from the discussion of marriage in the "Dialogue of Alcuin," from which Dunlap gives copious extracts:

46

Marriage," writes Brown, who is believed to have lived a blameless private life, "is an union founded on free and mutual consent. It cannot exist without friendship. It cannot exist without personal fidelity. As soon as the union ceases to be spontaneous, it ceases to be just. This is the sum. If I were to talk for months I could add nothing to the completeness of the definition."

Brown's admiration of Godwin might equally be inferred from the general character of his style; but for their historical relation we have better authority still. While Dunlap insists so strongly on Brown's individuality, he actually quotes words of Brown's which assert that he deliberately made Godwin his model:

"What is the nature or merit of my performance? When a mental comparison is made between this and the mass of novels, I am inclined to be pleased with my own production. But when the objects of comparison are changed, and I revolve the transcendent merits of 'Caleb Williams,' my pleasure is diminished, and is preserved from a total extinction only by the reflection that this performance is the first."

The truth is that, at least in his philosophical speculations and his novels, Brockden Brown, honestly aspiring to prove America highly civilised, was instinctively true to the American temper of his time in attempting to prove this by conscientious imitation. What he happened to imitate was a temporarily fashionable phase of stagnant English fiction. Nothing better marks the difference between English literature and American in 1798 than that this year produced both the Lyrical Ballads" and "Wieland." The former first expressed a new literary spirit in England; the latter, the first serious work of American letters, was as far from new as Wordsworth's verses and the "Ancient Mariner" were from conventional. Beyond doubt one's first impression is that the novels of Brown are merely imitative.

After a while, however, one begins to feel, beneath his conscientious imitative effort, a touch of something individual. In that epoch-making " Wieland," the hero is a gentleman of Philadelphia, who in the midst of almost ideal happiness is suddenly accosted by a mysterious voice which orders him to put to death his superhumanly perfect wife and children. The mysterious voice, which pursues him through increasing moods of horror, declares itself to be that of God. At last, driven to madness by this appalling command, Wieland obeys it and murders his family. To this point, in spite of confusion and turgidity, the story has power. The end is ludicrously weak; the voice of God turns out to have been merely the trick of a malignant ventriloquist. The triviality of this catastrophe tends to make you feel as if all the preceding horrors had been equally trivial. Really this is not the case. The chapters in which the mind of Wieland is gradually possessed by delusion could have been written only by one who had genuinely felt a sense of what hideously mysterious things may lie beyond human ken. Some such sense as this, in terribly serious form, haunted the imagination of Puritans. In a meretricious form it appears in the work of Poe. In a form alive with beauty it reveals itself throughout the melancholy romances of Hawthorne. In Poe's work and in Hawthorne's, it is handled with something like mastery, and few men of letters have been much further from mastery of their art than Charles Brockden Brown; but the sense of horror which Brown expressed in "Wieland" is genuine. To feel its power you need only compare it with the similar feeling expressed in Lewis's "Monk," in the "Mysteries of Udolpho,” or even in "Caleb Williams" itself.

In two of Brown's later novels, "Ormond" and "Arthur Mervyn," there are touches more directly from life which show another kind of power. Among his most poignant persona! experiences was the terrible fact of epidemic yellow fever. During a visitation of this scourge Brown was in New York,

where he was on intimate terms with one Dr. Smith, a young physician of about his own age. An Italian gentleman, arriving in town with an introduction to Dr. Smith, was taken with the plague and refused lodging in any respectable hotel. Smith found him, terribly ill, in a cheap lodging-house, whence he took him home. There the Italian died; and Smith, who contracted the disease, died too. Brockden Brown was with them all the while; he came to know the pestilence appallingly well. In both "Ormond" and "Arthur Mervyn" there are descriptions of epidemic yellow fever almost as powerful as Defoe's descriptions of the London plague. The passage in "Arthur Mervyn," for example, | which describes a yellow fever hospital is hideously vivid: —

"After a time I opened my eyes, and slowly gained some knowl edge of my situation. I lay upon a mattress, whose condition proved that an half decayed corpse had recently been dragged from it. The room was large, but it was covered with beds like my own. Between each, there was scarcely the interval of three feet. Each sustained a wretch, whose groans and distortions bespoke the desperateness of his condition. . .

"You will scarcely believe that, in this scene of horrors, the sound of laughter should be overheard. While the upper rooms of this building are filled with the sick and the dying, the lower apartments are the scenes of carousals and mirth. The wretches who are hired, at enormous wages, to tend the sick and convey away the dead, neglect their duty and consume the cordials, which are provided for the patients, in debauchery and riot. A female visage, bloated with malignity and drunkenness, occasionally looked in. Dying eyes were cast upon her, invoking the boon, perhaps, of a drop of cold water, or her assistance to change a posture which compelled him to behold the ghastly writhings or dreadful smile of his neighbour.

"The visitant had left the banquet for a moment, only to see who was dead. If she entered the room, blinking eyes and reeling steps showed her to be totally unqualified for ministering the aid that was needed. Presently she disappeared and others ascended the staircase, a coffin was deposited at the door, the wretch, whose heart still quivered, was seized by rude hands, and dragged along the floor into the passage."

The power, indicated in descriptions like that, of setting his scenes in a vividly real background again distinguishes Brown

from his English contemporaries.

His characters, mean

while, are lifelessly conventional. In "Ormond," for example, the villanous seducer who out-Lovelaces Lovelace in a literal Philadelphia is irretrievably "make believe;" and so is the incredibly spotless Constantia Dudley, who, oddly enough, is said to have impressed Shelley as the most perfect creature of human imagination. There is a funny touch in "Ormond," which brings out as clearly as anything the contrast between Brown's true backgrounds and his tritely fictitious characters. Constantia Dudley, with a blind father on her hands, in the midst of epidemic yellow fever, is persecuted by her seducer at a moment when the total resources of the family amount to about five dollars. Old Mr. Dudley who incidentally and for no reason has once been a drunkard, but has now recovered every paternal excellence - has travelled all over the world. In the course of his journeys in Italy he has remarked that the people of that country live very well on polenta, which is nothing but a mixture of Indian meal and water, resembling the Hasty Pudding so dear to the heart of Joel Barlow. In Philadelphia at that time Indian meal could be purchased very cheaply. With about two dollars and three quarters, then, Constantia procures meal enough to preserve the lives of her father, herself, and their devoted servant for something like three months, thereby triumphantly protecting her virtue from the assaults of wealthy persecution. Now, it is said that these facts concerning the price and the nutritive qualities of Indian meal are as true as were the horrors of yellow fever. Constantia and her father, meanwhile, and the wicked seducer, whose careers were so affected by these statistics, are rather less like anything human than are such marionettes as doubtless delighted the Italian travels of Mr. Dudley.

The veracity of Brown's backgrounds appears again in "Edgar Huntley." The incidents of this story are unimportant, except as they carry a somnambulist into the woods

and caves of the Pennsylvanian country. These, despite some theatrically conventional touches, are almost as real as the somnambulist is not. Such incongruities cannot blend harmoniously; Brown's incessant combination of reality in nature with unreality in character produces an effect of bewildering confusion.

Nor is this confusion in Brown's novels wholly a matter of conception. Few writers anywhere seem at first more hopelessly to lack constructive power. Take "Arthur Mervyn," for example: the story begins in the first person; the narrator meets somebody in whose past history he is interested; thereupon the second personage begins to narrate his own past, also in the first person; in the course of this narrative a third character appears, who soon proceeds to begin a third autobiography; and so on. As one who is bewildered by this confusion, however, pauses to unravel it or to wonder what it means, a significant fact presents itself. Whoever tries to write fiction must soon discover one of his most difficult problems to be the choice and maintenance of a definite point of view. To secure one, this device of assuming the first person is as old as the "Odyssey," where Odysseus narrates so many memorable experiences to the king of the Phæacians. In brief, a resort to this world-old device generally indicates a conscious effort to get material into manageable form. Paradoxical as it seems, then, these inextricable tangles of autobiography, which make Brockden Brown's construction appear so formless, probably arose from an impotent sense that form ought to be striven for; and, indeed, when any one of his autobiographic episodes is taken by itself, it will generally be found pretty satisfactory.

When we come to the technical question of style, too, the simple test of reading aloud will show that Brockden Brown's sense of form was unusual. Of course his work shows many of the careless faults inevitable when men write with undue haste; and his vocabulary is certainly turgid;