80 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periodstimes to the establishment of peace and the arts in a new America. The final vision
is of a time when the American federal system will extend “over the whole earth.”
The American, we are told, finding “FREEDOM” to be “his new Prometheus,” will
lead the way to utopia. There, in that blessed future, “one confederate, codependent
sway” will “spread with the sun and bound the walks of day”; throughout the globe,
“one centred system, one all ruling soul” will “live through the parts and regulate the
whole.” Here, in the announcement of this ultimate vision, and elsewhere, the
tone and style tend toward the declamatory, the derivative and didactic. What is
more, the poem as a whole lacks the essential ingredient of epic: a hero, or heroic
mind, engaged in heroic action. Columbus cannot be a hero. He is from the begin-
ning completely passive. He observes, he is troubled, he hopes for the future and he
is reassured by Hesper. He cannot do anything and is, in fact, closer to being an ideal
type of the reader of an American epic than to being a hero. The Columbiad clearly
poses the problem of how to write a democratic epic, a heroic poem of the common
man or woman, but it comes nowhere near solving it. That would have to wait for
Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass.
While Joel Barlow was busy trying to write an American epic, Royall Tyler (1756–
1826) was devoting his energies to establishing an American tradition in drama.
Tyler wrote seven plays, but his reputation rests on The Contrast, written in 1787,
produced in 1790 and published two years later. The first comedy by someone born
in America to receive a professional production, it was hailed by one reviewer as
“proof that these new climes are particularly favorable to the cultivation of arts
and sciences.” The Contrast was written after Tyler had attended a performance of
The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and is clearly influenced by
the English social comedies of the eighteenth century. It is, however, impeccably
American in theme, since the contrast of the title is between Bill Dimple, an embod-
iment of European affectation, and Colonel Manly, a representative of American
straightforwardness and republican honesty. The intensely Anglophile Dimple,
described by one character as a “flippant, pallid, polite beau,” flirts with two women,
Letitia and Charlotte, despite the fact that a match has been arranged with a third,
Maria van Rough, by her father. Manly, a patriot and veteran of the Revolutionary
War, is in love with Maria. And when Dimple, having gambled away his fortune,
decides to marry the wealthy Letitia instead, Maria’s father, discovering Dimple’s
baseness, gives his blessing to Manly’s suit. Dimple is then finally thwarted in his
ambition to cure his insolvency when Letitia learns of his flirtation with Charlotte.
And he leaves the scene, ousted but unabashed, underlining the contrast between
himself and Manly as he does so. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announces, “I take my
leave; and you will please to observe in the case of my deportment the contrast
between a gentleman who has ... received the polish of Europe and an unpolished,
untravelled American.”
Manly himself underlines this contrast, through his simplicity and natural
gentility of manner and through his comments on the times. In one long speech, for
example, he attacks the “luxury” to which, as he sees it, far too many Americans, like
Dimple, are prone. The aim of the play is clearly to address the different possibilitiesGGray_c01.indd 80ray_c 01 .indd 80 8 8/1/2011 7:54:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 57 AM