American Sage

THE PAPERS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, VOL. I (400 pp.)--Edited by Leonard W. Labaree--Yale University ($7.50).

Benjamin Franklin, printer, philosopher, scientist, author, patriot and first citizen of Philadelphia, is America's universal man. Perhaps the most attractive aspect of his greatness was that he managed to be a kind of human golden mean--wise, moral, prudent, without being dull. This first volume of his collected papers gives readers the happy chance to get reacquainted with Franklin's winy wit, sage maxims and arrow-swift mind.

27,000 Photocopies. The monumentally projected scope of the collected Papers is a publishing feat that would have delighted the man who signed himself "B. Franklin, Printer," and was as proud of his craft as of his country. The co-sponsors of the Papers, Yale University and the American Philosophical Society, aided by a grant from LIFE, expect the project to run to 40 volumes appearing over the next 15 years. For the past 5 1/2 years, Editor Leonard W. Labaree, Farnam Professor of History at Yale, and his associate, Whitfield J. Bell Jr., have combed libraries and personal collections from Leningrad to Hawaii for any letter or document written to or by Franklin. They have amassed more than 27,000 photocopies of manuscripts and pieces of manuscripts.

Spanning the period 1706-34, Volume I only takes Franklin to the age of 28, but these were the spawning years of his genius. He served his apprenticeship as a printer, journeyed to England and back, published the New England Courant, married, formed the "Junto," an intellectual self-improvement club of like-minded Philadelphians, and brought out the first three of the famed Poor Richard's Almanacks. Franklin also set down his basic religious outlook, a kind of deism that made him a logical child of the rationalist Enlightenment. Instinctively a yea-sayer to life, Franklin came very close to believing that whatever is is good. In "Articles of Belief" he offers up a characteristically benign prayer, "O Creator, O Father, I believe that thou art Good, and that thou art pleas'd with the Pleasure of thy Children."

Truth & Truisms. The chief pleasure of Ben Franklin during these years was journalism, and it is Franklin the journalist who dominates this book. There are the Addisonian "Silence Dogood" letters with their gently satiric barbs at Harvard College, bits of local gossip, humorous anecdotes, and a masterful and intricate essay on the value of a paper currency. In the profoundest sense, Franklin began a lifelong dialogue with his fellow Americans on their democratic destiny ("In those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own"). But entertainment always had priority on instruction. None of the humor would draw a belly laugh today, though it was probably uproarious at the time; e.g., "We are informed that one Piles a Fidler, with his Wife, were overset in a Canoo near Newtown Creek. The good Man, 'tis said, prudently secur'd his Fiddle, and let his Wife go to the Bottom."

It was not till Poor Richard that Franklin hit his stride as a maker and collector of aphorisms; e.g., "After 3 days men grow weary, of a wench, a guest, and weather rainy." "Men and Melons are hard to know," "There is no little enemy." Poor Richard, of course, is also chockablock with moralistic homilies. D. H. Lawrence once carped that Franklin "made himself a list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a gray nag in a paddock." Lawrence was not the first or the last to be infuriated by Franklin's middle-class prudence; yet Franklin's maxims--many taken from even earlier sages--are no less true for having become truisms. Who can deny that "He that lies down with Dogs, shall rise up with fleas"? Or that "Light purse, heavy heart" are still keeping company? What confounds Franklin's critics is that he was so confoundedly right.

Virtue & Fate. Ben Franklin was not as smug as he sometimes sounds. He was endlessly bent on civic and personal improvement, whether it was founding a library or starting a fire department. The doctrine of human perfectibility to which he subscribed was not yet the easy evolutionary faith of the 19th century but an everlasting challenge to be met with hard work, sound reason and unswerving virtue. In the end, he accepted fate with the engaging humility of his self-written epitaph:

The Body of

B. Franklin,

Printer;

Like the Cover of an old Book,

Its Contents torn out,

And stript of its Lettering and Gilding,

Lies here, Food for Worms.

But the work shall not be wholly lost:

For it will, as he believ'd, appear once more,

In a new & more perfect Edition,

Corrected and amended

By the Author.

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