by Steven Moore
Modern Chivalry, an 800-page novel published in installments between 1792 and 1815, was written by a Pennsylvanian lawyer and politician named Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748–1816). Born in Scotland, Brackenridge enrolled at Princeton in 1768, and two years later co-authored with classmate and poet Philip Freneau a short novel entitled Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca, a literally sophomoric satire about a fellow student who is sent by Muhammad on a pilgrimage to Mecca in punishment for plagiarizing a poem by Lucian. A freewheeling satire in the spirit of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage would be a candidate for the first American novel had it been published in 1770 instead of merely passed around among Princetonians. A year later, Brackenridge recited at their graduation address a poem also cowritten with Freneau entitled “The Rising Glory of America,” which predicted great things for the country:
Paradise anew
Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost,
No dangerous tree with deadly fruit shall grow,
No tempting serpent to allure the soul
From native innocence. . . .
. . . The lion and the lamb
In mutual friendship linked, shall browse the shrub
And timorous deer with softened tigers stray
O’er mead, or lofty hill, or grassy plain.
But 20 years later, this vision of paradise looked more like hell, with the lion and the lamb suing each other over legal possession of that shrub, and the timorous deer pulling a fast one on the softened tiger. Drawing upon his experience as a lawyer, newspaper editor, and politician, Brackenridge decided in 1790 to satirize those citizens who were abusing democratic ideals and questioning the Constitution, first in the form of a Hudibrastic poem called The Modern Chevalier, which he abandoned for a Cervantine narrative entitled Modern Chivalry. This rambling, entertaining “caricatura” (as the author calls it) features an idealistic but eminently sane Pennsylvanian named John Farrago and his “bog-trotter,” an indentured servant named Teague O’Regan. Here’s Petter’s précis: “Captain Farrago leaves his farm to see how America is making out in its newly-won independence and its experiment in democracy. He soon discovers, thanks to the behavior of his Irish servant Teague Oregan and the apparent affinity between Teague and the people, that there is as yet only a limited awareness in America of the workings of democracy and of the individual self-control required to develop reliable institutions in a democratic government” (443–44). The resemblance between America in the 1790s and today is amazing; the needle hasn’t moved an inch when it comes to the quality of our politicians or the “limited awareness” of the majority of citizens; it’s clear this “experiment in democracy” is never going to work, certainly not as its framers intended.
Modern Chivalry consists of seven volumes that were published in four units, each with a different thematic emphasis: the first three volumes (1792–93) focus on the problem of electing unqualified people for public office as Teague is championed by the citizens of Philadelphia for various positions and memberships, compounded by his willingness to assume these positions out of vanity and ambition regardless of his lack of qualifications. Farrago manages to talk him out of each of these positions by pointing out how much work and/or humiliation will be involved, not to mention the slight problem that Teague can’t read or write. In the short volume 4 (1797) Teague meets President Washington, who appoints him as an excise tax-collector in western Pennsylvania, where (in a dramatization of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794) he is promptly tar-and-feathered. In that condition he is then sold to the American Philosophical Society as an exotic animal; they had previously invited him to join their organization, and after writing a scientific paper on the feathered mammal, they loan him to their fellow scientists in France, where Teague witnesses the failure of the French Revolution. He returns to America years later in volumes 5–6 (i.e., part 2, vols. 1–2; 1804–5) and rejoins Captain Farrago, who is so upset at the constitutional reform frenzy in the air he leaves for a fresh start in a western Pennsylvanian frontier town. He is elected governor and Teague improbably becomes a newspaper editor, a satire on those engaging in tabloid journalism. These volumes are mostly a defense of the legal profession and the judiciary, which were under attack at the time by radicals and by President Jefferson, whose austerity measures after the wasteful Adams presidency are also criticized. Ten years passed before the appearance of the seventh and final volume (1815), which is the goofiest, most allegorical volume as voter qualifications are satirized; the yahoos of western Pennsylvania not only want to extend voting privileges to animals, but agree to educate them and allow them to practice law and enter politics. Eventually Farrago talks them out of this—but not before some hilarious courtroom scenes between snarling animal-lawyers—and wins the respect of the dimwitted citizens, who encourage him to look for a wife. There Brackenridge leaves him, leaving open the possibility of writing another volume (in which Teague is sent to England as an ambassador), but death, like an unsympathetic editor, canceled his contract.
Brackenridge intended his novel to be a kind of conduct book, a citizen’s guide to participatory democracy in the young republic. Most chapters are followed by ones labeled “Observations,” mini-essays that expand on the point of the preceding fiction chapters, not unlike Fielding’s prefatory essays in Tom Jones, which Brackenridge admired. They seem to be written by Brackenridge in propria persona, close but not identical to the persona who narrates the fiction chapters; as Wood cautions, “locating any stable or authoritative voice proves impossible in Modern Chivalry, an encyclopedia of contradictory public opinions, distinguished by a polemical tone and a shifting ironic stance” (99). The novel covers a wide range of social concerns: horse-racing, medical practices, elections, psychics, fraternal and professional organizations, preaching, dueling, Indian treaties, political corruption, biblical literalism, patriotic mythicization, suicide, racial diversity, immigration, Christian doctrinal history, demagoguery, slavery, women’s bad taste in men, etiquette, class warfare, superstition, freedom of the press, mob mentality, revenge, madness, education, economics, suffrage, etymology, education, and virtually every aspect of the law, from admissible evidence and testimony to the legality of capital punishment. (Except for maybe dueling and etymology, every one of these is still a hot topic, another example of how little the country has progressed.) Brackenridge viewed his novel as a kind of homemade Encyclopedia Americana, as he indicates in the especially digressive final volume, where he pursues all sorts of subjects: “The preceding dissertation on the origin of the languages of Europe, and incidentally upon other subjects, may seem incongruous with the nature of this work did it not occur to a diligent observer that there can be nothing incongruous, or inconsistent, with a book which embraces all subjects, and is an encyclopedia of the sciences. It is an opus magnum which comprehends law, physic, and divinity. Were all the books in the world lost, this alone would preserve a germ of every art.”39 The narrator is exaggerating, as he often does, but like Swift with his Drapier’s Letters, Brackenridge wanted to write a book that would influence citizens and policy, not merely satirize them from an aesthetic distance, and in the novel’s final chapter he flatters himself “that it is not a little owning to this book, published in portions from time to time, that a very different state of things now exists” (533), at least in Pennsylvania, for a little while.
Swift was one of Brackenridge’s main models; in one of many metafictional asides when the narrator comments on his work in progress, he notes that his style was “formed on the model of Xenophon, and Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels” (49). Elsewhere he broadens the list to include Lucian, Rabelais, Scarron, Cyrano de Bergerac, Lesage, Arbuthnot, Fielding, Voltaire, Sterne, and Smollett. (Humphry Clinker is the latest novel mentioned in Modern Chivalry; Brackenridge had a low opinion of “the modern novel” [346].) He tells us he modeled its encyclopedic breadth on late-classical miscellanies like Athenaeus’s Learned Banqueters and Aulus Gellius�
�s Attic Nights. But the presiding influence is of course Don Quixote, not only in the master/servant pairing, the dramatized conflicts between idealism and reality, and the episodic, road-trip structure, but in its attitude toward fiction. As I noted at the beginning of this volume, Cervantes’ canon dismisses most chivalric novels, but “he found one good thing in them, which was the opportunity for display that they offered a good mind, providing a broad and spacious field where one’s pen could write unhindered . . .” (1.47). Brackenridge knew he had “a good mind” and admits about halfway through his novel that “I mean this tale of a captain traveling but a vehicle to my way of thinking on some subjects . . .” (245). Like many of his predecessors (especially Rabelais and Sterne) he employs a variety of literary forms: oration, sermon, scientific report, book review, poems and songs, legal documents, minutes of a town meeting, pantomime, allegory, literary criticism, political speeches, and animal fables—all “to diversify the narration” (495). He set the pattern for later American novels of learned wit that likewise combine different narrative forms with encyclopedic ambitions, such as Irving’s History of New York, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Dos Passos’s USA, Gaddis’s Recognitions, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Coover’s Public Burning, Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat, Gass’s Tunnel, Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Vollmann’s Seven Dreams (still dreaming). European and Irish novels, from Gargantua and Pantagruel to Ulysses, are routinely cited as precedents for these American meganovels, overlooking the locally grown example that Brackenridge provides.
It is by the standards of these flamboyantly unconventional novels that Modern Chivalry should be measured, not by those of the conventional novel. In the sixth volume of Modern Chivalry, Brackenridge imagines a conventional-minded critic saying, “If for instance you had taken a youth from his early age and conducted him to manhood, insinuating by example or precept the best lessons, it might have been a schoolbook,” that is, a conservative, conventional novel, which didn’t interest Brackenridge: “I answer: there has been a great deal of this already, and my mind led me more to give lessons to grown people” (337), not to the YA audience his fellow American novelists catered to. Captain Farrago and Teague O’Regan are not intended to be well-rounded characters, but rather are types—the sensible man versus a representative of the senseless mob—and as a result neither has the personality of Don Quixote or Sancho Panza. The same goes for all the other characters in Modern Chivalry, who represent types and professions rather than distinct individuals, which is in keeping with the novel’s semiallegorical mode. Nor does Modern Chivalry display the shapeliness of a well-constructed novel; it is deliberately rambling, digressive, and open-ended, a formal analogue to the incongruous, open-ended nature of America during this time. (Between the appearance of the first volume of 1792 and the last of 1815, the United States doubled in size.) The novel is highly realistic in many ways and provides an accurate account of frontier life in the 1790s, but there are numerous flights of fancy, especially in the final volume where the ludicrous question of animal suffrage is entertained, resulting in such statistically improbable phrases as “The pertinacity of the unicorn would be insufferable” (465).40
Though John Farrago is a type rather than a character, he is a type that would begin to appear more frequently in American fiction: the independent, nonmaterialistic, often artistic type at odds with mainstream society. In one of his “Observations” interchapters, the author asks himself:
Why is it that I am proud and value myself amongst my own species? Is it because I think I possess, in some degree, the distinguishing characteristic of a man, a taste for the fine arts; a taste and characteristic too little valued in America, where a system of finance has introduced the love of unequal wealth, destroyed the spirit of common industry, and planted that of lottery in the human heart, making the mass of the people gamblers, and under the idea of speculation, shrouded engrossing and monopoly everywhere. (197–98)41
In a fine essay on this theme, Wendy Martin notes that Farrago is the first of many alienated American characters like “Natty Bumpo, Huck Finn, Ishmael, Miles Coverdale, Nick Carraway, Nick Adams, Augie March, Joe Christmas, and Stephen Rojack . . . who must establish value systems on the basis of their own experience” (242), systems at odds with the values of the majority and that often force him to light out for new territories, as Farrago does in the second half of Modern Chivalry. There the captain is able to talk the townspeople into coming around to his way of thinking about democracy and responsible citizenship at the end of the novel, and Brackenridge hoped Modern Chivalry would have the same effect on the American populace. It didn’t. But it did set a pattern for the alienated, quixotic figure who remains a staple of the American novel.
Brackenridge complains in the early volumes that his novel was slow to take off—he was disappointed there were no negative reviews because he had a fiery response all ready, which he printed anyway in volume 3—but when the final volume appeared in 1815, he claimed that in Pennsylvania “there is scarcely a parlour window without a Modern Chivalry” (545). During the first half of the 19th century it was “universally popular throughout the South and West,” Henry Adams wrote at the end of the century, for it was “more thoroughly American than any book yet published” and “filled the place of Don Quixote on the banks of the Ohio and along the Mississippi” (86–87). But this Yankee Doodle Quixote eventually fell out of favor—partly because it was replaced by abridged, bowdlerized editions—and has never regained its rightful place as the first great American novel.
But with Modern Chivalry, the American novelist, like America itself, was ready to compete with the rest of the world. Brockden Brown showed that an American novel could be as psychologically complex as any novel written in England or Europe, and Brackenridge demonstrated that it could be as learned as any Old World novel—Modern Chivalry is filled with quotations from the Bible, classical literature, Shakespeare, and the best writers of the early-modern period—and could be as funny, if it wanted to. The American novel could be as intellectually rigorous, as roguishly playful, as socially conscientious, and as technically innovative, with the added novelty of being set in a new world with new challenges. Though none of these early American novels is an unquestioned masterpiece on the same scale as those published elsewhere during this period, it wouldn’t be long before an American novelist would come along to produce one. There’s a feller with a whopper about a whale.
Notes
1 Page 3 in Derounian-Stodola’s anthology of Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, where A True History occupies pp. 7–51.
2 She quotes Psalm 46:8. As Howard Zinn notes, the Puritans quoted another verse from Psalms (2:8) to justify stealing the Indians’ land: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession” (14). In another perverse appropriation of scripture, the original seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony depicts a fig-leafed Indian pleading “Come over and help us,” adapted from Acts 16:9.
3 If interested, see Larkin’s “Cosmpolitan Revolution” for a reading of Letters from an American Farmer as a novel.
4 But again, if interested, see Davidson’s recent essay in Novel for a discussion of the “hybrid form” of this popular book.
5 On page 25 of Howard’s long introduction to her sumptuously annotated edition of Harriot Stuart. At the end of her writing career, Lennox wrote another novel with the same setting—upstate New York in the 1740s—entitled Euphemia (1790), which Howard has also edited (Broadview, 2008).
6 It was first published in London, as were many other books written by Americans at this time. It was reprinted in succeeding years not in England but in the United States, by small presses in Massachusetts (c. 1800) and Vermont (1814). Ironically, the only modern edition (2001) was published in Canada, by the invaluable Broadview Press.
7 By editor Carl F. Clink (1961), quoted in Edwards’s introdu
ction to her edition of Emily Montague, xvii; hereafter cited by letter number. A nitpicking Canuck might bestow that honor instead on The Golden Fleece (1626) by William Vaughan, a satiric allegory set in Newfoundland, where the Welsh writer lived from 1622 to 1625.