Besides this, and with respect to Irving in particular, there has been in America a criticism—­sometimes called the destructive, sometimes the Donnybrook Fair—­that found “earnestness” the only amusing thing in the world, that brought to literary art the test of utility, and disparaged what is called the “Knickerbocker School” (assuming Irving to be the head of it) as wanting in purpose and virility, a merely romantic development of the post-Revolutionary period.  And it has been to some extent the fashion to damn with faint admiration the pioneer if not the creator of American literature as the “genial” Irving.

Before I pass to an outline of the career of this representative American author, it is necessary to refer for a moment to certain periods, more or less marked, in our literature.  I do not include in it the works of writers either born in England or completely English in training, method, and tradition, showing nothing distinctively American in their writings except the incidental subject.  The first authors whom we may regard as characteristic of the new country—­leaving out the productions of speculative theology—­devoted their genius to politics.  It is in the political writings immediately preceding and following the Revolution —­such as those of Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Franklin, Jefferson—­that the new birth of a nation of original force and ideas is declared.  It has been said, and I think the statement can be maintained, that for any parallel to those treatises on the nature of government, in respect to originality and vigor, we must go back to classic times.  But literature, that is, literature which is an end in itself and not a means to something else, did not exist in America before Irving.  Some foreshadowings (the autobiographical fragment of Franklin was not published till 1817) of its coming may be traced, but there can be no question that his writings were the first that bore the national literary stamp, that he first made the nation conscious of its gift and opportunity, and that he first announced to trans-Atlantic readers the entrance of America upon the literary field.  For some time he was our only man of letters who had a reputation beyond seas.

Irving was not, however, the first American who made literature a profession and attempted to live on its fruits.  This distinction belongs to Charles Brockden Brown, who was born in Philadelphia, January 27, 1771, and, before the appearance in a newspaper of Irving’s juvenile essays in 1802, had published several romances, which were hailed as original and striking productions by his contemporaries, and even attracted attention in England.  As late as 1820 a prominent British review gives Mr. Brown the first rank in our literature as an original writer and characteristically American.  The reader of to-day who has the curiosity to inquire into the correctness of this opinion will, if he is familiar with the romances of the eighteenth century, find little originality in Brown’s stories, and nothing distinctively American.  The figures who are moved in them seem to be transported from the pages of foreign fiction to the New World, not as it was, but as it existed in the minds of European sentimentalists.