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The Literary Criticism of Orestes A. Brownson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
Literature was never central to Brownson's interests; indeed at times it was something he tolerated somewhat impatiently.* He wrote about it regularly, however, and during his career filled over a thousand closely packed octavo pages on the subject. He could even use the cant of the journalist reviewer with professional facility. Of a novel called Thorneberry Abbey, for instance, he says, “It has one or two literary faults … efforts at fine writing, and wearisome descriptions of natural scenery, which … only interrupt the narrative.” With variations in the details, this kind of formal gesture is repeated almost every time he reviews a novel. Moreover, the passage on Thorneberry Abbey appears towards the very end of a long review, introduced by the following candid admission: “But we have forgotten the little book before us.” What precedes the remark is not primarily a literary discussion but rather a warning to Catholics against the dangers of unwary compromises with Protestantism. What follows the remark is literary in a perfunctory and conventional way and is quickly dropped in favor of more polemic discussion. Although this procedure is not true of every piece of criticism by Brownson, something like it happens often enough to make it characteristic. When he was accused of such irrelevance later in life, he defended himself vigorously: “The book introduced is regarded as little more than an occasion or a text for an original discussion of some questions which the author wishes to treat.… Books are worthy of no great consideration for their own sake, and literature itself is never respectable as an end, and is valuable only as a means to an end.” In spite of this method, however, Brownson raised important critical questions and left a substantial amount of literary material.
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1954
References
* This is the third and last of the series of papers from the Brownson Symposium sponsored, at Notre Dame last autumn, by the Archives of the University of Notre Dame.
1 The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, edited by Brownson, Henry F., (Detroit, 1882–1887), XIX, p. 137Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as Works.
2 Ibid. For other clear examples see also pp. 307, 463. Brownson, however, could also discuss technical literary problems elaborately. His review of Reade, Charles's Hard CashGoogle Scholar discusses problems of dramatic presentation and of character quite competently. Cf. Brownson's Quarterly Review, XXI (1864), pp. 223–237Google Scholar. But that is not his regular practice.
3 Works, XIX, p. 447.Google Scholar
4 Ibid., p. 145 ss. Cf. Works, IV, p. 69.Google Scholar
5 Works, XIX, p. 300 ss.Google Scholar
6 Ibid., pp. 460–461.
7 Ibid., p. 599. These dates do not mark the stages of a clear consistent development. At times Brownson took these definite positions. When Brownson speaks of the novel, he is likely to change his opinion for the slightest reason even if it contradicts what he said in a previous review.
9 Ibid., p. 23.
10 Ibid., pp. 7–10.
11 Ibid., pp. 6–7.
12 Ibid., p. 9.
13 Ibid., p. 19.
14 At this time Brownson's theory of the place of literature was closely connected with his theory of progressive social evolution. Man becomes dissatisfied with his condition and tries to improve society by extending privileges to a greater number. These privileges may be intellectual, religious, political, or economic. Great works of literature in the past have risen from such important social changes. The Iliad comes from a period in Greek history when the country was parcelled out among petty princes who oppressed their subjects. The poem calls out for union and peace to benefit all subjects. Dante wrote in a period when there was an effort to preserve the republican institutions of Rome and during the fermentation which preceded the Reformation. The richest literature of England belongs to the seventeenth century, which was a period of revolutions “defeated, rejected, or adjourned.” Works, XIX, pp. 29–33.Google Scholar
15 Ibid., p. 35.
16 Brownson did not change his proletarian view of literature at once. In a review of French literature written in 1842 he repeats the ideas of 1839. Works, XIX, pp. 48–65.Google Scholar
17 Ibid., pp. 99, 269. The essay “Necessity of Liberal Education” in its emphasis on the need of leisure for intellectual leadership is really an answer to Brownson's own essays written in 1839. Ibid., pp. 88–99. “The Catholic Press” gives evidence of a divided mind. It begins with a severe attack on newspapers and on the popular mind. The rest of the essay combines grudging praise for the American Catholic press and paternal advice on its duties to the popular Catholic audience. The tolerance of the press is explained by the fact that shortly before the essay was published the papacy had approved a popular review in northern Italy and suggested that other Catholic communities follow its example. Ibid., pp. 269–292.
18 Ibid., pp. 114–115.
19 Ibid., p. 453. Brownson held that for the first time Catholics lived in a country which had political institutions consonant with Christianity, for in the United States rights and duties were ultimately founded in God. Moreover, this was explicitly stated. It would, therefore, be a mistake on the part of American Catholics to imitate the literature of other Catholic countries. At any rate, the Catholic literature of Europe rose from the pagan literature which had preceded it. Through the centuries, it developed independent of any influence by Christianity. At this time Brownson fears chiefly the absolutism of the many. In 1839, when he also argued explicitly for an independent literature, he complained that American writers were influenced by the English aristocratic mentality. Cf. Works, XIX, p. 27.Google Scholar
20 The purpose of the writer was to express the universal nature of man. Since he was to express universal nature only as he himself had experienced it, he would give it a particular quality in content and in form, even in its language. Brownson here offers an example of his occasional extravagance. He ranks Virgil below Catullus, Lucretius, Ovid, and Horace because Virgil “servilely copies Homer and other Greek poets.” Works, XIX, p. 494.Google Scholar
21 Ibid., pp. 502–503.
22 Ibid., pp. 500–-501.
23 Works, , IV, p. 69.Google Scholar
24 Works, , XIX, p. 235.Google Scholar
26 Ibid., pp. 196–202.
27 Brownson's Quarterly Review, VII (1850), pp. 530–531.Google Scholar
28 When Brownson judged particular writers, he approved of them when he found them intellectual and rejected them when he found them emotional, sentimental, etc. Thus, he liked Swift, 's “rare genius, his satirical wit, his strong masculine sense.” Works, XIX, pp. 336–337Google Scholar. He preferred Pope and Dryden to Wordsworth because they appealed to the intellect. Works, II, p. 70Google Scholar and XIX, p. 428. He thought Thackeray was the greatest English novelist for many reasons but also because “his literary career was a crusade against … the maudlin sentimentality of our Anglo-Saxon world in the nineteenth century.” Brownson's Quarterly Review, XXI (1864), p. 227Google Scholar. He objected to Chateau-briand because of his “weak and sentimental tone” and because he “sought by means of a pious romanticism to cheat his readers into a weak and sickly devotion.” Works, X, p. 451Google Scholar. He thought that Lowell could be a great poet if he were not a great philanthropist. Brownson's Quarterly Review, VII (1850), p. 271Google Scholar. Tennyson wrote a “great deal of namby-pamby sentiment” for “transcen-dentalists, beardless youths, and miss-in-her-teens.” Ibid., pp. 539–540.
29 Works, XIX, p. 145.Google Scholar
30 Ibid., pp. 311–313.
31 Ibid., p. 230.
32 Ibid., p. 231. “If no dangerous topic is made the subject of its interest, if it be the expression of the religious life of the author, if it make the supernatural its principle and end, the work, though in the form of a novel or fictitious narrative, may be written and read without detriment, nay, with profit, to religion, and that, too, even when its subject is not expressly a religious subject, and nothing is said directly of or for faith and piety.” Ibid., p. 243.
33 Ibid., p. 296.
34 Ibid., p. 454.
35 Ibid., p. 599.
36 Ibid., p. 226.
37 Ibid., p. 227.
38 Ibid., pp. 419–424. Brownson here, of course, begins with the metaphysical position that truth and beauty are convertible. Identifying the two very simply, he assures himself of a means for protecting orthodoxy as he wished to see it expressed in poetry.
39 Ibid., pp. 423–424. It is strange to find Byron among the great poets. Brownson doubts “if he was much less of a Christian than Wordsworth.” Brownson admired Byron's talent and power, but he suggested that no one read him. Indeed, he was once disappointed that one of the Catholic novelists knew him so well. Ibid., p. 156.
40 Ibid., p. 425.
41 Ibid., pp. 227–228.
42 Ibid., p. 572. For other references to Dickens see ibid., pp. 546, 569, 579 and Brownson's Quarterly Review, XXI (1864), p. 228Google Scholar. He said that he had disliked Dickens from the very beginning and foretold that Dickens would be forgotten because “he lacks intellectual ability, grasp of thought, real cultivation of mind, and truthfulness to man's permanent nature.” Ibid., pp. 228, 231.
43 Works, XIX, p. 572.Google Scholar
44 Ibid., p. 237.
45 Ibid., pp. 156, 158, 168, 181–182.
46 Ibid., p. 154. Cf. also p. 600.
47 Ibid., p. 516.