Odd Jobs (47 page)

The reader enters sweeter, less swift-flowing waters in those letters which deal with science, in lessons to Polly Stevenson or in consultation with such learned men as John Pringle, David Hume, Oliver Neave, Thomas Percival, Benjamin Rush, and William Brownrigg. Eighteenth-century science lay in the care of amateurs and permitted a vigorous-minded original like Franklin to roam productively across a wide range of basic phenomena. How and why evaporation cools, how raindrops accumulate, why oil calms water, why a low canal pulls harder than a full one, why rock strata are jumbled, what strange old teeth and tusks signify—such questions are attacked at the level of common sense and everyday life. Franklin describes an experiment in chromatic heat conduction charming in its simplicity, though rigorous and conclusive:

With the revelations of microscopy barely dawned upon them, Franklin and his contemporaries groped in the familiar macrocosm. He almost arrived at the germ theory of disease: “I have long been satisfy’d from Observation, that … People often catch Cold from one another when shut up together in small close Rooms, Coaches, &c. and when sitting near and conversing so as to breathe in each others Transpiration, the Disorder being in a certain State. I think too that it is the frowzy corrupt Air from animal Substances, and the perspired Matter from our Bodies, which … obtains that kind of Putridity which infects us.” His Philadelphia experiments with electricity, demonstrating that lightning and static electricity were the same “Fluid” and leading to his invention of the lightning rod, made him celebrated in scientific circles and popularly regarded as something of a wizard, like Swedenborg and Cagliostro. On at least one occasion, Franklin acted the part. At Lord Shelburne’s castle, while a large party was walking outdoors, Franklin volunteered that he could calm the waters quite as easily as Jesus Christ. Meeting general disbelief, he went to a pond that was being rippled in the breeze, raised the staff with which he had been walking, whirled it three times above the water, and signed the air with a magic hieroglyph. In a few minutes, the company was astonished to see, the pond became glassy as a mirror. The magician later revealed that his staff was hollow and had been filled with oil. Franklin had become interested in the calming effects of oil upon water while observing a swinging lamp on one of his eight trips across the Atlantic. And he also employed these long crossings to study and describe the Gulf Stream—the first scientist to do so. Worlds lay open to his endless curiosity, and he once wrote to Joseph Priestley, “The rapid Progress
true
Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon.”

Alone and almost penniless, Franklin came to Philadelphia at the age of seventeen. The next day, he had found work, as a journeyman printer,
and within six years he and a partner owned their own press and newspaper,
The Pennsylvania Gazette
. His business, which included a shop that sold stationery, books, quills, ink, slates, parchment, sealing wax, foodstuffs, patent medicines, cloth, stoves, and even slaves and the unexpired terms of indentured servants, prospered to such an extent that in 1748, at the age of forty-two, he felt free to retire and to devote himself to scientific research and civic affairs. Though by 1725 Philadelphia was the second-biggest city in the New World, it seems to have been an institutional wasteland, wherein Franklin founded or was a prime mover in organizing the first self-improvement and mutual-aid society, the Junto (1727), the first subscription library (1731), the first German-language newspaper (1732), the first fire company (1736), the first citizen militia (1747), the Colonies’ first learned society, The American Philosophical Society (1743), the city’s first college, the Philadelphia Academy, which became the University of Pennsylvania (1749), the first hospital (1751), and the first American fire-insurance company (1751). He also proposed and supervised the first plans to sweep and light Philadelphia’s streets, not to mention proclaiming the province’s first fast day, on January 7, 1748. This Philadelphia Franklin, the tireless improver of self and surroundings, is the one most deeply settled in American legend, thanks mostly to himself.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
lists his “firsts,” describes his rise, and contains a detailed prescription, with a handy checklist, for attaining “moral Perfection.” It is this document, along with the repeated admonitions to thrift and prudence in Poor Richard’s Almanacks, that goaded D. H. Lawrence to protest, “I am not a mechanical contrivance,” and to sneer:

And yet Franklin’s autobiography is a very unmechanical, elastically insouciant work, full of cheerful contradictions and humorous twists—a fond look back upon an earlier self, giving that intensely ambitious young man the benefit of the older man’s relaxation. He loves his
younger self—his strength,
^‡
his scrapes. He relates amusingly how the young man tried to seduce his friend’s mistress, and how he gave up vegetarianism when confronted with some tasty cod: “When the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs:—Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.… So convenient a thing is it to be a
reasonable Creature
, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” The
Autobiography
’s first, and masterly, part was written in the form of a letter to his son William, in two weeks of a summer visit to the English countryside, at Bishop Shipley’s residence in Twyford, when Franklin was sixty-five. It breaks off as the Philadelphia Franklin is founding the subscription library, and was resumed in 1784, in the idyll of Passy, without the earlier section’s being at hand. It then breaks off in a discussion of how to subdue the natural passion of Pride, and was taken up again in 1788, and carried forward into the beginnings of the English mission in 1757, but breaks off a last time, as the by now very aged writer bogs down in the details of futile bygone negotiations. The details of his unheralded arrival in Philadelphia—the weary boy in dirty clothes, the unexpected type and quantity of bread he gets for three pennies, the two excess rolls carried one under each arm, the amused glance from the girl who was to become his wife, the involuntary nap in the Quaker meeting—have passed into American mythology, and have the advantage over Parson Weems’s tale of Washington and the cherry tree of being possibly true. These pages by Franklin, from his Boston departure to his employment by the printer Samuel Kiemer, are a surpassingly vivid window into colonial life:

At a later stage of this long, damp journey, while walking fifty miles across New Jersey, Franklin encounters “an itinerant Doctor,” who “was ingenious, but much of an Unbeliever, & wickedly undertook some Years after to travesty the Bible in doggrel Verse as Cotton had done Virgil.”
^§
Thus in the space of a few paragraphs the seventeen-year-old pilgrim meets types of drunkenness and unbelief, and has reason to remember the Puritan author who inspires his own progress. As his Philadelphia career evolves, other characters—Kiemer, gluttonous and disorganized; Governor William Keith, who out of empty vanity sends the boy on a fool’s errand to England; James Ralph, who deserts his wife and child and wastes Franklin’s money—serve as bad examples amid whose sinking the young hero, a fine swimmer, can be felt almost physically to be rising, toward Virtue and Happiness.

The close relation between virtue and happiness is his great perception. “I grew convinc’d that
Truth, Sincerity & Integrity
in Dealings between Man & Man, were of the utmost Importance to the Felicity of Life.” “It was my Design to explain and enforce this Doctrine, that vicious Actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful, the Nature of Man alone consider’d: That it was therefore every ones Interest to be virtuous, who wish’d to be happy even in this World.” And this recognition is not itself enough: “I concluded at length, that the mere speculative Conviction that it was our Interest to be compleatly virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our Slipping, and that the contrary Habits must be broken and good Ones acquired and established.” Hence, the self-conditioning of his list of thirteen virtues and their daily checklist, detested by D. H. Lawrence and touchingly echoed in the journal of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s aspiring bootlegger Jay Gatsby.

Franklin’s criterion of utility works as well the other way: a Deist by
fifteen, in rejection of his parents’ strict Presbyterianism, and at nineteen the author of a published dissertation arguing that God sees no evil in the universe and that “since every Action is the Effect of Self-Uneasiness” there can be no distinction between virtue and vice, Franklin at twenty-two (according to Franklin at sixty-five) “began to suspect that this Doctrine [Deism] tho’ it might be true, was not very useful.” Usefulness is all. “What signifies Philosophy that does not apply to some Use?” There is, he wrote in the
Gazette
, a “S
CIENCE
O
F
V
IRTUE
” that is “of more consequence to [a man’s] Happiness than all the rest put together.” “Virtue and Happiness are Mother and Daughter,” Poor Richard said, and, most famously, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise”—the lack of serial commas emphasizing, perhaps, the interchangeability of health, wealth, and wisdom. Among the assertions of Poor Richard will
not
be found “Honesty is the best policy”; this saying dates from the sixteenth century and appears in the
Apophthegms
of Archbishop Whately of Dublin with an unexpected second thought: “Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.”

Those who would find Franklin’s practical morality too hard-hearted and smugly anti-rational should try to imagine the profligate, besozzled, rather murderous New World it was meant to tame. The Library of America reprints a number of news items that Franklin is now believed to have written for
The Pennsylvania Gazette:

To be a civilizing force in such a world is no despicable achievement. If Poor Richard’s advice “Get when you can, and what you get hold” is a long way from “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,” his assertion “When you’re good to others, you are best to yourself” is not far from the Golden Rule.

The writings from these Philadelphia years show an ebullient spirit. Franklin’s parodies can be hilarious, as when he versifies the speech of Virginia’s Governor William Gooch, whose capitol building had burned down early in 1747: