BEGINNINGS OF FICTION

wanderings, without much aim or sequence, Brown's sham-
bling narrative methods dull the edge of the story.

As a rationalist Brown tried to solve the mystery of Edgar
Jlunfly by explaining that both Clithcro, the suspected vil-
lain, and Iluntly were addicted to sleep-walking, a subject
which was just then under discussion and much debated In
another attempt to fuse mystery with science, \Vicland
(1798), Brown's most compact, most psychological, most
powerful novel, made use of ventriloquism. The plot was
founded upon the deed of an actual religious fanatic of Tom-
hannock, New York, who in a mad vision had heard himself
commanded to destroy all his idols, and had murdered his
wife and children with ferocious brutality, With this theme
Brown involved the story of Carwin, the biloquisi, to make
the voices seem less incredible than in the original. It may
be assumed that ventriloquism did not seem a pinchbeck solu-
tion in 1798, when it was a trick little known or practised;
and Brown, too much an artist to make his ventriloquist a
mere instigator to murder, made him out a hero-villain whose
tragedy it is that he has to sin, not as the old morality had
it> because of mere wickedness, but because of the driving
power of the spirit of evil which no man can resist and from
which only the weak are immune. Yet though Carwin by his
irresponsible acts of ventriloquism in and out of season
actually sets going in Theodore Wieland's mind the train of
thought which terminates in the crimes, he does no more
than to arouse from unsuspected depths a frtmy already
sleeping in Wieland's nature. These were cases of speculative
pathology which Brown had met in his Godwinum twilights,
beings who had for him the reality he knew best, that of
dream and passion; from them comes the fever in the climate
which gives the book its power. To a notable extent WieJand
fulfills the rules Brown had laid down in his announcement
of Sky-Walk, Ventriloquism, religious murder, and a case of
spontaneous combustion make up the "contexture of facts