A History of American Literature. Boynton Percy Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ the characterization, the supply of motives for action, the dialogue, the prose or verse style – or with reference to the personality of the author and the “signs of the times” – the purpose of the play, the moral, intellectual, and æsthetic character and prejudices of the author.

      If the student is working toward a report – written or oral – he will arrive at a satisfactory result only as he limits himself to one very definite subdivision and presents his findings in detail.

      CHAPTER VIII

      CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN

      The first professional man of letters in America, and the last of note who was born before the Revolution, was Charles Brockden Brown. His short life, from 1771 to 1810, was almost exactly contemporary with the productive middle half of Freneau’s long career. That he earned his living by his pen is a matter of incidental interest in American literary history; the more important facts are that he looms large in the chronicles of the American novel and that he was a factor in the development of the American periodical.

      He was born in Philadelphia. “His parents,” says Dunlap, whose whole biography is written with the same labored elevation, “were virtuous, religious people, and as such held a respectable rank in society; and he could trace back a long line of ancestry holding the same honorable station.” He was a delicate, precocious child, and under the prevalent forcing process of the day was cultivated into an infant prodigy. By the time that he was sixteen he was well schooled in the classics; he had versified parts of Job, the Psalms, and Ossian; he had sketched plans for three epic poems; and he had permanently undermined his health. At eighteen he was studying law, indulging in debate and in philosophical speculation, and was the author of his first published magazine article. In the next few years – the dates are not exactly recorded – he abandoned the law; at one time gave thanks that because of his feeble health he was free from the ordinary temptations of youth, and at another, for the same reason, contemplated suicide; and finally, to escape the urgent counsels of his advisers, he left his home city for New York. Here he fell in with congenial literary companions, joined the Friendly Club, in which among other benefits he was the recipient of friendly criticism for his “disputatiousness and dogmatism,” and in the stirring period of the ’90’s began to dream Utopian dreams of a new heaven on the old earth.

      His active authorship, which began with 1797, was varied and incessant. It included between then and 1810 a large number of magazine contributions (many of them serials), six novels (all published between 1798 and 1801), several other volumes more or less in the nature of hack work, and nine years of periodical editorship. He wrote with the confidence of youth for a youthful and uncritical reading public, with the natural result that his output was more bulky than distinguished. He was immensely communicative: filled with “the rapture with which he held communion with his own thoughts” – committing them to paper in a copious journal, in circumstantial letters, and in the rivulet which flowed from his pen into the forgotten gulf of magazinedom. In 1799 he was working on five different novels, although from April until the end of the next year he was editing The Monthly Magazine and American Review. Before he was thirty his reputation was established and his important work was done. In 1801 he returned to Philadelphia with achieved success as a reply to the friends who had tried to dissuade him from professional writing. There he undertook in 1803 another editorial venture in The Literary Magazine and American Register. From the excited young radical of a half-dozen years earlier, disciple of William Godwin, he had become by some reaction a fulfiller of his pious ancestry. In his statement of principles he made it clear that he would rather be respectable than disturbing in his sentiments. He referred to the recent bold attacks on “the foundations of religion and morality,” declared that he would conserve these and proscribe everything that offended against them, and concluded (using the editorial third person): “His poetical pieces may be dull, but they at least shall be free from voluptuousness or sensuality; and his prose, whether seconded or not by genius and knowledge, shall scrupulously aim at the promotion of public and private virtue.” Even under the weight of this unmitigated morality the magazine was continued for four years. Brown had, however, stepped down from the level of an author who was in any degree creative to a platform for dispensing commonplace conservatism and useful knowledge. The decline is further proven by the nature of his last industrious ventures: “The American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics and Science” (Philadelphia, 1807–1811, seven vols.) and a prospectus in 1809 of an unfinished “System of General Geography; containing a Topographical, Statistical and Descriptive Survey of the Earth.” With the handicap of his early impaired health and under the burden of his self-imposed schedule his strength failed him, and he died in 1810, an overworked consumptive. It is quite evident, however, that his distinctive work was done. If old age had been granted him, unless some amazing reversal of form had taken place, it would have been a long, industrious, and ultraconventional anticlimax to the rather brilliant promise of his young manhood.

      In entering the field of fiction-writing Brown took his place in the newest literary movement in America. For nearly two centuries, as the preceding chapters have shown, poetry and expository prose had been the only accepted forms. Some years after the beginnings of a native theater in the middle of the eighteenth century the first attempts were made in a native drama, but they were faint and scant and were looked on with indifference, if not with disapproval, by most of the country. The chief tide of composition after the war for independence was controlled by the twin moons of Pope and Addison. The triumph of the English novel had occurred in the twenty-five years after the death of Pope, however, and its influence could not be long unfelt. In fact the six years of controversy which led to the dismissal of Jonathan Edwards from his Northampton church in 1750 (see p. 43) suggest that Richardson achieved a furtive reading almost at once; for it was Edwards’s protest against certain books which led to “lascivious and obscene discourse” among the young people that started the whole trouble – and “Pamela” was the sensation of the day. A later disapproval of Richardson was based merely on his encouragement of frivolity. Says Trumbull of Harriet Simper, in “The Progress of Dulness” of 1773:

      Thus Harriet reads, and reading really

      Believes herself a young Pamela,

      The high-wrought whim, the tender strain

      Elate her mind and turn her brain:

      Before her glass, with smiling grace,

      She views the wonders of her face;

      There stands in admiration moveless,

      And hopes a Grandison, or Lovelace.

      And by 1804 so strait a conservative as President Dwight of Yale could refer with complacency to novelists in general, and to Sterne in particular: “Our progress resembled not a little that of my Uncle Toby; for we could hardly be said to advance at all.”

      The earliest American novels were tentative beginnings of several sorts. The first was “The Power of Sympathy,” by a Lady of Boston (Mrs. Sarah Wentworth Morton), in 1789. It was soon overshadowed by Susanna Rowson’s extremely popular “Charlotte” in 1790. Both were highly-seasoned love stories. Of a different kind was H. H. Brackenridge’s “Modern Chivalry” (1792–1793-1797), a rollicking satire on democracy carried on a narrative thread, with about the same right to be termed a novel as Pierce Egan’s “Life in London” of a generation later. Different again was G. Imlay’s “The Emigrants” (1793), a tale of the West with a conventional London plot and set of characters. And different again was Royall Tyler’s “The Algerine Captive” (1797), a contemporary story combining social satire, travel, and international politics, with significant witness in the preface to the growing American vogue of the novel.

      When Brown came to the point of telling his own stories, however, he did not follow in the footsteps of any American predecessors, but turned to a type for which he was especially fitted – the Gothic romance. This was the first extravagant contribution of fiction to the Romantic movement, – the tale of wonder and horror, of alternating moonlit serenities and midnight storms, of haunted castles and secret chambers, СКАЧАТЬ