(a) Conditions unfavorable for retention of Brown. (b) Suggestion of Cooper, the bold painter. (c) Inutility in investigation of fancied likeness. CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN. A STUDY OF EARLY AMERICAN FICTION. CHAPTER I. CONDITION OF LITERATURE WHEN BROWN WROTE. Literatures like Constitutions are not made; they grow. Like the growth of the coal mine they form, harden and mature from the timber of other ages, of times well nigh forgotten, and from materials usually overlooked by the ninety and nine. Literature is the clear lake in which may be seen mirrored the vegetation that grows near it, the animal life that appears above and around it and the movements within its horizon. That the beginnings of every nation in literature have been in verse, not prose; that the development of her prose has seldom antedated the development of her material resources is something generally recognized as almost a truism in the history of literatures. In the United States we note the rare exception. The rule has been true because with most nations we mark their rise from a condition of barbarism by long, slow stages to civilization and culture. The people in the early periods of progression have not the intellects capable of carrying on the successive steps in argumentative prose but their fancies are pleased by ballads descriptive of the heroism of themselves and their ancestors. But America received her origin and early development not through an Anchises and an Aeneas carrying their "sacra patriosque penates" to found a new city to rise by the fostering care of Olympus, nor yet, through a Hengist and a Horsa that bore to new shores a barbarous vigor and independence, but she received them at a stage in the world's history when the blackness of ten centuries of gloom had but fairly rolled away, when the civilized world, rejoicing anew in its rediscovered strength, was investigating and progressing as never before and had sent some of its best blood across the western seas to colonize and found new nations. The long years of evolution from the uncivilized to the civilized that marked the growth of European nations were absent here. For without the institutions of the Old World, the New yet possessed their training and influence and considered herself as good as her fathers. The United States, though her tuition has been derived from all the world, yet is in language, institutions and laws, the child of England. To her she has ever turned to draw the inspiration that has set her alive to the best instincts within herself. Moreover, poetry, the language of passion and imagination, could have, at the beginning not much in common with our fore-fathers unless it be used to illustrate some teaching of their strict Calvanism or to warn more effectively than could prose the sinner heedless of the coming "Day of Doom." To subdue the forests, to clear the land, till the fields and build homes amid an environment of savage beasts and savage men required a strong arm and a stout heart with but little demand |