1. Philip Freneau • Poet of Two Revolutions
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Parrington, Vernon Louis
Whose business is to stand and wait,
Subservient to command?
What right have you to white-bread, superfine,
Who were by nature destin’d for “a swine”—
As said good Edmund Burke,
The drudge of Britain’s dirty work,
Whose mighty pamphlets rous’d the royal band![11]
During the tumultuous year of ’93 Freneau issued a series of Probationary Odes by Jonathan Pindar, Esq., which reflect sharply the partisan passions aroused by the French Revolution. They were lampoons directed at members of government who were in the democratic black-book, chiefly John Adams, Knox, and Hamilton. The introductory poem was addressed To all the Great Folks in a Lump; the second, To Atlas, was an attack on Hamilton; the third, To A Select Body of Great Men, was a lampoon of the Senate; and the fourth, To a Would Be Great Man, was addressed to Freneau’s particular bête noire, John Adams. This last, apropos of Davila, will serve to show the popular reception which that unfortunate work received.
Daddy Vice, Daddy Vice,
One may see in a trice
The drift of your fine publication.
As sure as a gun
The thing was just done
To secure you a PRETTY HIGH station.
When you tell us of kings
And such pretty things
Good mercy! how brilliant your page is!
So bright is each line
I vow you’ll shine
Like—a glow worm to all future ages.
On Davila’s page
Your discourses so sage
Democratical numskulls bepuzzle,
With arguments tough
As white leather or buff,
The republican Bull Dogs to muzzle.
’Tis labor in vain,
Your senses to strain,
Our brains any longer to muddle;
Like Colossus you stride
O’er our noddles so wide
We look up like frogs in a puddle.
If Freneau’s hatred of the men who opposed the democratic movement was immeasurable, his enthusiasm for the new age of reason that he believed was rising was as boundless. His pages during those years of Jacobin radicalism are dotted thick with odes to liberty and addresses to republicans; probably more fully than any other pages they reflect the spirit that in England and America was forming Tom Paine clubs, and projecting innumerable programs of social reform. A new social conscience was stirring in Freneau, broadening immensely the horizon of his thought; and if he counted rather too confidently on the appeal to reason to bring the golden age, he proved himself thereby a true child of his generation. In such lines as these one discovers the spirit that moved Godwin to write Political Justice.
How can we call those systems just
Which bid the few, the proud, the first,
Possess all earthly good;
While millions robbed of all that’s dear
In silence shed the ceaseless tear,
And leaches suck their blood....
Let laws revive, by heaven designed,