A History of American Literature

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 than the city where the national business of government is carried on; locating the center for art and literature has been beyond the control of legislative action. For the first third of the nineteenth century New York was the favored city. Here Irving was born, and here Cooper and Bryant came as young men, rather than to the Philadelphia of Franklin and his contemporaries.

For these men of New York, America was an accomplished fact – a nation slowly and awkwardly taking its place among the nations of the world. To be sure, the place that Americans wanted to take, following the advice of George Washington, was one of withdrawal from the turmoil of the Old World and of safety from “entangling alliances” which could ever again bring it into the warfare from which it was so glad to be escaping. The Atlantic was immensely broader in those days than now, for its real breadth is to be measured not in miles but in the number of days that it takes to cross it. When Irving went abroad for the first time in 1803 he was fifty-nine days in passage. To-day one can go round the world in considerably less time, and the average fast Atlantic steamship passage is one tenth of that, while the aëroplane flight has divided the time by ten again. So the early Americans rejoiced in their “magnificent isolation” and wanted to grow up as dignified, respected, but very distant neighbors of the Old World.

It was an unhappy fact, however, that America – or the United States – was not notable for its dignity in the early years of the nineteenth century; for the finest dignity, like charity, “is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly,” whereas the new nation was very self-conscious; quickly irritated at foreign criticism, and uncomfortably aware of its own crudities in manner and defects in character. As far as foreign criticism was concerned, there were ample reasons for annoyance in America. Even as early as 1775 John Trumbull4 had felt that it was hopeless to expect fair treatment at the hands of English reviewers, warning his friends Dwight and Barlow,

Such men to charm could Homer’s muse avail,Who read to cavil, and who write to rail;When ardent genius pours the bold sublime,Carp at the style, or nibble at the rhyme;

and the mother country, after the Revolution and the War of 1812, was less inclined than before to deal in compliment. Man after man came over,

Like Fearon, Ashe, and others we could mention;Who paid us friendly visits to abuseOur country, and find food for the reviews.5

Moreover, all the time that England was criticizing her runaway child, she was maddeningly complacent as to her own virtues. Americans could not strike back with any effect, because they could not make the English feel their blows. So they fretted and fumed for half a century, their discomfort finding its clearest expression in Lowell’s lines6:

She is some punkins, thet I wun’t deny(For ain’t she some related to you ’n’ I?)But there’s a few small intrists here belowOutside the counter o’ John Bull an’ Co,An’ though they can’t conceit how’t should be so,I guess the Lord druv down Creation’s spiles’thout no gret helpin’ from the British Isles,An’ could contrive to keep things pooty stiffEf they withdrawed from business in a miff;I ha’n’t no patience with sech swellin’ fellers ezThink God can’t forge ’thout them to blow the bellerses.

A further reason for uneasiness in the face of foreign comment was that honest Americans were aware that their country suffered from the crudities of youth. It is unpleasant enough for “Seventeen” to be nagged by an unsympathetic maiden aunt, but it is intolerable if she has some ground for her naggings. In small matters as well as great “conscience doth make cowards of us all.” In a period of such rapid expansion as prevailed in the young manhood of Irving, Cooper, and Bryant it was unavoidable that most of the population were drawn into business undertakings that were usually eager and hurried and that were often slipshod or even shady. The American colleges and their graduates were not as distinguished as they had been in the earlier colonial days, and the new influence of European culture from the Old World universities was yet to come. In the cities, and notably in New York, the vulgar possessors of mushroom fortunes multiplied rapidly, bringing up vapid daughters like Halleck’s “Fanny,”7 who in all the modern languages was

Exceedingly well-versed; and had devotedTo their attainment, far more time than has,By the best teachers, lately been allotted;For she had taken lessons, twice a week,For a full month in each; and she could speakFrench and Italian, equally as wellAs Chinese, Portuguese, or German; and,What is still more surprising, she could spellMost of our longest English words off-hand;Was quite familiar in Low Dutch and Spanish,And thought of studying modern Greek and Danish;

and whose father, a man of newly affected silence that spoke “unutterable things,” was established in a mortgaged house filled with servants and “whatever is necessary for a ‘genteel liver’” and buttressed with a coach and half a dozen unpaid-for horses. At the same time the countryside was developing a native but not altogether admirable Yankee type. At their best, Halleck8 wrote,

The people of todayAppear good, honest, quiet men enoughAnd hospitable too – for ready pay;With manners like their roads, a little rough,And hands whose grasp is warm and welcoming, though tough.

And at their worst Whittier9 looked back a half century, to 1818, and recalled them as

Shrill, querulous women, sour and sullen men,Untidy, loveless, old before their time,With scarce a human interest save their ownMonotonous round of small economies,Or the poor scandal of the neighborhood;…Church-goers, fearful of the unseen Powers,But grumbling over pulpit tax and pew-rent,Saving, as shrewd economists, their soulsAnd winter pork, with the least possible outlayOf salt and sanctity; in daily lifeShowing as little actual comprehensionOf Christian charity and love and dutyAs if the Sermon on the Mount had beenOutdated like a last year’s almanac.

A natural consequence of such criticism from without, and such raw and defective culture within the country, was that American writers of any moment bided their time as patiently as they could, recognizing that for the moment America must be a nation of workers who were

rearing the pedestal, broad-based and grand,Whereon the fair shapes of the Artist shall stand,And creating, through labors undaunted and long,The theme for all Sculpture and Painting and Song.10

Finally, it is worth noting that the first three eminent writers in nineteenth-century America were themselves not university products. Bryant withdrew from Williams College at the end of the first year, and Cooper from Yale toward the end of the second. The real education of these two and of Irving, who did not even enter college, was in the world of action rather than in the world of books, and their associates were for the most part men of affairs.

WASHINGTON IRVING

Many of the facts about the boyhood and youth of Washington Irving (1783–1859) are typical of his place and his period as well as true of himself. The first is that he was born (in New York City) of British-American parents, his father a Scotch Presbyterian from the Orkney Islands and his mother an Englishwoman. His father’s rigid religious views dominated in the upbringing of himself and his six brothers and sisters. Two nearly inevitable results followed: one, that as a boy he grew to believe that almost everything that was enjoyable was wicked, and the other, that as he came toward manhood he was particularly fond of the pleasures of life. A boy of his capacities in Boston at this time would have been more than likely to go to Harvard College, which was a dominating influence in eastern Massachusetts, but King’s College (Columbia) occupied no such position in New York. Irving’s higher education began in a law office, and then, when his health seemed to be failing, was continued by travel abroad. The long journey, or series of journeys, that he took from 1804 to 1806 were of the greatest importance. They were important to Irving because he was peculiarly fitted to get the greatest good from such informal education. He was an attractive young fellow, so that it was easy for him to make and to hold friends; and he was blessed with his father’s moral balance, so that he did not fall into bad habits. He was so far inclined to laziness that it is doubtful if he would have achieved much if he had gone to college, but he was wide-awake and receptive, so that he absorbed information wherever he went. Furthermore, he had a mind as well as a memory, and he came back to America stocked not merely with a great lot of miscellaneous facts but with a real knowledge of human nature and of human life.

From the day of his return to New York in 1806 to the day of his death, in 1859, Washington Irving had an international point of view and developed steadily into an international character. His first piece of writing was that of a very young man, but a young man of promise. Like the other Americans of his day he had read a good deal of English literature written in the eighteenth century; and among the essayists of that century who had attracted his attention one was Oliver Goldsmith. New York supplied him with his subjects and Goldsmith with his method of attack, for he wrote, in company with one of his brothers and a mutual friend, a series of amusing criticisms on the ways of his townsmen, modeling his Salmagundi Papers after Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World. This was at once independent and imitative. The youthful authors blithely announced in their introductory number that they proposed to “instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age.” In the twenty-two papers that came out at irregular intervals between January, 1807, and January, 1808, they criticized everything that struck their attention, and they had their eyes wide open. The American love of display, the inclination to indulge in fruitless discussion which made the country a “logocracy” rather than a democracy, the lack of both judgment and order which marked their political elections, and their social and literary fashions make just a beginning of the list of subjects held up to genial ridicule. Yet, though the criticism was fair and to the point, it was an old-fashioned kind of comment, the kind that England had been feeding on for the better part of a century, ever since Addison and Steele had made it popular in the Tatler and the Spectator. Moreover, it was done in an old-fashioned way, for in making Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan, the Tripolitan, the foreign commentator on American life as he saw it with a stranger’s eyes, they were using a device that was old even before it was employed by the Englishman from whom they borrowed it. The Salmagundis are interesting, however, as early representatives of a longish succession of satires on the life of New York, all pleasant and rather pleasantly superficial. Three years later Irving, this time alone, followed up this initial success with his “Knickerbocker’s History of New York,” not as serious a piece of work as its title at first suggests, for it was a burlesque of a heavy and pretentious history on the same subject which had appeared just before. Like the Salmagundis it was vivacious and impertinent, the very clever work of a very young man.

Now for ten years Washington Irving produced nothing as a writer. He was engaged in business with his brothers, and proved himself the most level-headed member of a pretty unbusinesslike combination. In 1815, in connection with one of their many ambitious and unsuccessful schemes, he went abroad, probably without the least suspicion that he would be absent from his own country for seventeen years and that he would return to it as a celebrated writer widely read in two continents. The first step toward his wider reputation came in 1819 with the publication in London of “The Sketch Book,” the best known of all his works. This was followed in 1822 by “Bracebridge Hall” and in 1824 by “Tales of a Traveller,” both similar in tone and contents to “The Sketch Book.” With a reputation as a graceful writer of sketches and stories now thoroughly established, he turned to a more substantial and ambitious form of work in the composition of “The History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus,” living and writing in Madrid for the two years before its publication in 1828; and this book he followed quickly, as in the case of “The Sketch Book,” with two other productions of the same kind – “The Conquest of Granada” in 1829 and “The Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus” in 1831. For three years before his return to America, Irving served as Secretary of Legation to the court of St. James, London, and then came back to enjoy at home a popularity which had been almost wholly earned abroad. Out of his career thus far four main facts deserve attention. First, that his literary work began with two pieces of social satire, written in a boyish, jovial manner which he largely abandoned in later years; second, that his fame was established on works of “The Sketch Book” type, made up of short units, gracefully written, and full of quiet humor and tender sentiment (now and again he continued in this sort of composition up to the end of his life); third, that in his maturer years he resorted to the writing of formal history, and that he followed the first three studies, done in Spain, with “Oliver Goldsmith” in 1849, “Mahomet and his Successors” in 1850, and “The Life of Washington,” completed in 1859, the year of his death. To these literary facts should be added a fourth which is both literary and political and of no small significance in history – the fact of Irving’s appointment to a post in the foreign diplomatic service. This was to be followed in his own life by his four years as Minister to Spain in 1842–1846, under President Harrison, and in the next fifty years by a distinguished list of other appointments to the consular and diplomatic staffs. No single group has done more to bring honor to the United States in the courts of Europe during the nineteenth century than writers like Irving, Hawthorne, Motley, Howells, Bayard Taylor, Lowell, Hay, and their successors down to Thomas Nelson Page and Brand Whitlock.

To return to “The Sketch Book.” By 1818, three years after Irving had gone abroad for the second time, the business in which he had been engaged with his brothers had utterly failed, and he was forced to regard writing not merely as an attractive way of diverting himself but as a possible source of income. The new articles which he then wrote, together with many which had been accumulating in the leisure of his years in England, were soon ready for publication, but they found no English publisher ready to risk putting them out. Even the powerful influence of Sir Walter Scott, Irving’s cordial friend, could not prevail at first with John Murray, “the prince of publishers.” In 1819 Sidney Smith’s contemptuous and famous query, “Who reads an American book?” was fairly representative of the English-reading public. Murray was interested in Irving’s manuscript, but did not see any prospect of selling enough books to justify the risk of publication. Irving had wanted the indorsement of Murray’s imprint to offset the severity of the kind of English criticism deplored years earlier by John Trumbull (see p. 111). As soon, however, as the sketches were printed in New York in a set of seven modest installments, the attention of English readers was attracted to them, and Irving heard rumors that a “pirated” English edition was to appear. There was no international copyright in those days, and no adequate one until as late as 1899; so that a book printed on one side of the Atlantic was fair game for anyone who chose to steal it on the other. If an author wanted his works to appear correctly and to get his full money return for them, it was necessary for him to go through all the details of publishing independently in both countries. After a great deal of difficulty, therefore, Irving contrived to get out an English edition through an inefficient publisher, but the success of it was so marked that Murray soon saw the light and from then on was eager to get the English rights for everything that Irving wrote and to pay him in advance five, ten, and, in one case, as much as fifteen thousand dollars.

With the appearance of “The Sketch Book” England arrived at a new answer for Sidney Smith’s question. Irving was sought as a celebrity by the many, in addition to being loved as a charming gentleman by his older friends. Few tributes are more telling than that contained in a letter written many years later by Charles Dickens in which he refers to the delight he took in Irving’s pages when he was “a small and not over particularly well taken care of boy.” Even the austere Edinburgh Review indorsed the American as a writer of “great purity and beauty of diction.” From the most feared critic in the English-speaking world to the neglected boy whose father was in debtors’ prison Irving received enough applause quite to turn the head of a less modest man.