America's rising sun; two hundred years ago

National Review, July 13, 1984 by Thomas Wendel

IT SEEMS APPROPRIATE, given the National Endowment for the Humanities's sponsorship of these reflections, that we turn to the staus of the humanities and the arts at the time of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution whose bicentennial we prepare to celebrate. The founding generation's concept of eduction, rooted as it was in the classical tradition, encompassed the arts within the broad rubric of humanistic learning. in the words of historian Joseph ellis, the eighteenth century viewed "a flourishing high culture as but one manifestation of social health.... Politics, the arts, economic development, and demography were not separate spheres of human activity but interlaced strands comprising the social fabric." Or as' stated in the widely disseminated credo of NEH Chairman William bennett: "I hold to the view that the humanities provide us with an indispensable framework for the civilized development of public policy.... They do so less by attacking current issues than developing an intellectual, moral, and imaginative framework for thought and action."

Let us test the assertion that the humanities, in the sense in which the eighteenth century would have understood the concept, lend a broader vision to the shaping of intelligent responses in personal and public life--a vision that surely informed the men gathered at Philadelphia's State House in the summer of 1787.

First, what was the status of the humanities and the arts in America during the constitutional period? A review of American achievements through the 1780s reveals that as the United States attained political maturity, as signified by the Constitution, so also in history, in drama, in music, in art, poety, the country was attaining a corresponding maturity. I think that this is a striking fact, one too often neglected.

The year 1787 was remarkable, and not only for what was accomplished during that hot summer in Philadelphia. That year also saw the premier of Royall Tyler's pathbreaking drama, The Contrast, which Kenneth Silverman in his superb book A Cultural History of the American Revolution called "the first significant realistic comedy of American life." Tyler's play contains the archetypal country bumpkin who attends the theater and thinks, when the curtain opens, that he is looking in on real people sitting next door in their living room. Tyler wrote, says Silverman, "on the profound new assumption that there now existed a country substantial enough to withstand laughter."

Tyler's accomplishment was not an isolated event. Rather, it heralded the beginning of an American theatrical tradition. In 1788 William Dumlap's first successful play was produced. Dunlap, founder of the National Academy of Design and the author of 65 plays over a forty-year career, emulated Tyler's comedic treatment of distinctively American types.

Tyler's The Contrast premiered in April--one month before the start of the Convention. Charles Willson Peale opened his natural-history museum--that "curious and immensely optimistci effort to weld [together] science, art, and patriotism"--in Philadelphia during the sitting of the Convention. Washington and other members visited this remarkable collection. (Ever the entrepreneur, Peale used one of these occasions to paint yet another portrait of General Washington.)

Joel Barlow published his epic poem The Vision of Columbia (republished several years later as The Columbiad) one week before the Great Convention finally opened on May 25 (after a delay of 11 days while belated delegates straggled into Philadelphia). Subscribers to this first American effort in the epic genre included Louis XVI, Lafayette, and Washington. in Professor Silverman's opinion, The Vision is "the most serious American poem of the eithteenth century."

The constitutional period was rich in cultural achievement of all sorts. The year 1788 saw what has been called the first landscape painting by an American. The American was the problematic artist Ralph Earl, who produced his landscapes after his release from jail in that year. He had good lawyers, among them Alexander hamilton, for whom he did family portraits in payment of legal fees.

In 1789, William Hill Brown's Power of Sympathy, the first American novel, was published. It is written in epistolary form, in emulation of Samuel Richardson Again, as in the case of Tyler, Brown stands at the threshold of an American literary tradition. Some of his themes would later be echoed from Melville to Faulkner. More immediately, Brown was followed by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, whose Modern Chivalry (first published in 1792) marks the beginning--in the words of Russel nye--of "an authentic American satiric tradition." More widely read was Susanna Rowson's Richardsonesque--not to say Harlequinesque--novel Charlotte, A Tale of Truth (1791), whose eponymous heroine, like the ill-fated Pamela, stayed a mere two sentences ahead of her would-be seducer through several hundred pages of turgid prose. Charlotte was pursued, I should add, through some one hundred nineteenth-century editions of her story.