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Page 3
Besides this, and with respect to Irving in particular, there has been
in America a criticism--sometimes called the destructive, sometimes the
Donnybrook Fair--that found "earnestness" the only thing in the world
amusing, that brought to literary art the test of utility, and
disparaged what is called the "Knickerbocker School" (assuming Irving to
be the head of it) as wanting in purpose and virility, a merely romantic
development of the post-Revolutionary period. And it has been to some
extent the fashion to damn with faint admiration the pioneer if not the
creator of American literature as the "genial" Irving.
Before I pass to an outline of the career of this representative
American author, it is necessary to refer for a moment to certain
periods, more or less marked, in our literature. I do not include in it
the works of writers either born in England or completely English in
training, method, and tradition, showing nothing distinctively American
in their writings except the incidental subject. The first authors whom
we may regard as characteristic of the new country--leaving out the
productions of speculative theology--devoted their genius to politics.
It is in the political writings immediately preceding and following the
Revolution--such as those of Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Franklin,
Jefferson--that the new birth of a nation of original force and ideas is
declared. It has been said, and I think the statement can be maintained,
that for any parallel to those treatises on the nature of government, in
respect to originality and vigor, we must go back to classic times. But
literature, that is, literature which is an end in itself and not a
means to something else, did not exist in America before Irving. Some
foreshadowings (the autobiographical fragment of Franklin was not
published till 1817) of its coming may be traced, but there can be no
question that his writings were the first that bore the national
literary stamp, that he first made the nation conscious of its gift and
opportunity, and that he first announced to trans-Atlantic readers the
entrance of America upon the literary field. For some time he was our
only man of letters who had a reputation beyond seas.
Irving was not, however, the first American who made literature a
profession and attempted to live on its fruits. This distinction belongs
to Charles Brockden Brown, who was born in Philadelphia, January 17,
1771, and, before the appearance in a newspaper of Irving's juvenile
essays in 1802, had published several romances, which were hailed as
original and striking productions by his contemporaries, and even
attracted attention in England. As late as 1820 a prominent British
review gives Mr. Brown the first rank in our literature as an original
writer and characteristically American. The reader of to-day who has the
curiosity to inquire into the correctness of this opinion will, if he is
familiar with the romances of the eighteenth century, find little
originality in Brown's stories, and nothing distinctively American. The
figures who are moved in them seem to be transported from the pages of
foreign fiction to the New World, not as it was, but as it existed in
the minds of European sentimentalists.
Mr. Brown received a fair education in a classical school in his native
city, and studied law, which he abandoned on the threshold of practice,
as Irving did, and for the same reason. He had the genuine literary
impulse, which he obeyed against all the arguments and entreaties of his
friends. Unfortunately, with a delicate physical constitution he had a
mind of romantic sensibility, and in the comparative inaction imposed by
his frail health he indulged in visionary speculation, and in solitary
wanderings which developed the habit of sentimental musing. It was
natural that such reveries should produce morbid romances. The tone of
them is that of the unwholesome fiction of his time, in which the
"seducer" is a prominent and recognized character in social life, and
female virtue is the frail sport of opportunity. Brown's own life was
fastidiously correct, but it is a curious commentary upon his estimate
of the natural power of resistance to vice in his time, that he regarded
his feeble health as good fortune, since it protected him from the
temptations of youth and virility.
While he was reading law he constantly exercised his pen in the
composition of essays, some of which were published under the title of
the "Rhapsodist;" but it was not until 1797 that his career as an author
began, by the publication of "Alcuin: a Dialogue on the Rights of
Women." This and the romances which followed it show the powerful
influence upon him of the school of fiction of William Godwin, and the
movement of emancipation of which Mary Wollstonecraft was the leader.
The period of social and political ferment during which "Alcuin" was put
forth was not unlike that which may be said to have reached its height
in extravagance and millennial expectation in 1847-48. In "Alcuin" are
anticipated most of the subsequent discussions on the right of women to
property and to self-control, and the desirability of revising the
marriage relation. The injustice of any more enduring union than that
founded upon the inclination of the hour is as ingeniously urged in
"Alcuin" as it has been in our own day.
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