IV LITERATURE IN AMERICA SINCE 1800 It is only during this nineteenth century, as we have seen, that literature in America has advanced to a point where it deserves detached study. By chance its various phases, though not exactly like those of contemporary English literature, fall into chronologic groups very like those which we noted in the literature of the mother country. During the first thirty years of this century the chief development of literature in America took place in the Middle States, centring- as the life of the Middle States tended more and more to centre in the city of New York. The literary prominence of this region roughly corresponds with those years between 1798 and 1832 which produced the poets of the Regency and the "Waverley Novels." Meanwhile, as we shall see later, New England, which for a century past had been less conspicuous in American intellectual life than at the beginning, was gathering the strength which finally expressed itself in the most important literature hitherto produced in our country. Broadly speaking, this literature was contemporary with the Victorian. In 1837, when her Majesty came to the throne, it was hardly in existence; before 1881, when George Eliot, the third of the great Victorian novelists, died, it was virtually complete. To-day it may be regarded as a thing of the past. What has succeeded it is too recent for historical treatment; at this we shall only glance. For in a study like ours to discuss living men seems more and more to be as far from wisdom as to sensitive temper it must seem from decency. In the chapters to come, then, we shall consider these three literary epochs in turn: first, the prominence of the Middle States; next, the Renaissance of New England; and, finally, what has followed. BOOK IV LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE STATES FROM 1798 to 1857 I CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN DURING the last quarter of the eighteenth century the Hartford 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. It runs Dunlap's Life of Brown is unintentionally comic. 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 |