History of American Literature | Page 7

_History of the Dividing Line run in the Year 1728_. He was
commissioned by the Virginian colony to run a line between it and
North Carolina. This book is a record of personal experiences, and is as
interesting as its title is forbidding. This selection describes the Dismal
Swamp, through which the line ran:--
"Since the surveyors had entered the Dismal they had laid eyes on no
living creature; neither bird nor beast, insect nor reptile came in view.
Doubtless the eternal shade that broods over this mighty bog and
hinders the sunbeams from blessing the ground, makes it an
uncomfortable habitation for anything that has life. Not so much as a
Zealand frog could endure so aguish a situation. It had one beauty,
however, that delighted the eye, though at the expense of all the other
senses: the moisture of the soil preserves a continual verdure, and
makes every plant an evergreen, but at the same time the foul damps
ascend without ceasing, corrupt the air, and render it unfit for
respiration. Not even a turkey buzzard will venture to fly over it, no
more than the Italian vultures will fly over the filthy lake Avernus or
the birds in the Holy Land over the salt sea where Sodom and
Gomorrah formerly stood.
"In these sad circumstances the kindest thing we could do for our
suffering friends was to give them a place in the Litany. Our chaplain
for his part did his office and rubbed us up with a seasonable sermon.
This was quite a new thing to our brethren of North Carolina, who live
in a climate where no clergyman can breathe, any more than spiders in
Ireland."
These two selections show that American literature, even before the
Revolution, came to be something more than an imitation of English
literature. They are the product of our soil, and no critic could say that
they might as well have been written in London as in Virginia. They
also show how much eighteenth-century prose had improved in form.
Even in England, modern prose may almost be said to begin with John
Dryden, who died at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In

addition to improvement in form, we may note the appearance of a new
quality--humor. Our earliest writers have few traces of humor because
colonization was a serious life and death affair to them.
DIFFERENT LINES OF DEVELOPMENT OF VIRGINIA AND
NEW ENGLAND.--As we now go back more than a hundred years to
the founding of the Plymouth colony in 1620, we may note that
Virginia and New England developed along different lines. We shall
find more dwellers in towns, more democracy and mingling of all
classes, more popular education, and more literature in New England.
The ruling classes of Virginia were mostly descendants of the Cavaliers
who had sympathized with monarchy, while the Puritans had fought the
Stuart kings and had approved a Commonwealth. In Virginia a wealthy
class of landed gentry came to be an increasing power in the political
history of the country. The ancestors of George Washington and many
others who did inestimable service to the nation were among this class.
It was long the fashion for this aristocracy to send their children to
England to be educated, while the Puritans trained theirs at home.
[Illustration: EARLY PRINTING PRESS]
New England started a printing press, and was printing books by 1640.
In 1671 Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, wrote, "I thank
God there are no free schools, nor printing, and I hope we shall not
have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and
heresy and sects into the world, and printing has developed them."
Producers of literature need the stimulus of town life. The South was
chiefly agricultural. The plantations were large, and the people lived in
far greater isolation than in New England, where not only the town, but
more especially the church, developed a close social unit.
One other reason served to make it difficult for a poet of the plowman
type, like Robert Burns, or for an author from the general working class,
like Benjamin Franklin, to arise in the South. Labor was thought
degrading, and the laborer did not find the same chance as at the North
to learn from close association with the intelligent class.

The reason for this is given by Colonel William Byrd, from whom we
have quoted in the preceding section. He wrote in 1736 of the leading
men of the South:--
"They import so many negroes hither, that I fear this Colony will some
time or other be confirmed by the name of New Guinea. I am sensible
of many bad consequences of multiplying these Ethiopians amongst us.
They blow up the pride and ruin the industry of our white people, who
seeing a