sive and impious to Puritan theology.... 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. The original Puritans had at least been
men of a certain education, and even of a certain austere culture. They
were inordinately hostile to beauty in all its forms, but one somehow
suspects that much of their hostility was due to a sense of their
weakness before it, a realization of its disarming psychical pull. But
the American of the new republic was of a different kidney. He was not
so much hostile to beauty as devoid of any consciousness of it; he stood
as unmoved before its phenomena as a savage before a table of
logarithms. What he had set up on this continent, in brief, was a
commonwealth of peasants and small traders, a paradise of the
third-rate, and its national philosophy, almost wholly unchecked by the
more sophisticated and civilized ideas of an aristocracy, was precisely
the philosophy that one finds among peasants and small traders at all
times and everywhere. The difference between the United States and any
other nation did not lie in any essential difference between American
peasants and other peasants, but simply in the fact that here, alone,
the voice of the peasant was the single voice of the nation--that here,
alone, the only way to eminence and public influence was the way of
acquiescence in the opinions and prejudices of the untutored and
Philistine mo