Robert Treat Paine
Taunton, Massachusetts, 1773 - 1811
After the family moved to Boston, Paine, a precocious child, was sent to the Boston Latin School, where he excelled. At age twelve, under the pseudonym of "Cerberus," he attacked his father in a long, scathing poem. Probably he reflected the familial neglect his mother had expressed during the prolonged absences of Robert Treat Paine, Sr., during the American Revolution. This diatribe presaged a lifelong breach with his father.
Entering Harvard in 1788, Paine excelled in Latin, Greek, and rhetoric. His rhymed translations from the Greek won him attention, but he was a maverick and was frequently punished for missing requisite prayers or recitations. Sharp minded and confident, he was conspicuous in a student brawl in his senior year and "greatly aggravated" college authorities "by the indecent and imprudent manner in which he pretended to justify himself" (Faculty Records, bk. 6, p. 128). The result was a four-month suspension, though he was readmitted after public censure in chapel. Later, for graduation ceremonies, he composed and read a valedictory poem as well as one titled "Nature and Progress of Liberty."
Paine attempted a mercantile career in James Tisdale's firm, soon giving up his clerkship when writing verses for the Massachusetts Magazine took precedence. He carried on a poetical romance in the journal with Sarah Wentworth Morton, a Boston poet, with pieces such as "The Laurelled Nymph--Addressed to Philenia." The interchange between "Menander" and "Philenia" reflected an increasing public interest in indigenous literary accomplishment, although Paine and other poets still imitated English models.
Boston's burgeoning theater business, gradually freed from shackling legal restrictions and public hostility in the early 1790s, became the center of Paine's activities in 1792-1793. He joined the Board Alley Theatre, then became active in the splendorous Boston Theatre in Federal Street, recently designed by Charles Bulfinch. Competing in a contest to write a prologue in verse for the opening performance on 3 February 1794, he won a gold medal. Although his poem was praised as "highly creditable to the poet's genius" (William W. Clapp, Jr., A Record of the Boston Stage [1853], p. 22), he acknowledged a need to eliminate bombastic phraseology. His interest in drama was matched by his infatuation with actress Elizabeth Baker, the sixteen-year-old daughter of actor parents. Paine's marriage to Baker in 1795 led his father to bar him from his house.
Paine founded the Federal Orrery, a biweekly newspaper, in October 1794, encouraged by Boston Federalists. Its spirited pages went beyond political issues to promote drama and to print numerous poetic efforts. In 1796 he sold the Orrery to Benjamin Sweetser after his acerbic satirical thrusts in a poem, "The Jacobiniad," condemning Jeffersonian Republicans, led to a mob attack and a beating by the son of an affronted victim.
Requested by Harvard's President Joseph Willard in 1795 to present a commencement poem, Paine returned to receive his A.M. degree and produced The Invention of Letters: A Poem . . . on the Day of Annual Commencement, in part a panegyric to Harvard as the "blest seat of letters" with its "sacred walls." Typically, he overstepped bounds by refusing the president's demand to delete searing lines comparing the "Jacobins" to a "green-eyed monster." The poem was popular with Federalist readers, and two editions were published, for which Paine received the large sum of $1,500.
With an unusually facile mind, Paine was able to dazzle his contemporaries with inspired poems often written on the spur of the moment. For a period he also wrote highly regarded theater criticism. Drink and increasing debts, however, undermined his productivity, but his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem in 1797, "The Ruling Passion," was considered by his friends as "the most perfect of all his poetical productions" (Prentiss, p. 43).
Paine captured the surge of patriotism during the 1798 crisis with France by writing several very popular nationalistic songs. Responding to the request of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society, he wrote catchy lyrics for "Adams and Liberty." The poet expressed a postrevolutionary hope: "Mid the reign of mild peace, / May your nation increase, / With the glory of Rome, / And the wisdom of Greece." President John Adams was present at Boston's Haymarket Theatre on 5 June 1798 and heard the song in "Tempo Gusto." A newspaper publisher, Major Benjamin Russell, strongly insisted that George Washington's name be included. Paine instantly responded with a laudatory stanza. The song was published in at least eleven editions before 1800. Later Paine wrote the lyrics for "Adams and Washington" as well as "The Green Mountain Farmer."
Paine's popularity led to frequent politically tinged invitations for commemorative speeches. In 1799 he delivered an oration glorying in the dissolution of the Franco-American Alliance. Denouncing France, in An Oration Written at the Request of the Young Men of Boston he declaimed about the defeat of "Gallic perfidy" that restored freedom to America. On reading a copy, Thomas Boylston Adams, a son of President John Adams, maintained that it "seems to labor in several places rather unpleasantly."
Paine's eulogy on the death of Washington in 1799, An Eulogy on the Life of General George Washington (1800), given in Newburyport, was more sedate, emphasizing the president's high principles, his intelligence, and "the robust vigor of his virtue." Most of Paine's literary work was evoked by the occasion of the moment. In 1804, under the name of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., he wrote an ode, "The Spirit of the Vital Flame," for the Humane Society. His "Spain, Commerce, and Freedom," honoring Spanish patriots, elicited comments in the Port Folio (Dec. 1809, p. 497) that it was "undoubtedly written in the true spirit of an oracle . . . sublime, prophetic, and unintelligible."
Encouraged by friends, Paine belatedly studied law under Massachusetts chief justice Theophilus Parsons and was admitted to the bar in 1802. He was a successful attorney but lacked persistence, drifting back to his old ways of drinking and dissolute living. He planned a collection of his works, but the desire was unfulfilled in his lifetime. One of his last publications was an epilogue to William Charles White's tragedy, The Clergyman's Daughter (1810). As late as 1810 Robert Treat Paine, Sr., urged his son to reform, but Paine, in ill health, returned to his father's house, only to die in an attic room.
Despite his talents, widely admired in his own time, Paine was quixotic. He was unable to make his way in a milieu that barely recognized the professional writer. As Thomas Boylston Adams perceptively noted in 1799, "A Professional Poet cannot live here by his trade." In 1818 William Cullen Bryant harshly but directly assessed Paine's poetic accomplishment, writing that "the brilliancy of Paine's poetry is like the brilliance of frost work--cold and fantastic. . . . He was a fine, but misguided genius" (Bryant, p. 205). Though not a profound thinker, Paine made a distinctive contribution through his popular and patriotic verse.
Bibliography
The papers of Robert Treat Paine, Sr., are at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Selections from the collection, focusing on the era of the Revolution, are in Stephen T. Riley and Edward W. Hanson, eds., Massachusetts Historical Society Collections 87 and 888 (1992). Faculty Records bks. 5 and 6, Harvard University Archives, are informative about Paine's college activities. Charles Prentiss, ed., The Works in Verse and Prose of the Late Robert Treat Paine, Jr. (1812), is a collection of Paine's literary output and includes a lengthy biographical sketch. The work was reviewed in the Port Folio, May 1813. William Cullen Bryant, "American Poetry," North American Review 7 (1818): 198-211, is starkly critical of Paine as a poet. Lewis Leary, "The First Published Poem of Thomas Paine," New England Quarterly 43 (Mar. 1970): 130-34, illustrates Paine's early conflict with his father. Paine's work is scattered. Various unattributed pieces are in the Federal Orrery and the Massachusetts Magazine. Among the poet's separately published pieces are An Ode Written . . . for the Faustus Association (1807), A Monody on the Death of Lieut. General Sir John Moore (1811), and a poem in An Account of the Great Fire . . . at Newburyport . . . 31 May, 1811. Paine's popular songs were frequently printed and can be traced in Clifford Shipton and Robert Mooney, eds., National Index of American Imprints (1969). The literary scene of Paine's day is brought out in Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution to Renaissance (1986).
Winfred E. A. Bernhard,
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