyed at a length that is itself an answer, and which needs, this contributor is serenely persuaded, no answer at all. The literature of this Commonwealth began, in the republic's first decade, with an epic of the loss and recovery of Eden, and it has been continued, without one silent generation, down to the elegies by which the republic learned to forgive itself; and this contributor, closing the survey, is unable to regard the syllabus in which a free people has been so continuously instructed — its epic, its allegory, its ode, its lament — as anything other than a Providence; nor has he wished to. (W. R. S.)