BOOK IV

LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE STATES FROM 1798 to 1857

I

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN

DURING the last quarter of the eighteenth century the Hart-\ ford Wits were far from alone in their vigorously patriotic effort to create a national literature for America. A glance through the pages of Stedman and Hutchinson's "Library of American Literature" will show how considerable in quantity, though not in quality, was the fruitless literary activity of the period. Decidedly before 1800 a great many Americans were trying to write, and were founding on all sides. newspapers, magazines, reviews, and the like, usually ephemeral. The numerous printing-presses which thus came into existence began meantime to place at public disposal, for surprisingly low prices, the masterpieces of that English literature which our patriotic men of letters were endeavouring to emulate or to surpass. In New York, a little later, appeared an admirably printed series of British Classics in something like a hundred volumes; and a characteristic example of what occupied the leisure of country printers, whose chief business was to produce weekly newspapers, may be found in a pretty little pocket edition of Boswell's "Life of Johnson," printed in 1824 at Bellows Falls, Vermont.

Among other abortive phases of literary activity during the period of the Hartford Wits, was an effort to create a native American drama. In fact, up to the present time, the Ameri

can theatre has produced no more permanent work than that of John Howard Payne, who is remembered only as the author of "Home, Sweet Home," a song from an otherwise forgotten opera. In life, however, Payne was not a solitary. figure; he belonged to the later period of that school of American theatrical writing whose chief founder is sometimes said to have been William Dunlap. Of late years the Dunlap Society of New York has revived his name and has tried to revive his plays. This pious act has succeeded only in justifying the oblivion which long ago overtook writer and work alike. Yet in the course of Dunlap's literary career he produced one book worth our attention. The man himself, son of an Irish officer who had settled in New Jersey after the capture of Quebec, was a person whose general character may be inferred from the fact that, having lost the sight of his right eye, he devoted himself to the art of painting, in which he so far succeeded as to become a founder of the National Academy of Design. His career as artist and dramatist was at its height in New York at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The work which makes him worth our momentary attention came a little later; it is his twovolume book, published in 1815, which remains the principal authority concerning the life of Charles Brockden Brown.

Dunlap's Life of Brown is unintentionally comic. It runs through its two long volumes with never a chapter from beginning to end; it has neither table of contents nor index; and the diffuse pomposity of its style may be inferred from the sentence with which, after above two pages of generalities, he finally attacks his subject:—

"Brown is one of those names which belongs to so great a portion of those who descend from English parentage that it ceases to identify an individual. Brockden is a happy addition which was derived from a distant relation."

Incidentally Dunlap introduces such copious extracts from Brown's writings, and in so confused a way, that except as a

matter of style you would often be at a loss to know which of the two you were reading. His temper, too, is as far from critical as that of the Mr. Weems who gave us the story of Washington and the cherry-tree. For all its faults, however, Dunlap's book is honestly admiring, affectionately sympathetic, and artless enough to produce, along with exasperating bewilderment, a growing sense of the artistic and literary environment from which our first professional man of letters emerged.

For Brockden Brown, though for years almost forgotten, was really so memorable that in 1834, when Jared Sparks began his "Library of American Biography," a Life of Brown by Prescott, the future historian, deservedly appeared in the first volume. Charles Brockden Brown was born in Philadelphia, of respectable Quaker parentage, on January 17, 1771. For a while he studied law; but, finding himself irresistibly interested in literature, he turned to letters as a means of support at the age of about twenty-five. Before 1796 he had contributed essays to the "Columbus Magazine." In 1797 he published a work on marriage and divorce entitled "The Dialogue of Alcuin." In the following year, — the year of the "Lyrical Ballads," he produced his first novel, "Wieland," which had popular success. Within three years he had published five other novels. In 1799 he became editor of the "Monthly Magazine and American Review,' which lasted only a few months. For five years after 1803 he edited "The Literary Magazine and American Register." The names of these periodicals, like that of the "Columbus Magazine" to which he had contributed years before, are worth mention only because we are always in danger of forgetting what weedy crops of such nature had long ago sprung up and withered in our country. The greater part of Brown's literary life was passed in New York. He died of consumption on the 22d of February, 1810.

Brown's mature years came during that period, between the

Revolution and the War of 1812, when the nationally independent feeling of America was most acutely conscious. For the first time Europeans were becoming aware that America existed. Native Americans were consequently possessed by an impulse, not yet wholly past, to declare to all mankind, and particularly to Europeans, that Americans are a race of remarkable merit. This impulse the "American brag" so frequently remarked by foreigners — is clearly evident in the works of Brown; it is more so still in the books which Dunlap and Prescott wrote about him. These biographers were disposed not only to speak of him in such superlative terms as occasionally make one fear lest the American vocabulary may lose the positive degree of adjectives; but also to maintain as his chief claim to eminence that his work, being purely American, must of course be thoroughly original.

The most cursory glance at Brown's English contemporaries should have reminded them that no claim could be much worse founded. During the last ten years of the eighteenth century, English literature was not particularly rich. Among its most conspicuous phases was a kind of darkly romantic novel, which probably reached highest development in the more extravagant work of Germany when Germans were obese and romantic and sentimental. Half a century before, English fiction had produced masterpieces," Clarissa Harlowe," for example, "Tom Jones," "Tristram Shandy," and "The Vicar of Wakefield." Between 1790 and 1800 English fiction was in that apparently decadent and really abortive condition manifested by such books as Lewis's "Monk," Mrs. Radcliffe's "Mysteries of Udolpho," and Godwin's more significant "Caleb Williams."

Godwin is partly remembered because of his great influence on Shelley, which resulted in the poet's application to the philosopher's own family of those principles concerning love and marriage which Godwin so coolly set forth. Really, however, the man had power enough to be remembered for

himself; deeply influenced by the rationalistic philosophy of the eighteenth century, he devoted himself both in such direct writings as his "Political Justice," and in such medicated fiction as "Caleb Williams," to expounding deeply revolutionary ideas. "Caleb Williams" is a story written to demonstrate how hopelessly the artificial conditions of society and law may distort a normally worthy character. The hero has committed a murder, morally justifiable, but legally a capital crime. To avert the legal consequence of his act, he is driven to a course of deceit and falsehood which finally changes him into an utter villain. We are left to infer that when law and morals happen not to coincide, law is a monstrous evil. Incidentally "Caleb Williams" is written in what is meant to be a thrillingly mysterious style. The crimes and the distortion of character with which it deals are dark and horrible. At least in manner and temper, then, the book has something in common with such sensational, meaningless novels as the "Mysteries of Udolpho," which were then at the height of their popularity.

Though this kind of literature has happily proved abortive, it deeply affected several men properly eminent in English literature. If Shelley had written only such trivial fiction as "Zastrozzi," however, and De Quincey nothing more significant than "Klosterheim," neither name would now be remembered. The masterpiece of this school is probably Mrs. Shelley's deeply imaginative "Frankenstein," published in 1817; its last manifestations in England may perhaps be found among the earlier and more ridiculous works of Bulwer Lytton. Nowadays all this seems so lifelessly antiquated that one is prone to forget how slight were the indications in 1798 that the main current of English letters was SO soon to take another and more wholesome direction.

Were there no direct evidence that Brockden Brown was consciously influenced by Godwin, the fact might be inferred