A History of American Literature

The second notable play was Robert Rogers’s (1730? -1795) “Ponteach: or the Savages of America,” published in London in 1766. The fact that it was not produced at the time must be laid to managerial timidity rather than to defects in the play, for it has some of the merits of Godfrey’s work in the details and construction. Two reasons sufficient to put a cautious manager on guard were its criticism of the English and its treatment of the churchman. For the play as a whole is a sharp indictment of the white man’s avarice in his transactions with the Indians, in the course of which a Roman Catholic priest is by no means the least guilty. Traders, hunters, and governors combine in malice and deceit, undermining the character of the Indians and at the same time embittering them against their English conquerors. A play with this burden, written so soon after the Seven Years’ War, had no more chance of being produced than a pacifist production did from 1914 to 1918. Godfrey’s treatment of the Indians seems at first glance unconvincing, but this is chiefly because of the way he made them talk. All the savages and all the different types of white rascal hold forth in the same elevated rhetorical discourse. This fact, which constitutes a valid criticism, should be tempered by the recollection that generations were yet to pass before anything lifelike was to be achieved in dialect writing. Cooper’s Indians are quite as stately in speech as Rogers’s. Yet, like Cooper, Rogers endowed them with native dignity, self-control, tribal loyalty, and reverence for age as well as with treachery and the lust for blood. If “Ponteach” had been an indictment of the French instead of the English, it is a fair guess that American audiences would have seen it and greeted it “with universal applause.” As an Indian play it was followed by many successors – Pocahontas alone was the theme of four plays between 1808 and 1848. As a race play it broke the trail not only for these but for others which branched off to the negro theme – from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “The Octoroon,” before the Civil War, to Sheldon’s “The Nigger,” of 1911. As a problem-purpose play it was the first American contribution to a long series which never flags entirely and which always multiplies in years when class or political feeling runs high.

The third notable American play – a success of 1787 and the first of many successes in its field – was “The Contrast,” a comedy by Royall Tyler (1757–1826). Its purport is indicated in the opening lines of the prologue:

Exult each patriot heart! – this night is shewnA piece, which we may fairly call our own;Where the proud titles of “My Lord! Your Grace!”To humble Mr. and plain Sir give place.Our Author pictures not from foreign climesThe fashions, or the follies of the times;But has confin’d the subject of his workTo the gay scenes – the circles of New York.

There is a complacency of pioneership in this and a hint at servility among other playwrights which are not strictly justified by the facts, but the prologue is none the less interesting for this. It is quite as true to its period as the content of the play is, for it displays the independence of conscious revolt, exactly the note of Freneau’s “Literary Importation” written only two years earlier (see p. 78) and a constantly recurrent one in American literature for the next fifty years.

Tyler’s play is a comedy of manners setting forth “the contrast between a gentleman who has read Chesterfield and received the polish of Europe and an unpolished, untraveled American.” This is reënforced by the antithesis between an unscrupulous coquette and a feminine model of all the virtues, and between a popinjay servant and a crude countryman, the original stage Yankee. As far as the moral is concerned the play makes its point not because the good characters are admirable but because the bad ones are so vapid. Manly, the hero, is well disposed of by his frivolous sister’s statement: “His conversation is like a rich, old-fashioned brocade, it will stand alone; every sentence is a sentiment”; and Maria, the heroine, is revealed by her own observation that “the only safe asylum a woman of delicacy can find is in the arms of a man of honor.” Yet the contrasts lead to good dramatic situations and to some amusing comedy, and the play is further interesting because of the fund of allusion to what Tyler considered both worthless and worthy English literary influences. The extended reference to “The School for Scandal” as seen at the theater by Jonathan is acknowledgment enough of Tyler’s debt to an English master. “The Contrast” is the voice of young America protesting its superiority to old England and old Europe. It had been audible before the date of Tyler’s play, and it was to be heard again and again for the better part of a century and in all forms of literature. In drama the most famous play of the type in the next two generations was Anna C. O. Mowatt’s “Fashion” of 1845. “Contrast” was furthermore a forerunner of many later plays which were descriptive without being satirical, a large number of which carried New York in their titles as well as in their contents. These doubtless looked back quite directly to the repeated successes of Pierce Egan’s “Life in London,” but they had all to acknowledge that Tyler was the early and conspicuous playwright who had

confin’d the subject of his workTo the gay scenes – the circles of New York.

The fourth and last play for any detailed comment here is “André” (1798) by William Dunlap (1766–1839). Dunlap asked for recognition, as Tyler had done, on nationalistic grounds,

A Native Bard, a native scene displays,And claims your candour for his daring lays;

and he took heed, as Rogers seems not to have done, of the risk he was running in entering the perilous straits of political controversy in which “Ponteach” was stranded before it had reached the theater:

O, may no party spirit blast his views,Or turn to ill the meanings of the Muse;She sings of wrongs long past, Men as they were,To instruct, without reproach, the Men that are;Then judge the Story by the genius shown,And praise, or damn it, for its worth alone.

Party feeling was high at the time over the opposing claims of France and England – “The Rival Suitors for America,” as Freneau called them in his verses of 1795. “Hail Columbia,” by Joseph Hopkinson, made an immediate hit when sung at an actors’ benefit less than four weeks after the production of “André,” and made it by an appeal to broad national feeling. And Dunlap, after a slip of sentiment in the first performance, kept clear of politics, and showed tact as well as daring by making the Briton heroic, though a spy, and by his fine treatment of the unnamed “General,” who was evidently Washington. Dunlap’s play showed a ready appreciation of theatrical effectiveness. It was the work of a playmaker rather than a poet, and the verse had none of the elevation of Godfrey’s or Rogers’s. It was far better than the declamatory stage efforts of the Revolutionary years by Brackenridge, Leacock, Low, and Mercy Warren, and it was the best early specimen of the historical romance for which there is always a ready patronage.

Dunlap is more significant as an all-round man in the early history of the American theater than as a pure dramatist. He was a good judge of what the public wanted, and fairly able to achieve it. What he could not write he could translate or adapt. He turned Schiller’s “Don Carlos” into English, and it failed; but he made a great success of Zschokke’s “Abaellino” and translated no less than thirteen plays of Kotzebue. A comic opera, a dramatic satire, a farce, or an interlude seemed all one to him in point of ease or difficulty. From 1796 to 1803 he produced more than four plays a year under his own management at the Park Theater in New York. He continued as a manager till 1805 and was connected with the theater again in 1810–1811. Finally, to cap all, in 1832 he published in two volumes his “History of the American Theater,” which, though inaccurate in many details, is full of the personal recollections of men and events that no amount of exact scholarship could now unearth.

The really auspicious beginnings in American play-writing up to 1800 were hardly followed up in the period before the interruption of the drama by the Civil War. One man stands out, John Howard Payne (1791–1852). Starting as a precocious boy actor and a dramatist whose first play was staged at the age of fifteen, he developed into a reputation greater than that of Dunlap, but in the perspective of time little more enduring. His “Brutus” was played for years by well-known tragedians, and his “Charles II,” in which Washington Irving had a hand, was long successful as a comedy. But he was too prolific for high excellence, and he did nothing new. Now and then men who wrote abundantly produced single plays of rather high merit though of imitative quality, such as Robert Montgomery Bird’s “Broker of Bogota.” There was a generous output, but a low level of production; tragedies, historical plays, comedies of manners, local dramas, social satires, melodramas, and farces followed in steady flow. Successful novels of Cooper, Simms, Mrs. Stowe, and writers of lesser note were quickly staged, but no one of undoubted distinction came to the fore. Writers in other fields, like Nathaniel Parker Willis, the essayist, George Henry Boker, the poet, and Julia Ward Howe, turned their hands at times to play-writing with moderate success. But it is significant that the conspicuous names of the period were names of actors and producers rather than of playwrights. The history of the American stage has been unbroken up to the present time, but it was not until near the end of the century that the literary material presented on the stage became more than a vehicle for the enterprise of managers and the talents of actors. This later stage will be briefly discussed in one of the closing chapters of this book.

BOOK LIST

General References

Crawford, M. C. The Romance of the American Theater. 1913.

Dunlap, William. History of the American Theater. 1832.

Hutton, Laurence. Curiosities of the American Stage. 1891.

Moses, Montrose J. Famous Actor-Families in America. 1906.

Moses, Montrose J. The American Dramatist. 1911.

Seilhamer, G. O. History of the American Theater, 1749–1797. 3 vols. 1888–1891.

Tyler, Moses Coit. Literary History of the American Revolution, 2 vols. Vol. II, chap. xxxii.

Winter, William. The Wallet of Time. 2 vols. 1913.

Collections

Moses, Montrose J. Representative Plays by American Dramatists, Vol. I. 1918. Vols. II and III in press.

Quinn, Arthur H. Representative American Plays. 1917.

Special Articles

Gay, F. L. An Early Virginia Play. Nation, Vol. LXXXVIII, p. 136. 1909.

Law, Robert A. Early American Prologues and Epilogues. Nation, Vol. XCVIII, p. 463. 1914.

Law, Robert A. Charleston Theaters, 1735–1766. Nation, Vol. XCIX, p. 278. 1914.

Matthews, Albert. Early Plays at Harvard. Nation, Vol. LXXXVIII, p. 295. 1909.

Neidig, W. J. The First Play in America. Nation, Vol. LXXXVIII, p. 86. 1909.

Quinn, Arthur H. The Early Drama, 1756–1860. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, Bk. II, chap. ii.

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

The best available sources of material are the collection of A. H. Quinn, which contains three of the plays mentioned in detail, and the first volume of the collection of M. J. Moses, which contains all four, and a half dozen more from the early period.

There is no need of suggesting specific topics in connection with the different plays. Each one may be read with reference to its story content – the kind of plot, of characters, of scenes, of episodes – or with reference to the skill with which it was written – the construction, 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 reallyBelieves herself a young Pamela,The high-wrought whim, the tender strainElate 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.