AMERICAN LITERATURE - THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The 19th century in America, disregarding formal chronology, was, so far as literature is concerned, the period from the close of the second war with England (1815) to the war with Spain (1898), a period cut sharply across by the Civil War (1861-65). In the decades preceding the latter struggle American letters were buoyantly romantic ; in the years following they became increas ingly realistic—a shift of temper that resulted from profound changes in American life that cannot be considered here.
Until 1815 American literature lingered in the twilight of the 18th century. The heroic couplet and the Addisonian essay possessed sturdy vitality, and when Robert Treat Paine died in 181I a formal classicism was still in possession of the field. Nevertheless the sober culture of the earlier century was dying out. French thought was penetrating widely in America. The earliest romantics, from Freneau to Channing, were children of the Enlightenment, and the rise of the romantic movement in America coincided with the spread of French romantic philosophy. The movement began in Virginia with the inception of Jefferson ian democracy, and its first expression took the form of political theory. It came into literature under the influence of the English romantic movement, first through the writings of Tom Moore, and later through Scott, Wordsworth and Byron ; and in the decade of the '20s the old classicism was finally abandoned.
Of the many changes that came with romanticism perhaps the most enduring was the substitution of new literary forms that appealed to a wider and more democratic reading public. The newspaper and the magazine vastly enlarged their appeal. The Evening Post (1802) and The North American Review ) were precursors of a notable line of periodicals that multiplied rapidly. The drama was to run an unprosperous course, but fic tion was to become the commanding literary form as the century matured, engrossing much of the creative energy of American letters. The novel in America began somewhat inauspiciously with the venture in government under the new constitution. The Power of Sympathy (1789), by Sarah Wentworth Morton (r 1846), was a Richardsonian study in two volumes of letters, heavily sentimental and dark with warning to incautious females who persist in flirting with a wicked world. Other lachrymose novels followed in the next decade. Charlotte Temple (179o), by Susannah Haswell Rowson (1762-1824), achieved a popularity so astonishing as to run to a vast number of editions, and it is still reprinted in cheap form for the curious. The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster (1759-184o), won a success only a little less notable. Both works were reflections of the sentimental movement of the late 18th century, and they served to popular ize that movement in America.
It was at the turn of the century that the romantic novel got under headway in the work of Charles Brockden Brown (1771 181o). A Philadelphia Quaker, Brown was deeply sympathetic with the ideals of the French Revolution, and he threw into his work all the ardour of a sanguine temperament. Between and 18O1 he wrote seven novels—one in a single month and three in a twelvemonth—together with a mass of occasional work. A disciple of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, he united a vigorous rationalism to a romantic enthusiasm, suffusing the religion of reason with a warm humanitarianism. Structurally the most coherent of his works is Wieland, a tale of the "blood and thunder" school ; but the most characteristic is Arthur Mervyn with its Godwinian plot of an innocent youth in the grasp of a patron turned enemy, and its embodiment of French philosophy. In Edgar Huntly he turned to the frontier and opened a field that later writers were to exploit. The speed at which Brown wrote was not conducive to finished technique and his tales often de generate into absurd posturings ; but he rarely fails to create a romantic atmosphere and his dramatic effects are often excellent.