Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
as the piece on the mock-death of Philo-Musaeus in the August 31, 1748,
Gazette213 and in some of the reprintings from British periodicals.
Though in South Carolina there is from the first known issue of the
Gazette some literary evaluation, and a good deal more in later scattered
essays, it is the "Humourist" of 1753-1754 who devotes himself quite
frequently to critical theory and taste in literature. Condemning poetasters
and satirizing pastoral writers, he is most severe on modern critics who
pass judgment in areas in which they are not competent. He finds the
"true Nature of Criticism" as "not the Art of finding Fault [but] the determined
Resolution of a Reader neither to depricate nor dignify by partial
Representation." 21 4
The Virginia Gazette includes a considerable amount of aesthetic criticism,
from the "Monitor" series of 1737 and the Davies-Dymocke exchange
of 1752. The latter group is immediately preceded on February 7, 1750/
175 I, by a letter-essay complaining of the "Prostitution of Poetry to mean
and vicious Purposes" and insisting that it be returned to its "ancient and
natural Use; the Promotion of Piety and Virtue, and the Supression of Vice
and Immorality." The author illustrates good didactic poetry by presenting
a poem in imitation of Pope sent him by a friend. The verses were by
Davies and were included in his published Miscellaneous Poems within
the next year.215 "Zoilus" and others long before had discussed similar
topics in replying to the "Monitor." 216
The writers of the moral essays are naturally and frequently concerned
with various aspects of literary criticism. William Byrd in his scathing
letter to John Fox and throughout his miscellaneous writing is passing
judgment on the verse and prose of his contemporaries. Though the principal
overt critics of literature--Dr. Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Davies,
"Dymocke," and "Humourist"-are sound enough, not one of them analyzes
the forms of literature to the extent or with the profundity of Cotton
Mather and some of his New England contemporaries. Within the next
decade or two from the mid-fifties southerners, even in the midst of war,
began to show considerably greater interest in the function and form of
belles lettres, but even then they were for the most part content to follow
without question British literary models.
PICfION AND ALLEGORY AND OTHER NARRATIVE
The southern periodical writing of the eighteenth century before 1764
contains only a small proportion of prose narrative in any form, though
a few other separately printed tales were composed or related by colonials.
The allegory, with its burden of morality and of ornate imagery and elab-
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