Charles Brockden Brown was born in Philadelphia, Jan. 17, 1771, and died in the same city, of consumption, Feb. 22, 1810. By his own statement, made in a letter just before his death, we learn that he never had more than one continuous half-hour of perfect health. In spite of his short life and his ill-health he accomplished much. At first he studied law, but abandoned it for literature. He was a frequent contributor to the magazines of the time and was himself editor of the “Monthly Magazine and American Review” (1799), and the “Literary Magazine and American Register” (1803–8). His first published work, “The Dialogue of Alcuin” (1797), dealt with questions of marriage and divorce, and he was also the author of several essays on political, historical, and geographical subjects. His novels followed each other with astonishing rapidity: “Sky Walk; or the Man Unknown to Himself” (1798, not published), “Wieland; or the Transformation” (1798), “Ormond; or the Secret Witness” (1799), “Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the year 1793” (1799–1800), “Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker” (1801), “Jane Talbot” (1801), and “Clara Howard or the Enthusiasm of Love” (1801). They met with an equally astonishing success, and constitute the first important contribution to American fiction.
Personal
Acted as if he had no use for money…. Without system in every thing…. Was negligent of personal appearance, even to slovenliness…. In mixed company often silent and absent…. Fitful and irregular.
We believe Brown to have been one of the purest of men. The intellectual so predominated in him, and he seems so to have loathed the sensual, that perhaps he was not aware of the great strength of certain temptations over others.
His religious views were unsettled in the early period of his life, but in the preface of his Magazine he emphatically professes his faith in Christianity. His moral character was unexceptionable. He was much beloved by his friends and relatives, and was liberal notwithstanding his poverty, receiving his sisters-in-law, on their father’s death, into his own family. In person, Brown was tall and strongly framed, but extremely thin. His complexion was pale and sallow, his hair straight and black. The expression of his face was strongly marked with melancholy. “I saw him,” says Sully, the painter, “a little before his death. I had never known him—never heard of him—never read any of his works. He was in a deep decline. It was in the month of November—our Indian summer—when the air is full of smoke. Passing a window one day, I was caught by the sight of a man, with a remarkable physiognomy, writing at a table in a dark room. The sun shone directly upon his head. I never shall forget it. The dead leaves were falling then—it was Charles Brockden Brown.”
Mr. Brown’s character was one of great amiability and moral excellence, and his manners were distinguished by a gentleness and unaffected simplicity. His great colloquial powers made him a most agreeable companion; and his unwearied application is attested by the large amount of his works, the whole number of which, including his editorial labors, must be equal to twenty-four volumes,—a vast amount to be produced in the brief compass of a little more than ten years.
He had little of the spirit of adventure, and on one occasion said he would rather consort with a ploughman or an old market-woman forever, than expose himself to the hundredth part of the perils which beset the heels of a Ledyard or a Park. He was careless of money, and slovenly in dress, but he was habitually careful in his diet. He abstained from spirituous liquors long before temperance societies were established, and he wrote papers in one of his magazines on the deleterious effects of intemperance, and of the use of greasy articles of food.
Truly he was a man of letters, in the fullest sense of the phrase; and though consumption ended his career at the age of thirty-nine, he had his share of the labor of life.
Wieland, 1798
This powerful and original romance, excited attention and brought the author into the notice of all readers of works of this description. Few novels or romances have been written, which seize so strongly upon the imagination and feelings of the reader, hurry him from the realities which surround him, bury in oblivion his joys or sorrows, and fix his whole attention on the images which the author presents before him, as “Wieland.”
This novel is the history of a fanatic, whose religious mania incited him to murder his wife and children, and at last to commit suicide, and is one of the most masterly stories that has ever been told of the human soul.
In the hands of a tiro, the materials of which “Wieland” is composed would have resulted in a melodrama of the commonest and most pinchbeck order; but being infused by the spirit and power of genius, they are transformed into a gloomy and awful tragedy, in which the reader forgets for a time the incredibility of the incidents and the impossibility of the situations. “Wieland” upon the whole, deservedly ranks as Brown’s completest work of fiction.
Brown’s early life was unmistakably gloomy. From a temperament delicate and fine, but morbid,—in which the intellectual overbalanced the physical forces,—sprang his first book, which, though stimulated from across the water, was wholly within the range of his mood and spirit. It contained, however, not a hint of the new American life, not a spark of that humor which afterward flashed freely in American literature. Except for an awful sense of solitude,—the gloom of primeval nature,—there was scarcely a touch of our glorious scenery. No social element is represented.
In spite of confusion and turgidity, the story has power. The end is ludicrously weak. The chapters in which the mind of Wieland is gradually possessed by delusion could have been written only by one who had genuinely felt a sense of what hideously mysterious things may lie beyond human ken. Some such sense as this, in terrible serious form, haunted the imagination of Puritans. In a meretricious form it appears in the work of Poe. In a form alive with beauty it reveals itself throughout the melancholy romances of Hawthorne. In Poe’s work and in Hawthorne’s, it is handled with something like mastery, and few men of letters have been much further from mastery of their art than Charles Brockden Brown; but the sense of horror which Brown expressed in “Wieland” is genuine. To feel its power you need only compare it with the similar feeling expressed in Lewis’s “Monk,” in the “Mysteries of Udolpho,” or even in “Caleb Williams” itself.
Ormond, 1799
The appearance of these two novels [“Wieland,” and “Ormond”], constitutes an epoch in the ornamental literature of America. They are the first decidedly successful attempts in the walk of romantic fiction. They are still farther remarkable as illustrating the character and state of society on this side of the Atlantic, instead of resorting to the exhausted springs of European invention. These circumstances, as well as the uncommon powers they displayed both of conception and execution, recommended them to the notice of the literary world, although their philosophical method of dissecting passion and analyzing motives of action placed them somewhat beyond the reach of vulgar popularity.
“Ormond” is mainly remarkable for the analytical power shown in the author’s one fine female character, Constantia Dudley, who, reduced from affluence to poverty, braves all the threats and seductions of the hypocritical Lovelace, from whom the book takes its name. Brown’s plots are, as a rule, methodless and improbable: his bursts of passion are dulled by intervening tediousness; and his style, generally rough, is sometimes further deformed by pedantic circumlocutions; but he leaves us, despite his acknowledged obligations to Godwin, with the impression of an original power cramped by the necessities of hasty work, unhappily because prematurely quenched, and of a writer who has been unduly forgotten.
Arthur Mervyn, 1799–1800
“Arthur Mervyn” is, of all his books, the most wandering and forgetful in narrative, continually throwing out false clews and leaving behind unsolved mysteries, leading with elaborate pains up to situations which amount to nothing. With something of Poe’s sombre imagination, Brown lacked Poe’s fine economy of literary structure. The strength of “Arthur Mervyn” is in its episodes,—its vivid pictures of Philadelphia ravaged by the yellow fever, its glimpses of the debtors’ prison, anticipating “Little Dorrit.”
Edgar Huntly, 1801
“Edgar Huntly,” the scene of which is laid in a then thinly-settled part of Pennsylvania, is full of vivid, if somewhat over-colored, descriptions of the solitudes of mountain and forest. We are taken, perhaps for the first time in fiction, into the midst of the perils of our frontier life; we encounter the panther and the Indian, the latter surrounded with none of Cooper’s tinge of romance, but depicted as the mere wily and bloodthirsty savage. This choice of a native theme was a deliberate one, for Brown says in his preface that he is the first to call forth the reader’s sympathy by substituting for puerile superstitions, Gothic castles, and chimeras,—the conventional machinery of the English romances,—“the incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the Western wilderness.” In this story he distantly suggests Cooper, in his fondness for psychological problems, and in the morbid strain that runs through many of his books, he still more faintly foreshadows Poe and the yet greater Hawthorne.
General
Brown owes his reputation to his novels. He wrote them indeed principally for his amusement, and preferred publishing them when unfinished to labouring upon them after they had lost their interest to himself: they are proofs or signs of power rather than the result of its complete and steady exertion; but they shew the character of his mind and will justify our curiosity to examine it. In attempting this, we do not feel as if we were bringing forward a deserving but neglected author; he has received honourable notice from distinguished men abroad, and his countrymen discerned his merits without waiting till a foreign glory had shone on and revealed them. Still he is very far from being a popular writer. There is no call, as far as we know, for a second edition of any of his works. He is rarely spoken of but by those who have an habitual curiosity about everything literary, and a becoming pride in all good writing which appears amongst ourselves. They have not met with the usual success of leaders, in matters of taste, since, with all their admiration, they have not been able to extend his celebrity much beyond themselves…. We should not pronounce Brown a man of genius, nor deny him that distinction, from his style. It might have been acquired by care and study, but it is the result only and never betrays the process.
The very want of variety has given such an air of truth to what he is about, showing such an earnest singleness of purpose, that perhaps no writer ever made his readers more completely forget that they were not reading a statement of some serious matter of fact; and so strong is this impression, that we even become half reconciled to improbabilities which so vex us in fiction, though often happening in daily life. This enables us, also, to bear better with his style; for, along with something like a conviction that the man who had vivacity of genius enough for such inventions could never have delivered himself with such dull poverty and pedantry of phrase, we at last are almost driven to the conclusion, that, however extraordinary they may be, they are nevertheless facts; for the man never could have made them, and things must have happened pretty much as he tells us they did.
He may be rather called a philosophical than a poetical writer; for, though he has that intensity of feeling which constitutes one of the distinguishing attributes of the latter, yet in his most tumultuous bursts of passion we frequently find him pausing to analyze and coolly speculate on the elements which have raised it. This intrusion, indeed, of reason, la raison froide, into scenes of the greatest interest and emotion, has sometimes the unhappy effect of chilling them altogether.
We have long been ashamed that one who ought to be the pride of the country, and who is, in the highest qualities of the mind, so far in advance of our other novelists, should have become almost inaccessible to the public. It has been the custom to liken Brown to Godwin. But there was no imitation, no second-hand in the matter. They were congenial natures, and whichever had come first might have lent an impulse to the other. Either mind might have been conscious of the possession of that peculiar vein of ore without thinking of working it for the mint of the world, till the other, led by accident, or overflow of feeling, showed him how easy it was to put the reveries of his solitary hours into words and upon paper for the benefit of his fellow men…. Brown is great as ever human writer was in showing the self-sustaining force of which a lonely mind is capable. He takes one person, makes him brood like the bee, and extract from the common life before him all its sweetness, its bitterness, and its nourishment.
He had more genius than talent, and more imagination than fancy. It has been said that he outraged the laws of art by gross improbabilities and inconsistencies, but the most incredible of his incidents had parallels in true history, and the metaphysical unity and consistency of his novels are apparent to all readers familiar with psychological phenomena. His works, generally written with great rapidity, are incomplete, and deficient in method. He disregarded rules, and cared little for criticism. But his style was clear and nervous, with little ornament, free of affectations, and indicated a singular sincerity and depth of feeling.
So deficient, indeed, in constructive design and unity of purpose, are his writings, that, with the exception of his essays and other argumentative papers, they resemble the sketches that litter an artist’s studio more than elaborate and finished works. His fictions might aptly be designated as studies in Romance. He left many fragmentary narratives, scenes and dialogues—some founded upon history, some upon observation, and others apparently the result of an inventive mood. At one time he had no less than five novels commenced, sketched out, or partially written.
In romantic narrative. Brown was often successful, but he failed in the delineation of character.
Some of his novels have been republished in this country, but copies of these it is now difficult to meet with. Yet a public which so liberally admired Hawthorne, ought to know something about a writer of kindred and more potent genius. If Hoffmann’s Night-pieces and Fancy Pieces after the manner of Jacques Callot must rank first in the literature of the Weird, Brockden Brown comes second, and he adds to the weird such elements of psychological subtlety as give him a place to which Hoffmann had no claim in the literature of spiritual analysis. To a daring imagination—the most singular and flexible, perhaps, yet witnessed amongst American writers—Charles Brockden Brown united a placid temperament and a contemplative intellect. Such a combination of seeming discordant, and yet sharply defined qualities, is almost unique. Deep-rooted melancholy, and the pathos of an apparently disordered mind, distinguish the works of this author, and yet few men were happier in their lives, or more profoundly enjoyed the simple fact of existence. He coveted no complex pleasures or recreations; his greatest solace was Nature; and he extracted happiness from those commonplace pursuits which by most men of genius would have been deemed monotonous and insupportable. His creations are dire, astounding, terrible—his life was sedate, tranquil, serene.
In 1800 he was the best writer of fiction of his time; he led the way to the general diffusion of the novel. His scenery was all American: he loved to paint sometimes the golden air of autumn, the evening sinking over the Schuylkill, rich in unrivalled colors, the splendors of a clime to which Europe offered no parallel; but oftener the city street, the plague-stricken homes, the stately mansion. In this rare setting his sombre, mysterious characters move dark and dreadful, scarcely human in their objects, always governed by some immutable law…. He was the morning-star that beckoned in the day.
Brown, in his depth of insight into the morbid phenomena of the human mind, really anticipated Hawthorne; but hurried as he was by that most malignant of literary devils, the printer’s, he produced no such masterpieces of literary art as “The Scarlet Letter,” “The Blithedale Romance,” and “The Marble Faun.” Brown is one of the most melancholy instances of a genius arrested in its orderly development by the pressure of circumstances. In mere power his forgotten novels rank very high among the products of the American imagination. And it should be added that though he is unread, he is by no means unreadable…. With all his faults, Brown does not deserve to be the victim of the bitterest irony of criticism, that, namely, of not being considered worth the trouble of a critical examination. His writings are contemptuously classed among dead books, interesting to the antiquary alone. Still, they have that vitality which comes from the presence of genius, and a little stirring of the ashes under which they are buried would reveal sparks of genuine fire.
Brockden Brown introduced the weird, the romantic, the appalling, the “native American,” and made a failure, on the whole.
Charles Brockden Brown, of Philadelphia, had all the qualities which would have recommended him to Goethe’s particular detestation, being slipshod in style and exhibiting a sovereign disregard of reality. His works abound in psychological curiosities and super-ingenious mysteries, exulting, like those of his romantic compeers, in all the calamities from which in the Prayer Book we ask God to deliver us.
Brown’s romances are not wanting an inventive power; in occasional situations that are intensely thrilling, and in subtle analysis of character; but they are fatally defective in art. The narrative is by turns abrupt and tiresomely prolix, proceeding not so much by dialogue as by elaborate dissection and discussion of motives and states of mind, interspersed with the author’s reflections. The wild improbabilities of plot and the unnatural and even monstrous developments of character are in startling contrast with the old-fashioned preciseness of the language; the conversations, when there are any, being conducted in that insipid dialect in which a fine woman was called an “elegant female.”
Judged by the standards set by Poe and Hawthorne, his work is crude and defective in art. The story is at times tediously spun out; character is dissected with disgusting minuteness; the plots are glaringly improbable; the characters either monsters or angels. He is not even a “clumsy Poe,” as some have called him, so vastly inferior is his art to his who produced the “Fall of the House of Usher.” Brown’s excellences are his graphic portrayals of action and his descriptions of wild nature. He had the art of stimulating expectations;—it is hard to lay down one of his romances unfinished; one reads on and on in a sort of ghastly dream until at length the end of the book completes the hideous nightmare.
The first imaginative writer worth mentioning in America…. He was also the first to exert a positive influence, across the Atlantic, upon British literature, laying thus early a few modest strands towards an ocean-cable of thought. As a result of this influence concealed doors opened in lonely houses, fatal epidemics laid cities desolate, secret plots were organized, unknown persons from foreign lands died in garrets leaving large sums of money; the honor of innocent women was occasionally endangered, though usually saved in time; people were subject to somnambulism and general frenzy; vast conspiracies were organized with small aims and smaller results. His books, published between 1798 and 1801, made their way across the ocean with a promptness that now seems inexplicable; and Mrs. Shelley in her novel of “The Last Man” founds her description of an epidemic on “the masterly delineations of the author of ‘Arthur Mervyn.’” Shelley himself recognized his obligations to Brown; and it is to be remembered that Brown himself was evidently familiar with Godwin’s philosophical writings, and that he may have drawn from those of Mary Wollstonecraft his advanced views as to the rights and education of women, a subject on which his first book, “Alcuin,” provided the earliest American protest…. There is so much of monotony in the general method, that one novel seems to stand for all; and the same modes of solution reappear so often—somnambulism, ventriloquism, yellow fever, forged letters, concealed money, secret closets—that it not only gives a sense of puerility, but makes it very difficult to recall, as to any particular passage, from which book it came.
The style, also, is a combination of crudeness and power. It is often stiff and sometimes ludicrously stilted; but everywhere it has strength; and in passages of exciting description and narration it rises to a very high degree of power. In these scenes of horror—the maniac Wieland about to kill his sister; Huntly groping about in the black pit; the midnight burial of Watson in the cellar; Ormond’s deliberate and gloating assault upon his trembling victim in the lonely house; the loathsome scenes in the pestilence-stricken city—Brown is in his element, and by them he has made a permanent contribution to the literature of terror. Inferior to Hawthorne in subtle spiritual suggestiveness, to Poe in brilliancy, intensity, and enveloping atmosphere of poetic gloom, he is perhaps superior to them and to the whole contemporary English school of terror in Defoe-like sense of reality and in sheer mass of overwhelming horror.
