The Beginnings.—American fiction was one of the latest types of native literature to appear. The hard conditions of life imposed on the colonists by the necessity of clearing the forests and keeping the Indians in check were evidently unfavourable to sustained efforts in imaginative writing. And there were other reasons for the late growth of the novel. Except as they had a religious turn or an evident moral, stories were likely to be looked upon by the Puritans as a species of useless frivolity, which could have no part in the saving of souls.[3] Again, in the struggle with the mother country the robust and scholarly intellects of America had other matters to think of besides the elements of pure literature. The rights of man, the basis of resistance to tyranny, the principles of statecraft, the elements of democracy, were among the interests that absorbed the Washingtons, the Otises, and the Hamiltons of the latter part of the eighteenth century. But perhaps the most important reason for the tardy appearance of American fiction was the lack of tradition and legend. Of this Hawthorne complained as late as 1859, in the preface to “The Marble Faun”:
No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance-writers may find congenial and easily handled themes, either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers need ruin to make them grow.
Thus it was that for a long time Defoe and Fielding, Smollett and Sterne found no imitators in America. The American novel-reader, for the most part, was content with British provender, and satisfied his appetite for the marvellous with Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto,” Lewis’ “Monk,” and Mrs. Radcliffe’s “Romance of the Forest” and “The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Toward the end of the eighteenth century several writers essayed the novel, but not with lasting success. In “The Foresters” (published serially in The Columbian Magazine, and in book form in 1792), Jeremy Belknap (1774–98) produced an ingenious though trivial allegorical tale of the colonisation of America and the rebellion of the colonies. In this, Peter Bullfrog stood for New York, Ethan Greenwood for Vermont, Walter Pipeweed for Virginia, Charles Indigo for South Carolina, and so on. Ann Eliza Bleecker (1752–83) was the author of “The History of Maria Kittle,” which in the form of a letter sets forth some harrowing experiences among the savages during the French and Indian War; and of “The Story of Henry and Anne,” a tale, “founded on fact,” of the misfortunes of some German peasants who finally settled in America; both of these were published posthumously in her “Works” in 1793. Mrs. Susanna Haswell Rowson’s “Charlotte Temple” (1790), a story of love, betrayal, and desertion, despite its absurdly stilted phrases and its long-drawn melancholy, has ever been popular with a certain class of readers; the editor of the latest edition (1905), Mr. Francis W. Halsey, has examined 104 editions, and his list is incomplete. An avowed antidote to “Charlotte Temple,” Mrs. Tabitha G. Tenney’s satirical “Female Quixotism” (1808), suggests to Professor Trent “an expurgated Smollett”; it is now unknown. Mrs. Hannah W. Foster, the wife of a clergyman in Massachusetts, wrote “The Coquette, or The History of Eliza Wharton, a Novel Founded on Fact” (1797), a story of desertion, showing the marked influence of Richardson. In the same year, appeared “The Algerine Captive,” by Royall Tyler, who was one of the first to turn to American life as a fruitful subject for fiction. His story is a broadly humorous picaresque tale, of the Smollett type, which introduces rather too many wearisome details of customs in Algiers; a fault for which his generally spirited style and his powerful description of the horrors of a slave-ship partially atone.
Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748–1816), the classmate at Princeton of James Madison and Philip Freneau, wrote “Modern Chivalry, or The Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O’Regan, His Servant” (Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, published in four parts, 1792–7), a modern “Don Quixote” narrating his experiences in the Whisky Insurrection of 1794. Though widely read in its day, especially by artisans and farmers, its literary worth was not sufficient to preserve it. “The Gamesters,” published in 1805 by Mrs. Catharine Warren, was likewise popular in its day; it attempted “to blend instruction with amusement.”
Charles Brockden Brown.—The history of the novel in America, therefore, properly begins with Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), who has been called “the first professional man of letters and important creative writer of the English-speaking portion of the New World.” He was born in Philadelphia of a good Quaker family; just forty years earlier, his uncle, Charles Brockden, had drawn up the constitution of the old Philadelphia Library Company. From early childhood, books were familiar to the youthful Brown, who became an omnivorous reader, and at Robert Proud’s school undermined his health by excessive devotion to reading and study, so that he was always an invalid. He took up the study of law, but soon abandoned it, despite the protest of his family, for the career of “book-making.” After some writing of verse and of essays, he published in 1798 a successful novel, “Wieland, or The Transformation,” and at once followed this with five others, “Ormond, or The Secret Witness,” (1799), “Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793” (1799–1800), in which he gave an account of the ravages of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, “Edgar Huntly, or The Adventures of a Sleep-Walker,” “Clara Howard” (1801), and “Jane Talbot” (published in England in 1804). From 1798 till 1801, Brown lived amid congenial surroundings in New York; in the former year he nearly died of yellow fever, to which his friend Dr. Elihu H. Smith succumbed. Returning to Philadelphia in 1801, he spent the remainder of his life there; marrying happily in 1804, editing The Literary Magazine, and writing political pamphlets and works on geography and Roman history, until consumption brought his busy and useful life to a premature end.
Brown’s novels mostly belong with the “tales of terror” so popular in his day. A radical thinker and analyst, he rejects supernatural agencies in his explanation of events, and relies wholly on natural causes; but this does not diminish the number of marvels in his tales. The plots of one or two of his stories will give an idea of the character of all. The scene of “Wieland” is laid on the banks of the Schuylkill, in Pennsylvania. The Wielands are a cultivated German family. Wieland’s father has died mysteriously by what is explained as self- or spontaneous combustion, and the son has inherited a melancholy and superstitious mind, which develops into fanaticism. The family hear strange voices giving commands or warnings or telling of events beyond the reach of human knowledge. A mysterious man, Carwin, appears, with such powers of pleasing that he becomes very intimate with the family. At length Wieland, at the command of what he takes to be a heavenly voice, sacrifices to God his wife and children. Confined in a maniac’s dungeon, he bears his fate with a sense of moral exaltation. Having escaped, he attempts to offer up also his sister, the narrator of the story, when he learns that he has been deceived by the ventriloquism of Carwin, whom malice has thus led to trick the family. In a frenzy, Wieland kills himself; Carwin disappears; and the story ends with the marriage of the sister and Pleyel, a brother of Wieland’s late wife and now a widower. Less powerful than “Wieland,” but still superior to Brown’s other works, is “Ormond.” An artist, Stephen Dudley, engaging in pharmacy to support his family, is brought to beggary through the villainy of his partner. His daughter Constantia bears up bravely through severe trials. Just when life appears brighter, Ormond comes upon the scene, a mysteriously powerful man, much like Falkland in Godwin’s “Caleb Williams,” of great wealth, strong mind, and base morals; he deserts Helena Cleves, who commits suicide, and pursues Constantia. Stephen Dudley is murdered by an unknown hand. Having a legacy from Helena, Constantia is about to sail for Europe with her friend (who narrates the story) when Ormond, finding her invincible, assaults her in a lonely house and meets death by her hand, after he has himself slain Craig, now revealed as the assassin of Dudley at Ormond’s instigation. Constantia afterward lives quietly with her friend in Europe. Brown’s plots are usually disfigured by irrelevant incidents and superfluous characters; he frequently changed his plans and even his heroines, and, writing with great rapidity, often with a greedy printer at his elbow, he utterly failed to weld together the elements of his stories and often to give them proper motivation. His characters are drawn in bold and clear outlines, but are frequently uninteresting—being too sentimental or inconsistent, or given to long and prosy soliloquies. It cannot be affirmed that Brown understood human nature well. Of style he had none; his pages are innocent of epigram or humorous turn; he employs very little dialogue and makes but scanty and awkward use of dialect. Yet in certain passages, in describing great crises, he exhibits considerable vividness and power. Brown’s chief merit consists in the sense of reality with which he contrives to invest his scenes of gloom and terror.
The power possessed by this rare genius, says Mr. James H. Morse,[4] of throwing gloomy characteristics into his theme, was equalled by no other American writer. In the matter of morbid analysis, Poe, in comparison with Brown, was superficial, Hawthorne was cheerful, and the modern school of French writers are feeble. With Poe, we can see that the gloom came by an effort of a spurred imagination; with Hawthorne, that it was the work of an artistic sense; but with Brown, it seems to have been constitutional—the gift at once of temperament and circumstances.
Brown was an admirer of William Godwin and obviously imitated not only his method of developing characters but also his style. It may be added that Brown in turn found many readers in England, where several of his novels were republished and where, as we have seen, “Jane Talbot” was first published. Professor Dowden quotes Peacock as saying that of all the works with which Shelley was familiar, those which took the deepest root in his mind were Brown’s four novels, Schiller’s “Robbers,” and Goethe’s “Faust.” Brown’s influence upon subsequent American writers, moreover, was not inconsiderable, and his place in our literature, if not high, is at least honourable.
John Davis, an Englishman about whom little is known, wrote several novels of American life, most of which were published here, and became somewhat popular. He lived in the United States from 1798 till 1802, and travelled over a large part of the country. His first novel, “The Original Letters of Ferdinand and Elizabeth” (1798), was a conventional story of seduction and suicide. It was followed by “The Farmer of New Jersey” (1800), “The First Settlers of Virginia” (1805), a pioneer historical novel, crude and ill managed, “Walter Kennedy, an American Tale” (London, 1805), and “The Post Captain” (1813). The most that can be said of these stories is that their author was shrewd and observant, and had some journalistic skill.
Mrs. Sally Keating Wood (1760–1855), wife of General Abiel Wood, of Maine, may be mentioned as the author of “Julia and the Illuminated Baron” (1800), which recalls the mysterious evil power and atheistic tendencies attributed to the Bavarian order of the Illuminati, established in 1775, which, though suppressed in 1780 by the Elector, was supposed to have secretly persisted and spread over Europe. Mrs. Wood wrote also “Dorval, or The Speculator” (1801), “Amelia, or The Influence of Virtue” (1802), “Ferdinand and Elmira, a Russian Story” (1804), and “Tales of the Night” (1827), besides several novels that were never published. Mrs. Wood placed many of her scenes in Europe.