New England culture

“ New England Traits in the Seventeenth Century.—Did the people of New England in their earliest age begin to produce a literature? Who can doubt it? With their incessant activity of brain, with so much both of common and8 of uncommon culture among them, with intellectual interests so lofty and strong, with so many outward occasions to stir their deepest passions into the same great currents, it would be hard to explain it had they indeed produced no literature. ”

“ In New England, which succeeded to New York as the chief source of literature of high distinction, the progress of culture in the post-Revolutionary period was as normal and gradual as elsewhere in the country; there was no violence of development, no sudden break, but the New England scholarship.growth of knowledge and taste went slowly on in conjunction with the softening of the Puritan foundation of thought, belief and practice. ”

“ The most striking characteristic of the older, as of the younger, New England literature is its deep and beautiful humanism, the closeness of its touch upon experience, the warmth of its sympathy with men and women in contact with the great movement of life. Growing out of such a soil, it could hardly have been otherwise, for New England represents, not an abstraction, but a commanding faith in personality, the clear self-realization of a man whose obligation goes straight to God, and to whom God's word travels like an arrow's flight. ”

“ Thus New England stands, in her freedom, love of education, and all those homely domestic traits which make her the comfortable, clever, strong, and tender mother she is, while under and through and over all her traits runs, like a strain of restful music, her great, all powerful, far-reaching faith. ”

“ Life’s currents pursue a tangled course, and while we catch many strains of harmony, there are discordant notes of which we rarely get entirely out of hearing. New England is not perfect, but once to have known is always to love it, no matter how far one wanders or how fair new regions open before one’s eyes. ”

“ On the other hand, had the Pilgrims and Puritans, as both seriously thought of doing, settled in the tropics, where the nature of the climate and the soil would have turned the scale for slavery, where the conditions of life would have strongly combatted their notions of town and church, and where luxury and easy living would have been quickly attained by their inherent energy, what would then have become of what we call the New England element in our national life? ”

“ The sons of New England in the West revisit her as men who make pilgrimage to some holy shrine, and her hills and valleys are still instinct with noble traditions. In her glories and her history we claim a common heritage, and we never wander so far away from her that, with each recurring anniversary of this day, our hearts do not turn to her with renewed love and devotion for our beloved New England ”

“ Lowell’s Letters, ii., 102.
THE early history of New England seems to many minds dry and unromantic. No mist of distance softens the harsh outlines, no mirage of tradition lifts events or characters into picturesque beauty, and there seems a poverty of sentiment. The transplanting of a people breaks the successions and associations of history. No memories of Crusader and Conqueror stir the imagination. Instead of the glitter of chivalry we have but the sombre homespun of Puritan peasants. ”

“ It was usual, in an earlier and less critical day, to trace all of New England's greatness, and of her noble contributions to our common American life, to the same little group of leaders, who were supposed to have done all because they did much. Life is not so simple as that, and in the founding of New England, and the development of her liberties, we must find place for English kings and statesmen, for colonial liberals and martyrs, as well as for Pilgrim Father and Puritan Priest. ”

“ With humor to see the little eccentricities of the people among whom she lived and a sympathetic understanding of their heroic qualities, she has created real men and women,—farmers, school teachers, prim spinsters, clergymen, stern Roman matrons,—all unmistakable types of New England village life. Her unfailing ability to transplant the reader into rock-ribbed, snow-clad New England, with its many fond associations for most Americans, is proof of her power as an artist. ”

“ They are written with a consciousness of the manly virtues, and solid worth, of New England, as she is, and always has been. They simply mark points of difference worked upon men by a change of soil and society—points that should be known, whether approved or condemned. What son of New England does not look back upon her with pride? ”

“ By GEORGE PERRY MORRIS FROM the earliest days of the New England Colonies down to the present time, those European analysts of our national life, whose opinions have been based on personal observation, have usually conceded that in New England towns and villages one might, at almost any period of their history, find a higher average degree of physical comfort, intelligence and mental attainment, and political liberty and power than was or is to be found in any other communities of Christendom. ”

“ The New England men still exhibit a distinct feature in American society, and probably possess more virtue, intelligence, and independence of character than is to be found in any other state in the union.—See Doctor Dwight’s Travels in New England. ”

“ The same causes which built up religion in New England, built up democracy along with it. Is it not easy to see the cause which made the rich men of New England the most benevolent of rich men; gave them their character for generosity and public spirit—yes, for eminent humanity? The acorn is not more obviously the parent of the oak than those two institutions of New England the parent of such masculine virtues as distinguish her sons. ”

“ That New Englanders in the past have been and even now are provincial, is the indictment of Europeans and of some Americans. That they have developed reason at the expense of imagination, utility at the expense of beauty, is also affirmed. Their Puritan ancestors are the butt of the ridicule of the caricaturist, of ultra-Liberal preachers and devotees of materialistic science, and of those who have never read history, European or American. No less an authority than Matthew Arnold has described the life of New England as “uninteresting.” ”

“ The true history of New England is sufficiently great to enable her to look fearlessly into the mirror of Truth, and she can well afford to cast off the meretricious glamour which has been thrown about her by those sons who “loved her not not wisely, but too well.” ”

“ In this place, where "the work which this society is doing touches every fiber of our national life," that which produced the sterling manhood of New England in the past days, and made our national life a possibility and then a fact, can, in a like manner in the future, produce such men and women on the mountains and in the valleys of the South. ”

“ The literary life of New England had already begun, and it is worth while to follow the lines of its growth and development, through the colonial days, if only to understand better the curious limitations for any one who sought to give tangible form to thought, whether in prose or poetry. ”

“ In the other colonies, men may have been more ignorant of books, but they were healthy-minded. In New England, the concentration of an awakened mental life almost wholly upon the problems of election or damnation created a condition of ethical morbidity, and bequeathed to us the legacy of what may almost be called that section’s fourth contribution to American life—the New England conscience, with its pathological questionings and elaborate system of taboos. ”

“ To wealth and leisure we must add, moreover,—as important conditions underlying the historical productiveness of New England—literary and political traditions, the possession of documents and other instruments of research, and, finally, the general intellectual tone of the extreme Eastern States—that part of the country most strongly affected by the civilisation of Europe. ”

“ The history of New England, and especially of Massachusetts, is full of the horrors that have turned life into gloom, joy into despair, naturalness into disease, honesty and truth into hideous lies and hypocrisies. The ducking-stool and whipping post, as well as numerous other devices of torture, were the favorite English methods for American purification.
Boston, the city of culture, has gone down in the annals of Puritanism as the "Bloody Town." It rivaled Salem, even, in her cruel persecution of unauthorized religious opinions. ”

“ WHOEVER has had opportunity of acquaintance with society in New England during the last twenty-five years, with those middle and with those leading sections that may constitute any just representation of the character and aim of the community, will have been struck with the great activity of thought and experimenting. ”

“ The New England communities, generally, possess a higher standard of morals, a more intelligent adhesion to what is regarded as duty, a more simple social intercourse, and purer social manners and customs, with fewer dissipations and derelictions, than perhaps any other people in the world can boast. Nor is there claimed for the New England Puritan a perfect character. ”

“ The mind instinctively turns to the colonizing of New England as one of the great landmarks of human history. A little more than two centuries ago this land was covered with forests in which roamed various tribes of Indians; and the rivers, which now give life to so much cheerful industry, flowed uselessly to the sea. To-day this same land is covered with cities, towns and villages, gardens, vineyards and orchards, schools and palaces—a civilization surpassing, in some respects, that of any other country on the face of the globe. ”

“ But in due time the yearning for the hills, valleys and seacoast of rocky and rigorous New England, for the established institutions, the generally diffused intelligence, the equality of opportunity, the sane standards of worth, and the inspiring historical traditions of the early home becomes too strong to be resisted longer, and back to the homestead they come—some on annual visits, some as often as the exchequer permits, some never to depart. ”

“ Suffice it to say that the children of New England are ever returning to her. They sojourn for a time in Europe, the valley of the Mississippi, in Southern California, and in Hawaii. They find more salubrious climes, more beautiful works of ecclesiastical and municipal art, better municipal government, and sometimes greater opportunities for investment of capital and ability and choicer circles of society than those which exist in the towns in which they were born or reared. ”

“ They were strong men, one and all, quiet and self-contained in years of peace, grim fighters in seasons of war, and prominent citizens at all times, a godly, gritty, and prosperous race. Of such is the greatness of New England. ”

“ They have touched the chords that speak to the universal heart. The very provincialism of our poets endears them to us. Their work, as some foreign critic said, has been done in a corner. We do not deny it. But, verily we believe, that New England is the corner lot of our national estate. ”

“ The first planters had been drawn to a large extent from a very sound element in the England of their day, but, with few exceptions, they were men of narrow outlook, which had naturally become still narrower in their laborious, isolated life in America. Among the religious elements in the new communities, the intensity of their faith in the divine nature of their mission, combined with their extraordinary self-consciousness, tended to breed a belief in their own superiority, which infected not only the whole of New England, but much subsequent historical writing. ”

“ The English company wanted a successful settlement, one to which they could themselves retreat if political and ecclesiastical oppression in the old country should prove too great for their endurance; and they well knew that prosperity depended upon order, sobriety, thrift, and piety. The splendid history and the moral leadership of New England in these three centuries have justified this painstaking, minute, even exasperating watch over the welfare of a colony far from the restraints of an old civilization, in peril from hostile savages and lawless adventurers on an inhospitable soil. ”

“ Whoever has turned over the pages of early New England history can not fail to have had his curiosity piqued by the relations of old French writers respecting this extreme outpost of French empire in America. The traditions of the existence of an ancient and populous city, going far beyond any English attempt in this corner of the continent, are of themselves sufficient to excite the ardent pursuit of an antiquary, and to set all the busy hives of historical searchers in a buzz of excitement. ”

“ The expansion of New England into the vacant spaces of its own section, in the period we have chosen for discussion, resulted in the formation of an interior society which contrasted in many ways with that of the coast, and which has a special significance in Western history, in that it was this interior New England people who settled the Greater New England in central and western New York, the Wyoming Valley, the Connecticut Reserve of Ohio, and much of the prairie areas of the Old Northwest. It is important to realize that the Old West included interior New England. ”