positive merits. Brown narrates single incidents with tell. ing effect; and in spite of long-drawn-out passages he holds the reader's interest throughout. He gave the American

Indian a place in romantic fiction. His stories have a uniformly high moral tone. It is also to his credit that he had sufficient confidence in his ability and in the public to adopt literature as his profession-he was the first American to do this.

ness, and suicide. Arthur Mervyn and Ormond are chiefly concerned with yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia and New York, with all the horrors of poor hospitals, incompetent attendants, and criminally ignorant and negligent officials. Edgar Huntly (subtitle, "Memoirs of a Sleep Walker") deals

really with two sleep walkers, both of whom go through extraordinary and mysterious adventures, and one of whom, like Wieland, ends his stormy career in madness and suicide. The element of suspense is strong, and surprises are frequent.

Style. Among his mannerisms of style is the over-frequent use of certain favorite words, often in unusual senses. An example that will strike the reader of any of these stories is "bereave." The hero of Edgar Huntly is "bereaved" of the use of his limbs, "bereaved" of sense, "bereaved of strength," "bereaved of the power to walk"; and an Indian he shoots is "bereaved of sensation though not of life." In other stories persons are "bereft" of all satisfaction, of understanding, of activity, of affectionate regards, etc. Another mannerism is a wearisome tendency to what may be called the polysyllabic style. "It was obvious to conclude that his disease was pestilential"; "His aspect was embellished with good nature, though indicative of ignorance"; "He promised to maintain with me an epistolary intercourse." Of Brown's most noticeable peculiarity in sentence structure - an excessive use of the rhetorical question, especially in series a single example will suffice. "How, I asked, might he regard her claims? In what light would he consider that engagement of the understanding, rather than of the heart, into which I had entered? How far would he esteem it proper to adhere to it? and what efforts might he make to dissolve it?"

Brown's Literary Value. One errs in attributing to Brown, as does the writer of the "Memoir" prefixed to Wieland, "superior genius and profound knowledge." The reader who comes to any one of Brown's romances expecting to find either of these will be disappointed. He will find a gloomy and sometimes exciting story, of peculiar if not puzzling people, who talk in rather high-flown language, and

whose conversation is often enigmatical. He will find a narrative that "gets going" in fewer pages than do many of Cooper's or Scott's, and that seldom lets the reader's interest flag. If he brings to the reading a recollection of the times in which the author wrote, the romance will gain the additional interest that attaches to all pioneer or independent work. The novel as a literary form was young in England, and in America still in its infancy. Few Americans had written literature for its own sake. Add to these circumstances the fact that the English poet Shelley and his wife were admittedly influenced by Brown, and the probability that Poe and Hawthorne were also, and it will be seen that he has an importance in literature on other than historical grounds.

CHAPTER III

FROM IRVING TO THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR,

Introduction.

1809-1865

According to Brander Matthews "it would be possible to maintain the thesis that American literature began in 1809 with the publication of Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York." This is true only if one takes literature in the restricted sense mentioned on page 1; and elsewhere Professor Matthews admits that "not a few of the early state papers of our country have literary merit in a high degree." If we omitted from our literary history the authors of the Declaration of Independence, The Crisis, The Federalist, Liberty or Death, we should be unable to defend the inclusion of several names found in the present chapter. Webster and Lincoln hold a higher place in literature, doubtless, than do Jefferson and Hamilton; but no one of the four was much concerned with "beauty of form or emotional effect." They addressed the intellect as "a clear, cold, logic engine"; yet Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Poe, and Hawthorne are not more sure of places in American literature of this period than are Webster and Lincoln.

Literature as well as politics- indeed, the whole life of the American people down to the end of 1865 was dominated by the slavery question. Not only in the halls of Congress does this appear. Poetry and fiction were devoted to abolition; the lyceum platform took it up; journalism of every kind was given over to it; newspapers and magazines

came into existence solely to attack slavery. The defense of the institution was left to the orators, who formally defended, not slavery, but a principle of government. The discussion involved a question which had divided the very founders of the government, as noted above in our sketch of Hamilton. This question was whether the United States of America was a league of sovereign states, or an indissoluble union of the people. On this question the country divided in such a way as to involve even purely literary men. Poe thought he saw in Lowell's Fable for Critics a criticism of the South; and there is no doubt that Hawthorne's death was hastened by grief over the war.

1

With the entrance of Irving, "the first ambassador whom the New World of Letters sent to the Old," 1 American literature takes its place among the literatures of the world. It does not, of course, rank with that of the mother country, or of the leading nations of Europe; but from this time it claimed writers and writings which are received with enthusiasm in the older countries. When Irving received an honorary degree at Oxford, the auditorium rang with shouts of "Geoffrey Crayon!" "Diedrich Knickerbocker!" "Rip Van Winkle!" Emerson, Poe, and Cooper were all acclaimed by England, and the last two by France, as names destined to permanent high places in literature. From the time of the Sketch Book there were several answers to the contemptuous query of Sydney Smith, an English critic, "Who reads an American book?"

English literature during the first quarter of the nineteenth century attained an excellence surpassed only by the great Elizabethan age. It was the age of Romanticism, of which the chief characteristics were a revolt against tradition, a breaking away from the hard and fast rules of the eighteenth century, an emphasis on individuality. WordsThackeray, in Nil Nisi Bonum.

1