[Footnote: Pope's Essay on Criticism, lines 297-8.]
In poetry the favorite form was a couplet, that is, two lines which rhymed and usually made complete sense. This was not inaptly termed "rocking horse meter." The prose writers loved the balanced antithetical sentences used by Dr. Johnson in his comparison of Pope and Dryden:—
"If the flights of Dryden, therefore, are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing…. Dryden is read with frequent astonishment and Pope with perpetual delight."
Such overemphasis placed on mere form tended to draw the attention of the writer away from the matter. The American poetry of this period suffered more than the prose from this formal influence.
Since the motto of the classicists was polished regularity, they avoided the romantic, irregular, and improbable, and condemned the Arabian Nights, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, and other "monstrous irregularities of Shakespeare." This school loved to teach and to point out shortcomings, hence the terms "didactic" and "satiric" are often applied to it.
The last part of the eighteenth century showed a revolt against the classicists. Victory came to the new romantic school, which included authors like Wordsworth (1770-1850), Coleridge (1772-1834), Shelley (1792-1822), and Keats (1795-1821). The terms "romantic" and "imaginative" were at first in great measure synonymous. The romanticists maintained that a reality of the imagination might be as satisfying and as important as a reality of the prosaic reason, since the human mind had the power of imagining as well as of thinking.
The term "Gothic" was first applied to fiction by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), who gave to his famous romance the title of "The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Romance" (1764). "Gothic" is here used in the same sense as "romantic." Gothic architecture seemed highly imaginative and overwrought in comparison with the severe classic order. In attempting to avoid the old classic monotony, the Gothic school of fiction was soon noted for its lavish use of the unusual, the mysterious, and the terrible. Improbability, or the necessity for calling in the supernatural to untie some knot, did not seriously disturb this school. The standard definition of "Gothic" in fiction soon came to include an element of strangeness added to terror. When the taste for the extreme Gothic declined, there ensued a period of modified romanticism, which demanded the unusual and occasionally the impossible. This influence persisted in the fiction of the greatest writers, until the coming of the realistic school (p. 367). We are now better prepared to understand the work of Charles Brockden Brown, the first great American writer of romance, and to pass from him to Cooper, Hawthorne, and Poe.
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, 1771-1810
[Illustration: CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN]
Philadelphia has the honor of being the birthplace of Brown, who was the first professional man of letters in America. Franklin is a more famous writer than Brown, but, unlike Brown, he did not make literature the business of his life. Descended from ancestors who came over on the ship with William Penn, Brown at the age of ten had read, with Quaker seriousness, every book that he could find. He did not go to college, but studied law, which he soon gave up for literature as a profession.