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Updated: June 1, 2025
To this was added the influence of Wieland, who had lately published a series of 'Letters to a Young Poet', in which he read his contemporaries a lecture on the absurdity of their boasting over the French. He wanted to know where the German dramas were that could compare with the best works of Racine, Corneille and Moliere.
At the close of the eighteenth century, Charles Brockden Brown began the career of the first American novelist with "Wieland." His pecuniary necessities and the slight encouragement offered at that time to American authors made it impossible for him to afford the time and care essential to artistic finish.
It did not arise from the death of the Saxon lady: it was not a contagious emanation from the countenances of Wieland or Carwin. There was but one other source whence it could flow. A nameless ecstacy thrilled through my frame when any new proof occurred that the ambiguousness of my behaviour was the cause. My brother had received a new book from Germany.
The stars of Russian decorations, the ribbons of the Legion of Honor, glittered for the first time on breasts like those of Goethe and Wieland, which were not accustomed to such distinctions. The dual league of emperors appeared to the world stronger and more illustrious than before.
He enumerated the objections which had been made, and the industry with which he had endeavoured to confute them. He mentioned the effect upon his resolutions produced by the failure of a letter. "During our late walk," continued he, "I introduced the subject that was nearest my heart. I re-urged all my former arguments, and placed them in more forcible lights. Wieland was still refractory.
Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more offensively, Wieland has done; instead of degrading and deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence, Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse itself so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery; or by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty or profound reflections which the poet's ever active mind has deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents.
He is arrested, tried for murder, and acquitted as insane. The light breaks in upon him at last; he discovers the imposture which has controlled him; and, made desperate by the full consciousness of his folly and crime, ends the terrible drama by suicide. Wieland is not a pleasant book.
The writings of Wieland and Klopstock influenced his youthful fancy, and from Shakspeare he extended his affection to the chief masters in English literature. His love of poetry was natural, not affected he practiced at an early age the art which he admired through life, and some of his first attempts at composition were pieces in his native language, which made his name known in Zurich.
In our relations with our neighbor, Goethe like Lessing and Wieland, Kant and Herder, and all the great men of his and the preceding age, in England and France as well as in Germany recommended absolute toleration, not only of opinions, but also of individualities, particularly those in which Nature manifests herself "undefiled."
Beckford's "Vathek" and Lewis' "The Monk" are variations upon this theme, which for a while was very popular and is decidedly to be seen in the work of the first novelist upon American soil, Charles Brockden Brown, whose somber "Wieland," read with the Radcliffe school in mind, will reveal its probable parentage.
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