[Illustration:  CHARLES B. BROWN]

The United States in 1800 was mentally and morally a colony of Great Britain still.  A few hundred thousand white families scattered over about as many square miles of territory, much of it refractory wilderness with more refractory inhabitants; with no cities of any size, and no communication save by wretched roads or by sailing vessels; no rich old universities for centres of culture, and no rich leisured society to enjoy it; the energies of the people perforce absorbed in subduing material obstacles, or solidifying a political experiment disbelieved in by the very men who organized it;—­neither time nor materials existed then for an independent literary life, which is the growth of security and comfort and leisure if it embraces a whole society, or of endowed college foundations and an aristocracy if it is only of the few.  Hence American society took its literary meals at the common table of the English-speaking race, with little or no effort at a separate establishment.  There was much writing, but mostly polemic or journalistic.  When real literature was attempted, it consisted in general of imitations of British essays, or fiction, or poetry; and in the last two cases not even imitations of the best models in either.  The essays were modeled on Addison; the poetry on the heavy imitators of Pope’s heroics; the fiction either on the effusive sentimentalists who followed Richardson, or on the pseudo-Orientalists like Walpole and Lewis, or on the pseudo-mediaevalists like Mrs. Roche and Mrs. Radcliffe.  This sort of work filled the few literary periodicals of the day, but was not read enough to make such publications profitable even then, and is pretty much all unreadable now.

Charles Brockden Brown stands in marked contrast to these second-hand weaklings, not only by his work but still more by his method and temper.  In actual achievement he did not quite fulfill the promise of his early books, and cannot be set high among his craft.  He was an inferior artist; and though he achieved naturalism of matter, he clung to the theatrical artificiality of style which was in vogue.  But if he had broken away from all traditions, he could have gained no hearing whatever; he died young—­twenty years more might have left him a much greater figure; and he wrought in disheartening loneliness of spirit.  His accomplishment was that of a pioneer.  He was the first American author to see that the true field for his fellows was America and not Europe.  He realized, as the genius of Chateaubriand realized at almost the same moment, the artistic richness of the material which lay to hand in the silent forest vastnesses, with their unfamiliar life of man and beast, and their possibilities of mystery enough to satisfy the most craving.  He was not the equal of the author of ‘The Natchez’ and ‘Atala’; but he had a fresh and daring mind.  He turned away from both the emotional orgasms and the stage claptrap of his time, to break ground for all future American novelists.  He antedated Cooper in the field of Indian life and character; and he entered the regions of mystic supernaturalism and the disordered human brain in advance of Hawthorne and Poe.