1. What I have in mind is Bercovitch, Sacvan, “Cotton Mather,” in Emerson, Everett, ed., Major Writers of Early American Literature (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1972), pp. 93–151Google Scholar; Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Levin, David, “The Hazing of Cotton Mather,” in In Defense of Historical Literature (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), pp. 34–57Google Scholar; Levin, David, Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord's Remembrancer, 1663–1703 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kenneth Silverman's Introduction and annotations in his edition of Mather, 's letters, Selected Letters of Cotton Mather (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1971).Google Scholar

This is not to say that the image of Mather as diarist is much closer to the best older scholarship, although that also is a part of the context in which this study takes place and on which it depends. The best of the older scholarship is Wendell, Barrett, Cotton Mather: The Puritan Priest (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963)Google Scholar, with an Introduction by Alan Heimert, and, of course, Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (New York: Beacon, 1968)Google Scholar.

It is here, in announcing my differences with him, that I should thank Sacvan Bercovitch for his extraordinarily rigorous and sympathetic reading of several earlier drafts of this essay.

2. There is little secondary material. The passage quoted most often is Haller, William, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), pp. 96–102.Google Scholar See also Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, “Literary Reflections of the Puritan Character,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 29, 01–03 1968, 13–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Watkins, Owen, The Puritan Experience (New York: Schocken, 1972), pp. 18–24.Google Scholar

3. Edwards, Jonathan, The Works of President Edwards, ed. Williams, Edward and Parsons, Edward, 2: The Life and Diary of the Reverend David Brainerd, with Notes and Reflections (London: J. Black & Son, 1817–1847; rept. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 262.Google Scholar Cited hereafter as Brainerd, Diary.

Brainerd's Preface to his edition of the diary of Thomas Shepard—in Shepard, Thomas, Three Valuable Pieces …, ed. Prince, Thomas (Boston: Rogers & Fowle, 1747)Google Scholar—is of great use in defining the sort of diary of which both his and Shepard's were examples.

4. Walett, Francis G., ed., The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman 1703–1782 (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1974), p. 8.Google Scholar

5. Ford, Worthington C., ed., The Diary of Cotton Mather, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, series 7, vols. 7–8 (Boston, 1911–1912; rept. New York: Ungar Press, 1957?), 1: 63.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as Mather, Diary. For most other quotations from the diary, I will give the volume and page numbers and the date in brackets at the end of the passage quoted.

6. Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), I, 9.Google Scholar

7. In his Jonathan Edwards (Cleveland: World, 1963), p. 57Google Scholar, Perry Miller points out the difficulty of figuring out where Edwards got the copy he read in 1717.

8. A remark of Poe's seems relevant here: “If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—‘My Heart Laid Bare.’ But this little book must be true to its title. … No man dare write it. No man ever will dare write it. No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen” (Poe, Edgar Allan, “Marginalia,” in Selected Prose, Poetry, and Eureka, with a Foreword by Auden, W. H. [New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1950], pp. 445–46).Google Scholar

Cotton Mather claimed to have written such a book: “I composed what I have intituled, The true Picture of Cotton Mather, wherein I have, with black, yet with true, Characters, described my own vileness at such a rate, that it cannot be look'd upon without Horror of Soul” (Diary, 1: 195; 05 23, 1696).Google Scholar But most Puritans would have agreed with Poe.

The diaries on which this sketch is based are those listed in Matthews, William, American Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of American Diaries Written Prior to the Year 1861 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1945)Google Scholar, plus the manuscript diaries at the American Antiquarian Society.

Aside from Brainerd's, the best published examples of the genre are the diaries of Shepard, Thomas (God's Plot, ed. McGiffert, Michael [Amherst, Mass.: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1972])Google Scholar and Wigglesworth, Michael (The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653–1657Google Scholar, ed. Morgan, Edmund S., Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 35 [1942–1946], 311–444; rept. New York: Harper & Row, 1965).Google Scholar

9. The second pattern is harder to see, because one nee to know both the diary and the biography that does not quote it. Examples are Mather's lives of Francis Higginson and Simon Bradstreet in the Magnolia Christi Americana and his life of Peter Thacher (The Comfortable Chambers Opened and Visited … [Boston, 1728]).

10. Prince, Thomas, A Sermon … upon the Death of the Honorable Samuel Sewall (Boston, 1730)Google Scholar, and Sewall, Joseph, The Orphan's Best Legacy (Boston, 1730).Google Scholar

11. In taking over Shepard, 's “many fears I had of Eli's punishment for not reproving sin in Mr. E. when I saw it, and that sharply”Google Scholar (Shepard, , God's Plot, p. 92)Google Scholar, Mather, suppressed the “in Mr. E.” in his Magnalia Christi Americana (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1702; rpt. New York: Arno, 1972), 3: 92).Google Scholar In taking over “when I saw the gifts, and honor attending them, in another, T.H., I began to affect such an excellency” (Shepard, , God's Plot, p. 121)Google Scholar, Mather suppressed the “T.H.” (Magnalia, 3:92).Google Scholar Mr. E. was Nathaniel Eaton, first master of Harvard College; T.H. was Thomas Hooker. There is no difficulty in understanding why Mather would wish to suppress the sin of the one or Shepard's resentment of the other. It is less understandable that Shepard's “So after dinner on the Saturday, April 11,1 gave up myself to the Lord thus” (Shepard, , God's Plot, p. 95)Google Scholar becomes Mather's “So on the Saturday, April 11. I gave my self to the Lord Jesus, thus” (Magnalia, 3: 90).Google Scholar (Brainerd's 1747 edition of Shepard leaves “after dinner” in [p. 16].)Google Scholar

12. The volumes I inspected were in the possession of the American Antiquarian Society. One oddity: None of them is bound. Sewall kept his diary (in the possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society) in three bulky leather books; Shepard kept his in one (God's Plot, p. 30)Google Scholar; neither was in any other respect as careful or orderly in keeping his diary as Mather was, and the incongruity is surprising.

13. Mather, , Diary, 2:585.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., 1: 11, 41, 56, 63, 81, 100.

15. Beadle, John, The Journal of Diary of a Faithful Christian (London, 1656), p. 175.Google Scholar

16. Mather himself does not call the extant diary a diary. He calls it his “memorials,” or “reserved memorials,” reserving “diary,” apparently, for such records as he quotes here. In the Magnalia, on the other hand, he calls Shepard's diary a diary despite its resemblance to his own.

17. Mather's son Samuel quotes what may be another passage from the same diary: “I find in one of his Diaries an Account of the Transactions of one Day as follows: ‘This Day I performed the Duties of my general Calling, instructed the Scholars under my Charge, underwent the Diversion of Meals and Company, with whom I was a considerable while,—I made a long Sermon, and preached it, I spent more than a little Time at the private Meeting, where I preached, and read over Knox's Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon’” (Mather, Samuel, The Life of the Very Reverend and Learned Cotton Mather, DD. and F.R.S. [Boston, 1729], p. 24).Google Scholar The differences between Latin and English aside, the diary from which Samuel quotes resembles closely the one Cotton threw into the fire. The subsidiary differences between them—the Latin diary is more detailed in its information and more sparse and formulaic in its style—are differences of fashion. One can imagine the one mode succeeding the other in a single sequence, without any great change in the diarist's intention. The English entry, moreover, though undated, probably was written about the same time as the Latin one: Knox's book was published in 1681, and Mather liked to read books early.

18. Brunschvicq, Léon, De la Connaissance de Soi (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1931), p. 8.Google Scholar

19. Sic, perhaps “it”?

20. “Strangely” and “strange” seem in the diary always to refer to actions seen as providential. See, for example, Mather, , Diary, 1: 20, 249, 253, 402.Google Scholar

There is a complex game going on here, I think. The word itself, in the sense that Mather is evidently tinkering with, means remarkable, extraordinary, unaccountable, and the like. The events Mather applies it to are just the opposite; the whole point is that being particular providences, they are quite intelligible. Take for example this decision of Mather's congregation. The decision itself is commonplace, the providential intention of it clear (if one believes in such things). Hence what seems to me the argument, so to speak, of “strangely,” either deferential or arrogant—either, that is, “these things are most likely evidence of God's benevolence toward me, but God is unknowable and His designs not ascertainable, so perhaps my interpretation of these things is wrong” or “God is unknowable and His designs unascertainable, but I can read them, and what these wonderful events mean is that God is well-disposed toward me.” The second argument is, I think, the more valid one; it fits better with other traits of Mather's character that I will describe later.

21. Actually, the matter is more complicated still. The account of the first day must have been written sometime after the event; that of the second may, for lack of any evidence to the contrary in the text, have been written on the day of which it is the record. Wendell, Barrett, Cotton Mather, p. 36Google Scholar, suggests that Mather assembled his diary by “copying from his records such as he deemed worth preserving.” That would explain the account of the second day but not that of the first. I myself imagine Mather sitting down with his (hypothesized) records and making use of them as the raw materials for his “annual autobiography” (ibid., p. 172)—copying some, rewriting and rearranging others, annotating, commenting, fabricating from scratch. The point to keep in mind is that the diary as we have it is a hodgepodge and stands at a considerable (if not uniform) distance from what it records.

22. Mather, , Diary, 1: 81–82.Google Scholar

23. Wendell, , p. 222.Google Scholar

24. See the lives of Eliot, John, Wilson, John, and Brock, John in the MagnaliaGoogle Scholar; also Mather's life of his father, Increase: Parentator: Memoirs of Remarkables in the Life and Death of the Ever-memorable Dr. Increase Mather (Boston: B. Green, 1724), pp. 189–96.Google Scholar

25. Brainerd, , Diary, p. 78Google Scholar; see also pp. 535–38.

26. Miller, (pp. 402–4)Google Scholar goes so far as to imply that Mather invented the particular faith. That seems to me inaccurate—Mather himself told stories of its happening to other people. More inaccurate still, I think, is Miller's argument that Mather invented it in response to the Massachusetts theocracy's decline and fall, which Miller dates from 1692. The problem here is that Mather had experienced particular faiths before 1692, and that he stopped experiencing them in 1702, for reasons I will discuss later that have little to do with the theocracy's downfall—which in any case was constantly accelerating.

27. See Watkins, , p. 96.Google Scholar

28. For example, Mather, Cotton, Little Flocks Guarded Against Grievous Wolves (Boston, 1691).Google Scholar

29. James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 8.Google Scholar

30. Worthington Ford, Introduction to Mather, , Diary, 1: xiii–xiv.Google Scholar

31. Fox, George, Journal, ed. Nickalls, John L., with Epilogue by Cadbury, Henry J. and Introduction by Nuttall, Geoffrey F. (Cambridge, U.K.: At the University Press, 1952), p. 71.Google Scholar

32. Increase Mather, Diary, American Antiquarian Society ms., July 18,1682.

33. Idem, Autobiography, ed. Hall, M. G. (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1962), p. 292.Google Scholar

34. Weil, Simone, “La Personne et le Sacré,” in Ecrits de Londres et Dernieres Lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 37.Google Scholar

35. Mather, , Diary, 1: 86–87Google Scholar (beginning of 1685, n.d.), and 1: 263–64 (June 10, 1688). In the diary for 1713 (Diary, 2: 190)Google Scholar Mather says he had a vision about nineteen years before: “Near nineteen years ago, I preached a Lecture on the Wrongs done to our Saviour, by persons who little Imagine or Consider what they do. A Spirit who with a wondrous Lustre, made his Descent into my Study, declaring himself to be a good Angel of God, and expressing his Desire to have ACT. IX. 5. preach'd upon, was the occasion of my preaching it.” But the diary for that period has not survived.

36. Mather, , Diary, 1: 221.Google Scholar Cotton's son Samuel thought the epigraph interesting enough to quote it himself: “And, if what some great Men have hinted be true, Nemo Vir magnus sine afflatu, while he was yet young he bid fair to be great” (Mather, Samuel, Cotton Mather, p. 6).Google Scholar

37. The passage from Streposo is an epigraph to the diary of 1696.

38. Sometimes, in statements like the one just quoted, one finds “can” in place of “may.” The one word makes a considerable difference. Man's inability to express any aspect of the divine is a commonplace. It is only the rarer formula that I adduce as evidence.

39. Wendell, , p. 118.Google Scholar

40. Mather, , Diary, 1: 356; 06 16, 1700.Google Scholar

41. Identified in Silverman, , p. 62.Google Scholar

42. Mather, , Diary, 1: 467.Google Scholar

43. Ibid.

44. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, Aphorismen, ed. Sengle, Friedrich (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970), p. 38.Google Scholar “Die Metapher ist weit klüger als ihr Verfasser, und so sind es viele Dinge. Alles hat seine Tiefen. Wer Augen hat, der sieht in allem.”

45. One can, for that matter, see him beginning to assimilate it in choosing the one woman over the other. To prefer serviceableness to sensibility is to prefer useful actions to ecstatic experiences. To send away a woman to whom one is attracted because people think badly of her is to acknowledge the importance of one's earthly community. Both choices are reasonable responses to the miscarriage of a particular faith sent from heaven.

46. The close verbal similarities between the two passages are puzzling. Mather, a formulaic writer, may be repeating himself out of habit; if not, perhaps he means to emphasize the fulfillment of his prophecy even while not claiming it.

47. I have no idea what Mather is talking about here. There are no such lists in any of the extant diaries.

48. One might argue that “diary” ought to be applied not to the yearly summary but only to the (hypothesized) records from which it was derived; that the diary Mather kept after 1711 ought to be compared not with the former but with the latter, even though they are not extant; and that therefore, conclusions based on comparisons made between the later diary and the earlier summary are invalid.

The answer to that argument is that it is Mather himself who has made the comparison—who has, that is, established the earlier summary and the later diary as parts of the same sequence—explicitly in the passage just quoted in the text, implicitly by maintaining, in passing from the first diary to the second, the same physical format.

49. And, as it turns out, the average volume of the first diary runs to 36 pages, that of the second to 92.

50. As Miller does in The New England Mind, pp. 395–416.Google Scholar

51. If, in fact, the miscarriage of a particular faith exerted so decisive an influence on Mather's life and diary, there is a parallel here between Mather and his father, Increase. After Increase's return from England, he was repeatedly subject to—one can say he was haunted by—a particular faith that he would go to England again and would again do great service there for Massachusetts. He did not, as it turned out; and the course of his life thenceforth, as reflected in his diary, seems to me a long, slow acceptance of what Cotton accepted so quickly and acutely.

Perhaps to draw parallels between lives is not the business of the critic or the historian; it is to draw attention to the artistry of providence, which is only interesting if one believes in it. On the other hand, people do imitate one another's lives—Northrop Frye, for instance, mentions having unconsciously imitated William Blake's (Frye, Northrop, Spiritus Mundi [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976], p. 16)Google Scholar—and it is interesting, if nothing else, that Cotton acknowledged the miscarriage of his particular faith two and a half years after he had almost acknowledged the miscarriage of his father's. If Cotton's acknowledgment is imitation, it suggests a remarkable relationship between the son and his father; and if one was to write a psychological study of Cotton, one might do best to start with Increase.

52. The discrepancy between three hundred weeks and thirteen years arises from several volumes' having disappeared. The extant volumes for the years in question are those for 1711, 1713, 1716, 1717, 1718, 1721, and 1724. That Mather kept to his schedule during the years for which the diaries are not extant is only a presumption, of course, but not a very risky one.

One might object, I suppose, to drawing any conclusions at all from so spotty a record; but there is a funny thing about diaries: It does not seem to make much difference whether one reads all or part of them. So much, at any rate, one would think from comparing the conclusions drawn about certain diaries by critics who read early, abridged editions of them with the conclusions critics draw now, after reading the wholes. They are not often very different. See Girard, Alain, Le Journal Intime (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), p. 141.Google Scholar

53. It is not that Mather is writing Senecan prose on principle; see his comments on style in the Manuductio ad Ministerium—quoted in Miller, Perry and Johnson, Thomas H., eds., The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, 2 vols. (American Book, 1938; rept. New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 2: 684–89.Google Scholar But his even, copious style sometimes breaks down. When that happens, he gains the facility in the expression of individual experience that the anti-Ciceronians sought. The reflection of the movement of his thought is as vivid as if it had been intended.

54. It was actually Mather's eldest son, Increase, who was originally to be the heir of Mather, 's PaternaGoogle Scholar (a serial autobiography; see William Manierre's note in his edition of The Diary of Cotton Mather, D.D., F.R.S., for the Year 1712 [Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1964], p. 9)Google Scholar and so probably of the diary as well; but by 1718 he had already, proved himself a scandalous reprobate. That left Samuel.

55. The question is more complicated still; the entry in which Mather recounts the stealing of his diary is in English. But the pattern holds: less accessible before the outbreak and theft, more after.

56. Miller, , p. 402.Google Scholar

57. An asterisk indicates a Sunday.

58. Silverman, , p. 415Google Scholar; Mather, , Diary, 2: 811.Google Scholar

59. This is not true; Mather recorded one of his hymns in 1683 (Diary, 1: 59–62).Google Scholar

60. During the five weeks immediately preceding his decision to give up G.D.s, Mather suffered from a cough, asthma, and a fever. To judge from his diary, he had never before been sick so long. He gave up keeping his diary for the duration of his illness. No doubt, the sickness precipitated his decision to give up G.D.s; it would seem to me to go too far to say that it caused it.