'The Promise of One, and the First Fruits'

“Books of common-place are the amusements of literature.”

A quaint notion today, I suppose. How many readers are sufficiently moved by a passage in the book they are reading to transcribe it for future use or “amusement”? Starting in high school I kept a commonplace book in a large double-entry accounting ledger. Into it I pasted articles and columns clipped from newspapers and magazines, and copied quotations from books that struck me as interesting, amusing or memorable. I wish I had kept it but I’ve always travelled light and tend to discard such things. It would constitute a piece of legitimate autobiography, of interest to me and no one else. At the time, I had no idea what a commonplace book was, and to this day I usually read with pen in hand.

The quotation above is the first sentence in the preface to a curious old volume, The American Common-place Book of Prose, edited by the Rev. G.B. (George Barrell) Cheever (1807-1890) and published in 1828 by Russell, Shattuck and Co. of Boston. Cheever was a theologian, pastor of the Church of the Puritans in New York City and a well-known abolitionist. I borrowed the first edition from the Fondren Library, and I’m surprised they keep it in the circulating collection. The leather cover is attached to what remains of the spine by two leather straps, and the entire book is kept in a folding box of stiff paper and Velcro. Bits of leather and paper flake off as I turn the pages. The front endpaper is inscribed in pencil by Alex Lamm or Samm, and the sub-title is A Collection of Eloquent and Interesting Extracts from the Writings of American Authors. The book last circulated in 1952. Cheever continues in his preface:

“It is pleasant to have at one’s side a well-selected volume, to which he may turn for mental recreation, when the fatigue of preceding exertion has rendered him unequal to intellectual effort. It is pleasant, also, to have before us the eloquent passages of our favourite authors, so that we may occasionally awaken and prolong the delightful sensations with which we at first perused them.”

Keep in mind the publication date, 1828, before Twain, Melville and Dickinson. Irving and Cooper were in print and are included by Cheever. Hawthorne published Fanshawe anonymously that year. Abraham Lincoln was guiding a flatboat down the Mississippi. The American publishing event of the year was Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language. Except for the Founding Fathers, few of the writers included by Cheever are familiar to me. Most of the selections, though written by Americans, could have been composed by their English contemporaries. Except for an emphasis on liberty and self-government, a distinctly American voice is rarely heard. Cheever prints an anonymous piece published in the American Quarterly Review which he titles “Neglect of Foreign Literature in America.” Our literary taste, the author says, is parochial, “not sufficiently expansive.” What follows is a prose poem in celebration of “rejoic[ing] in every exhibition of genius.” Near the end he takes an Emersonian detour:

“We cannot as yet be said to have a national literature; but we already have the promise of one, and the first fruits. As the literary character of the country is developed, it should resemble our political institutions in liberality, and welcome excellence from every quarter of the world.”