Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
appeal to reason and justice; and to a new world and a new venture
in government it came with double appeal. How could the republican
experiment better justify itself than by establishing justice in
the new social order--justice for men and justice for women who had
too long suffered under narrow handicaps? It was certainly an ideal
worth serious consideration--particularly since the French school had
suggested that the germinal source of social injustice must be sought
in institutions rather than in the nature of man. It was natural enough
for gentlemen who profited by social wrong to charge that injustice was
inherent in human nature--that man’s innate selfishness was to blame
for the ills of society. But the new thinkers were of an inquiring turn
of mind, and under their critical scrutiny the old conception was seen
to rest on a perversion of fact. Gentlemen had got the cart before the
horse. The crying evils of civilization, when analyzed, were traceable
to vicious environment, to social and political maladjustments; not
to human nature. The mind of the infant is plastic. Very well. If it
is molded by social environment, why is it so often misshapen and
perverted to base purposes, if institutions are not at fault? why may
it not be molded to nobler ends under more beneficent institutions?
Reason is a common possession; the ideal of justice is a common ideal.
The evil genius that has hitherto thwarted their benevolent work is
the overgrown political state, debased to selfish ends. Once let the
beneficent sway of social instincts supersede the exploiting machinery
of the political state, and reason must conduct to justice. The heart
of man is sound. Let it be free to follow its natural promptings and
war must give way to peace, the selfish struggle of classes disappear
in a common brotherhood.
To an ardent young American like Brockden Brown, with the Hamiltonian
struggle for power before his eyes, such a philosophy must have come
with immense appeal. America confronted a future unmortgaged to the
past; why should it repeat the old follies and mistakes that had
reduced Europe to its present level? Here the pressure of vicious
institutions was light as yet. Here the appeal to reason and justice
was less hampered by selfish preëmptions. Let social commendation be
bestowed on the uncorrupted heart, on generous impulses, on native
integrity of character. Let education be a natural unfolding of humane
instincts, not a sharpening of wits to overreach one’s fellows. Let
rewards go to frank, outspoken truth, rather than to chicanery and
deceit. Inspired by such sentiments, Brockden Brown proposed to
make fiction serve social ends. He would spread the gospel of Mary
Wollstonecraft and Godwin by means of popular tales. The views of
the former he elaborated in _Alcuin; A Dialogue_, which in the year
1798 presented for the consideration of the American people the
Wollstonecraft feminism in such passages as this:
Marriage is an union founded on free and mutual consent. It
cannot exist without friendship. It cannot exist without personal
fidelity. As soon as the union ceases to be spontaneous, it ceases
to be just. This is the sum. If I were to talk for months I could
add nothing to the completeness of the definition.
But it is in _Arthur Mervyn_ that he gives his fullest pronouncement
of what he conceives must be done in America. He takes his hero fresh
from the plowtail, one of nature’s noblemen, and traces his triumphant
course through the thick of sordid intrigue to a happy end. Generous
in instincts, impulsive in sociability, responsive to suffering,
hating injustice, loving the pure and disinterested, Arthur Mervyn
is a Godwinian figure drawn to captivate the imagination with the
social ideal. It is not so much the plot of the story that reveals
the enormous influence of Godwin--patent as the likeness is to _Caleb
Williams_, but rather the expansive nature of the title hero, whose
instincts bid him espouse justice, and whose life is an implied
criticism of all that is sordid and mean.
With the political romanticism of his work was joined a literary
romanticism that likewise came from England, where it was muddying
the stream of English fiction and turning it aside from the vigorous
realism of the middle eighteenth century. The movement that Paulding
dubbed the “blood-pudding school” was one of the by-products of the
romantic development that ran a far more disastrous course in America
than in England, distorting the growth of native fiction for half
a century. It was perhaps unfortunate for the American novel that
_Wieland_ should have been Brockden Brown’s most finished work, for
it contributed in consequence more powerfully to the spread of the
melodramatic. Lacking his strain of rationalism, other writers reveled
increasingly in the luridly picaresque, till the popular taste was so
debauched that Gilmore Simms found it well-nigh impossible to struggle
against it. For this of course Brown was not to blame; yet his gross
romanticisms of manner persisted long after his Godwinian romanticisms
had faded out of the popular mind, if indeed they ever found lodgment
there.
III
Brockden Brown’s career was in a sense symbolic of the fate of his
native city--a few brilliant years and then a swift decline. Death cut
him down before he fulfilled his promise. Something of a like fate
befell his most brilliant successor, Robert Montgomery Bird, probably
the ablest man of letters that Philadelphia produced. Caught up by
the romantic movement at the beginning of his precocious career, he
plunged into dramatic writing and from 1830 to 1834, between the ages
of twenty-four and twenty-eight, he wrote four plays for Edwin Forrest,
one of which, _The Gladiator_, met with extraordinary success, both
in this country and in England; and another, _The Broker of Bogota_,
kept the stage for years. At the age of thirty he gave over the writing
of plays and turned to other fields. The explanation of so unusual a
course, according to a recent historian, is not far to seek. He had
been overreached by Forrest, and after parting with his manuscripts
to the actor, the playwright found himself in the condition of the
farmer who after shipping his potatoes to market discovers himself to
be in debt to the commission merchant.[419] That he determined to try
a different crop was natural enough, but unfortunate for the American
drama.
Of his subsequent ventures into the field of romantic fiction, one at
least was an extraordinary success, rivaling if not surpassing _The
Gladiator_ in popular favor. _Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay_
still remains one of the few outstanding tales of the Kentucky
settlement. Published in Philadelphia in 1837, it has been reissued in
successive editions, more than twenty in all down to the present. It
was translated into German in 1838, into Dutch in 1877, and into Polish
in 1905. There is abundant reason for its popularity. It is a story of
calculating revenge, done with extraordinary vividness and set against
a romantic background. A frontier Quaker, trusting in the spirit of
good will, finds his non-resistance futile; he is set upon by Indians,
his family murdered before his eyes, and himself scalped and left for
dead beside his burnt cabin. Recovering, he sets forth on a fierce
career. Under the mask of a non-resistant, so effectively worn as to
awaken the contempt of the frontier Indian-haters, he became a hunter
of men, and his secret passages through the wilderness leave no other
trail than the marked bodies of slaughtered warriors. The Jibbenainosay
is an uncanny figure who strikes with appalling suddenness, a Nemesis
that fills the hearts of border Indians with terror and turns their
dreams to nightmares--one of the most striking and fearful figures
in our early fiction. The Indians whom he pursues so remorselessly
are depicted as thorough savages. In describing them Bird has put all
his romanticisms aside. There is no sentimentalizing of the noble
red man in the brisk pages of _Nick of the Woods_; the warriors are
dirty drunken louts, filled with an unquenchable blood-lust, whom
the frontiersman kills with as little compunction as he would kill a
rattlesnake. The ugly feud that so long soiled the Border is depicted
with almost startling frankness, and through its worst phases moves the
figure of Bloody Nathan, professing to be a man of peace whilst cutting
an appalling lot of notches in his gun, an epileptic who perhaps
deceives even himself.
If one likes stirring action that is certain to end in blood-letting,
there is good foraging in _Nick of the Woods_, despite its excesses
of conventional romance. And there is much else as well. Bird had
evidently studied his western materials with some care, and he did
his part to popularize certain conceptions that literature had come
to associate with the Ohio valley. The character of Ralph Stackpole
is clearly suggestive of the wild antics supposed to be common to the
river boatmen. “The history of this wild scape-gallows,” says Bird,
“his prowess in the pin-fold and the battle-field, his adventure on
the beech-tree, and his escape from the meshes of the law, with other
characteristic events not included in our relation, are recollections
still cherished in some parts of Kentucky, and made the theme of many
a gleesome story.” But what seems more suggestive today is Bird’s
conscious attempt to reproduce the new type of western humor that
found its expression in the Davy Crockett myth. Perhaps the wild
extravagance of Ralph Stackpole’s vocabulary goes back to Mike Fink,
perhaps it derives from Davy himself; at any rate the mode had spread
so widely by 1837 that this Philadelphia man of letters had come to
believe that such was the indigenous form of humor in the new West of
the Ohio valley, and he took particular pains to draw the irrepressible
Ralph with vigorous touches. A pronounced romantic, Bird unconsciously
contributed his mite to the myth of western humor.
Footnotes
[418] Quoted in Oberholtzer, _Literary History of Philadelphia_, p. 178.
[419] See A. H. Quinn, _A History of the American Drama, etc._, pp.
244-248.
Chapter II • The New Capital
I
Very different from the gay and cultivated Quaker City was the
commercial port of Manhattan, with its Yankee energy ingrafted on the
stolid Dutch stock, which fate seized upon and transformed into the
greatest of our new cities, the favorite home of the genius of American
enterprise. Never a cultural capital as Philadelphia had been, and
as Charleston was becoming--a fact which Fenimore Cooper untactfully
announced to the world--it was ambitious to acquire commercial and
financial ascendency; and this ascendency of the economic over the
cultural, this frank evaluation of progress in terms of exploitation,
marks the definite transition from the eighteenth century to the
nineteenth, the triumph of an aggressive middle class over the
leisurely ways of an older landed aristocracy. The romance of expansion
was creating there a new psychology, and this new psychology was
preparing the city for leadership in the new age that was rising. Its
strategic position brought to it the produce of the new settlements
that were pushing west to the great lakes and beyond; its aggressive
traders were reaching out for a share in the markets of the world;
the plodding methods of money-getting that had satisfied an earlier
generation no longer satisfied men who had discovered the richer
possibilities of capitalistic manipulation. The potentialities that lay
in the capitalistic system were shrewdly explored, and the necessary
machinery of the new finance was devised. The acquisitive spirit of the
city found itself in a position to profit from the rage of speculation