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. 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 |