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, of woods and vales and caves and precipices, of apparent
supernaturalism which was explained away in a conscientious anticlimax,
and of the same seraphic heroine and diabolical villain who had played
the leading roles for Richardson. It had been developed by Horace
Walpole and Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis and finally by William
Godwin, who combined all this machinery into a kind of literary "tank"
for the conveyance of a didactic gun crew, for his "Caleb Williams" was
in fact little more than "Political Justice" in narrative camouflage.
This was a formula exactly to Brown's taste, since he had both a
strong ethical bias and a liking for the mysterious. His particular
undertaking was to translate it into American terms, a task that he
carried through in his extraordinary output of 1798 to 1801.
The first to be published was "Wieland," a gradually increasing
succession of horrors which are brought about through the influence
of a mysterious voice. By the oracular commands of the unseen speaker
Wieland's double tendency to superstition and melancholy is deepened
into a calm and steady fanaticism. At the end, in obedience to what
he thinks is the voice of God, he murders his wife and children and,
confessing, is acquitted on grounds of insanity. The horrid chapter of
mishaps is explained by the repentant villain, Carwin, a ventriloquist,
who accounts for the stupendous wickedness of his achievement by
nothing more convincing than an irresistible inclination to practice
his talent. "Ormond," of the next year, is a story of feminine virtue
triumphant over obstacles, which is complicated by the employment of
two heroines, two victimized fathers, and two villains. The element
of horror is supplied in the background of the yellow-fever plague;
and the mystery, by the apparent omniscience of the worse of the
malefactors, who is simply an ingenious resorter to false doors and
secret partitions.
Brown's most ambitious novel was "Arthur Mervyn," which appeared in
two volumes in 1799 and 1800. It carries as a subtitle "The Memoirs
of 1793." These days, according to the preface, were suggestive to
"the moral observer, to whom they have furnished new displays of the
influence of human passions and motives." He has used "such incidents
as appeared to him most instructive and remarkable," believing that
"it is every one's duty to profit by all opportunities of inculcating
upon mankind the lessons of justice and humanity." He believes in
tragic realism on account of the "pity" which it may inspire. As a
matter of fact the plague seems rather incidental than integral to the
story. It gives rise to the introduction of Arthur Mervyn on the scene
and to the long piece of retrospective narrative which occupies all
of the first volume. This tells of the experiences of Arthur, three
days long, with a consummate villain, Welbeck, just as the sins of the
latter return to him in a dozen ways. The second volume pursues certain
unfinished stories begun in the first, the general motives being to
show how completely the innocent Arthur Mervyn is misunderstood and to
present his efforts to atone in some degree for the offenses of the
real sinner. The structure is by no means as firm even as this analysis
would seem to indicate. It is an endless ramification of stories within
stories, and stops at last without any sufficient conclusion.
"Arthur Mervyn" is evidently indebted to William Godwin, of whose
"transcendent powers" in "Caleb Williams" Brown was an ardent admirer.
But it as hard for the modern reader to see why either book is
strikingly individual. Godwin's feelings about the travesties on
justice indulged in by the English courts had been anticipated by
Smollett in "Roderick Random" (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.