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A dumpy little man, silent with strangers, responsive among friends, dead at 39 of consumption, Brown was a far better writer than later generations admitted. He filled his novels with seductions, crimes, violence and a robust 18th-Century sentiment, as well as the ghostly trappings of Gothic romances. But the novels "were singularly original, poetic and impressive," and Brown "added a third dimension to the Gothic novel; he suffused his mechanical devices with true horrors of the mind. . . . He was a precursor, in more than one respect, of Poe, Melville, Hawthorne and Henry James. Brown represented, in other words, the native American wild stock that produced these splendid blossoms in the course of time."
Lawyer's Legend. New York was more aristocratic, less intellectual. But the little city (pop. 60,000 in 1800) of yellow brick buildings and whitewashed brick houses at the tip of Manhattan Island was already friendly to painters and actors. Washington Irving, aged 17 in 1800, used to climb out the bedroom window of his home on William Street, after family prayers at night, to sneak to the theater.
A published author by the time he was 20—though much of his town-gossip writing was pale as the moon in the morning—Irving was popular, attractive, the bearer of a charmed life from the time he suddenly got the idea for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (he was crossing a bridge in Westchester) to the time he was captured by Mediterranean pirates. With his successful older brothers making life easy for him, Irving took his lawyer's career lightly. He had only one client, and neglected him. But he knew the old Dutch legends of the Hudson, cheerfully lampooned the Ten Eycks and Author Brooks's forebears the Van Wycks, hunted and fished through the farms and forests of Scarsdale and Tarrytown. He excelled at descriptive writing, became a model of English prose more popular than Addison.
Yellow Rivers and Red Men. Irving traveled not only in Europe, but to the U.S. West, attracted by Painter George Catlin's letters to New York papers about Indian life, which were the talk of the city in 1832-33. Catlin lived for eight years among the Indians, visited 48 tribes. He "could scarcely bear to leave the plains, where nothing suggested home but the sun and the rats, where frogs had horns and dogs were wolves and rivers were yellow and men were red and where there were no laws save those of honor." When he first visited the Mandans on a steamboat, 2,000 miles up the Missouri, the chiefs and braves thronged his lodge. Awaiting their turn to be painted in strict order of rank, they sometimes spent the whole morning, from sunrise to noon, arranging their war dress and war paint.
Of such richly colorful material, woven into a narrative that is never schematic, and yet never a mere miscellaneous grab bag of historical information, is Van Wyck Brooks's book constructed. Its individual word-portraits—of Alexander Wilson, the dour ornithologist and bird-painter, of Davy Crockett, teller of tall backwoods tales, who thought they made a book "jump out of the press like a new dollar from a mint-hopper," of Fenimore Cooper, whose father gave him 23 farms in New York State when the future novelist was expelled from Yale—are equal to Brooks's best.