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Page 2
It is to be noted also, and not with regard to Irving only, that the
attention of young and old readers has been so occupied and distracted by
the flood of new books, written with the single purpose of satisfying the
wants of the day, produced and distributed with marvelous cheapness and
facility, that the standard works of approved literature remain for the
most part unread upon the shelves. Thirty years ago Irving was much read
in America by young people, and his clear style helped to form a good
taste and correct literary habits. It is not so now. The manufacturers
of books, periodicals, and newspapers for the young keep the rising
generation fully occupied, with a result to its taste and mental fiber
which, to say the least of it, must be regarded with some apprehension.
The "plant," in the way of money and writing industry invested in the
production of juvenile literature, is so large and is so permanent an
interest, that it requires more discriminating consideration than can be
given to it in a passing paragraph.
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 amusing thing in the
world, 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 27,
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.
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