NOVEL AND AMERICA
of his
Wieland
to Thomas Jefferson in 1798, he must, beneath
his modest disclaimers, have had some sense of his and the Pres–
ident's kinship as revolutionaries. "I am therefore obliged to
hope," Brown wrote, "that ... the train of eloquent and judici-
ous reasoning ... will be regarded by Thomas Jefferson with as
much respect as ... me." But if Jefferson ever found the time to
read Brown's novel, he left no record
j
we know only that he
expressed general approval of "works of the imagination" as
being able, more than history, to "possess virtue in the best and
vice in the worst forms possible."
It
is a chillingly rational ap–
proach to art and a perhaps sufficient indication of the hopell!$–
ness of Brown's attempting in those sensible years to live by his
writing.
Yet despite the fact that no professional novelist of real
seriousness was to find a supporting public in America for
twenty-five or thirty years more, Brown's instincts had not de–
ceived him. He and Jefferson
were
engaged in a common enter–
prise; the novel and America did not come into existence at the
same time by accident. They are the two great inventions of the
bourgeois, Protestant mind at the moment when it stood, on the
one hand, between Rationalism and Sentimentalism, and on the
other, between the drive for economic power and the need for
cultural autonomy. The series of events which includes the rise
of modem psychology, and the triumph of the lyric in poetry,
adds
up to a psychic revolution as well as a social one-perhaps
first of all to a psychic revolution.
This
revolution, viewed as an
overturning of ideas and artistic forms, has traditionally been
called "Romantic"; but the term is paralyzingly narrow, defin–
ing too little too precisely, and leading to further pointles;
dis–
tinctions between Romanticism proper, pre-Romanticism,
StUrm
und Drang,
Sentimentalism,
Symbolisme,
etc. It seems prefer–
able to call the whole continuing, complex event simply "the
Break-through," thus emphasizing the dramatic entry of a new
voice into the dialogue of Western man with his various selves.
