A History of American Literature. Boynton Percy Holmes
(chap. lxi ff.); and Caleb’s hard times as a fugitive from a false charge are very similar to Roderick’s. In the light of history it seems apparent that Brown was impressed by the book because it was widely popular when he was writing, and that its popularity was due not so much to its merits as to its political timeliness at a moment of revolutionary excitement. Of Brown’s three remaining novels only one, “Edgar Huntly,” is of any importance. This is a good detective story, fresher than any of his others. A somnambulist who murders while walking in his sleep supplies the horror and creates the mystery; and certain pictures of frontier life and Allegheny Mountain scenery, with an Indian massacre and a panther fight, are effectively homemade.
Brown’s novels should naturally be estimated in comparison with the works of his contemporaries rather than with the crisp and clean-cut narrative of the present, but even so they are burdened with very evident defects. The most flagrant of these are the natural fruits of hasty writing. He is quoted as saying to one of his friends, “Sir, good pens, thick paper, and ink well diluted, would facilitate my composition more than the prospect of the broadest expanse of clouds, water or mountains rising above the clouds.” This suggests the steady craftsmanship of Anthony Trollope with his thousand words an hour. Yet he was in no respect of style or construction the equal of Trollope. His novels are full of loose ends and inconsequences. He is unblushing in his reliance on “the long arm of coincidence.” Even when one untangles the plots from the maze of circumstance in which he involves them, they are unconvincing because they are so deficient in human motive. Moreover, in style they are expressed in language which is dizzily exalted even for the formal period in which they were written. “I proceeded to the bath, and filling the reservoir with water, speedily dissipated the heat that incommoded me.” “I had been a stranger to what is called love. From subsequent reflection I have contracted a suspicion that the sentiment with which I regarded the lady was not untinctured from this source and that hence arose the turbulence of my feelings.”
As he never wrote – never had time to write – with painstaking care, his best passages are those which he set down with passionate rapidity. When the subject in hand rapt him clean out of himself so that he became part of the story, he could transmit his thrill to the reader. The horrors of a plague-stricken city such as he had survived in New York made him forget to be “literary.” And the tense excitement of an actor in moments of suspense he could recreate in himself and on paper. His gifts, therefore, were such as to strengthen the climaxes of his stories and to emphasize the flatness of the long levels between. He had the weakness of a dramatist who could write nothing but “big scenes,” but his big scenes were thrillers of the first magnitude. He was a journalist with a ready pen; his best work was done in the mood and manner of a gifted reporter. He had neither the constructive imagination nor the scrupulous regard for details of the creative artist.
Although in his Gothic tales Brown was a pioneer among American novelists, he was like many another American of early days in trailing along after a declining English fashion. By 1800 the great day of the Gothic romance was over. Within a few years it was to become a literary oddity. Scott was to continue in what he called the “big bow-wow” strain but was to make his romances rational and human, and Jane Austen was to describe the feelings and characters of ordinary life with the hearty contempt for the extravagances of the Radcliffe school which she expressed throughout “Northanger Abbey” (chaps. 1, xx ff.). Yet in his own period Brown was recognized in England as well as in America. The best reviews took him seriously, Godwin owed a return influence from him, Shelley read him with absorbed attention, Scott borrowed the names of two of his characters. In these facts there is evidence that he was American not only in his acceptance of foreign influence but in his conversion of what he received into a product that was truly his own and truly American. There are more or less distinct hints of Cooper and Poe and Hawthorne in the material and the temper of his writings, and there is more than a hint of Mrs. Stowe and Lew Wallace and the modern purpose-novelists in the grave intention to inculcate “upon mankind the lessons of justice and morality” with which he undertook his labors.
BOOK LIST
General References
Cross, W. L. The Development of the English Novel, pp. 98–109. 1899.
Loshe, L. D. The Early American Novel. 1907.
Individual Author
Charles Brockden Brown. The Novels of, with a Memoir of the Author. Boston, 1827; Philadelphia, 1857, 1887. These appeared originally as follows: Alcuin, 1798; Wieland, 1798; Ormond, 1799; Arthur Mervyn, 1799–1800; Edgar Huntly, 1799; Clara Howard, 1801; Jane Talbot, 1801.
Bibliography
Wegelin, O. Early American Fiction, 1774–1830. 1913. See also Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 527–529.
History and Criticism
Dunlap, William. Life of Charles Brockden Brown: with selections. 1815. 2 vols.
Erskine, John. Leading American Novelists. 1910.
Higginson, T. W. Charles Brockden Brown, in Carlyle’s Laugh and Other Surprises. 1909.
Marble, Annie R. Charles Brockden Brown and Pioneers in Fiction, in Heralds of American Literature. 1907.
Prescott, W. H. Life of Charles Brockden Brown, in Sparks’s Library of American Biography, Vol. I. 1834. Also in Prescott, Biographical and Critical Miscellanies. 1845.
Van Doren, C. Early American Realism. Nation, Nov. 12, 1914. (The Source of Wieland.)
Van Doren, C. Minor Tales of Brockden Brown, 1798–1800. Nation, Jan. 14, 1915. (A detailed study, adding several titles not before ascribed to Brown.)
Van Doren, C. In chap. vi of Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, Bk. II.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read W. L. Cross’s “Development of the English Novel” for general characterization of the Gothic romance, and for contemporary reaction against this type of fiction read Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey,” chaps. i, xx ff.
Brown and his work are so remote from the present that they challenge inevitable comparisons with other authors who preceded, accompanied, or followed him in literary history. For example:
Read “Arthur Mervyn,” Bk. I, for a comparison in handling similar material with Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year” and the entries in Pepys’s Diary on the plague of 1666.
Read “Arthur Mervyn” for a comparison of subject matter, plot, and purpose with Godwin’s “Caleb Williams.”
Read “Edgar Huntly” for a comparison as a detective story with any modern story, as, for example, one of Conan Doyle’s.
Read the great suspense passages in “Wieland” for a comparison with similar passages in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
CHAPTER IX
IRVING AND THE KNICKERBOCKER SCHOOL
The turn to Washington Irving and his chief associates in New York – James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant – is a turn from colonial to national America and from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. This is not to say that what they wrote was utterly and dramatically different from what had been written in the colonial period; yet there are many points of clear distinction to be marked. With them, for one thing, New York City first assumed the literary leadership of the country. It was not a permanent conquest, but it was notable as marking the fact that the new country had a dominating city. As a rule the intellectual and artistic life of a country centers about its capital. Athens, Rome, Paris, London, are places through which the voices of Greece, Italy, France, and England have uttered their messages. These cities have held their preëminence, moreover, because, in addition to being the seats of government, they have been the great commercial centers and usually the great ports of their countries. In the United States, then, the final adoption of Washington in the District of Columbia as the national capital was a compromise step; this could not result in bringing to it the additional distinction which natural conditions gave to New York. Washington has never been more