... One thing is an
established fact: up to the close of the eighteenth century America had
no belletristic literature."
This Puritan bedevilment by the idea of personal sin, this reign of the
God-crazy, gave way in later years, as we shall see, to other and
somewhat milder forms of pious enthusiasm. At the time of the
Revolution, indeed, the importation of French political ideas was
accompanied by an importation of French theological ideas, and such men
as Franklin and Jefferson dallied with what, in those days at least, was
regarded as downright atheism. Even in New England this influence made
itself felt; there was a gradual letting down of Calvinism to the
softness of Unitarianism, and that change was presently to flower in the
vague temporizing of Transcendentalism. But as Puritanism, in the strict
sense, declined in virulence and took deceptive new forms, there was a
compensating growth of its brother, Philistinism, and by the first
quarter of the nineteenth century, the distrust of beauty, and of the
joy that is its object, was as firmly established throughout the land as
it had ever been in New England.
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