III. • Henry Thoreau • Transcendental Economist…

III. • Henry Thoreau • Transcendental Economist

“Wisdom crieth in the streets and no man regardeth her”; yet “she teacheth temperance and forethought, justice and fortitude; than which men can have in their life nothing more profitable.”

The single business of Henry Thoreau, during forty-odd years of eager activity, was to discover an economy calculated to provide a satisfying life. His one concern, that gave to his ramblings in Concord fields a value as of high adventure, was to explore the true meaning of wealth. Honest, fearless, curiously inquisitive--a masterless man who would give no hostages to fortune--he proved his right to be called a philosopher by seeking wisdom as a daily counselor and friend, and following such paths only as wisdom suggested. Out of his own experience, tested in the clear light of the Greeks, he wrote a transcendental declaration of independence that may be taken as the final word of the Concord school touching the great issues of practical living. Walden is the handbook of an economy that endeavors to refute Adam Smith and transform the round of daily life into something nobler than a mean gospel of plus and minus.

It was the common opinion of his neighbors that Henry Thoreau was a queer fellow who had somehow got all his values topsy-turvy. And yet the more thoughtfully one considers him, the more doubtful it appears whether the queerness lay with him or with his critics. Unfortunately a wholly honest and original man is so rare as to fall under common suspicion. To the inmates of Bedlam a sane man will appear queer. In a society of serfs a masterless man will be accounted an outlaw. To the Concord farmers Thoreau appeared strange only because he applied in his daily life a truth they assented to on the Sabbath. The principle that life is more than the meat and the body than raiment was familiar enough to the Sunday doctrines of Concord; but that a man should seriously apply it on week-days; that he should propose to regulate his mid-week activities by the economy of the Sermon on the Mount, passed the comprehension of practical Yankees who followed quite another economy. It was Thoreau’s conduct that perplexed them, rather than his philosophy.

From first to last that conduct was serenely logical. To this disciple of the ancient wisdom, Sabbath and week-day were one, and in seeking to square his daily life with the ancient precept, Thoreau became the arch-rebel of his group, the most individual amongst the “lunatic fringe” of the transcendental movement, the one who escapes elusively from the grip of an adjective. He slips out of all phrases devised to imprison him. “A bachelor of nature,” Emerson, with his gift for cryptic phrase, called him; “poet-naturalist,” Ellery Channing who knew him intimately, chose to call him. “I am a poet, a mystic, and a transcendentalist,” Thoreau said of himself, disregarding his nature writings. Yet none of these phrases, true as they are, quite adequately sums him up. At the risk of committing a fresh futility, one may perhaps suggest that he was a Greek turned transcendental economist. His life seems to have been a persistent experiment in values. A philosopher of the open air who kept his mind clear and his nerves robust by daily contact with wind and weather; a mystic who pried curiously into the meaning of nature and was familiar with Hellenic and Oriental systems of thought; a Yankee, skilled in various homely crafts, yet rather interested in proving for himself what things were excellent and taking nothing on hearsay--Thoreau’s chief business would seem to have been with life itself, and how it might best be lived by Henry Thoreau; how a rational being, in short, might enjoy the faculties God has given him, following the higher economy and not enslaving himself to the lower, so that when he came to die he might honestly say, I have lived.

Amongst the members of the transcendental school Thoreau was the one Concord man, born and bred there, literally of the soil and loving the things of the soil. His tireless rovings were commonly bounded by the familiar Concord horizons. His life had taken deep root in the Concord fields, and he refused to join the restless multitude of the déracinés, who seek novel experiences in a succession of transplantings. No English peasant ever clung to the home-acres with more loving tenacity. He was a countryman in instinct, distrusting the great city twenty miles away that disseminated its virus through the outlying villages and farms. The city was wedded to the economy of industrialism and exploitation. But as a child of Jean Jacques, Thoreau chose to believe that the road to heaven ran through the fields and not over the cobblestones of Boston; he discovered an honest integrity of character oftener in the country than in Lowell mills, yet none too often there. It was easier to be free there, yet even in Concord village the herd mind was always laying springes to catch the unwary; and Thoreau would not be caught. He was poet and philosopher as well as countryman, and he weighed his own life and the life of his neighbors in the scales of Hellenic thought. He was surveyor of broader fields than his neighbor’s wood-lot; was acquainted with other mysteries than the mystery of pencil-making. He desired other ends than those his shopkeeping, farm-tending neighbors served; he would not be encumbered as they were. He could not carry such gross impedimenta in his pack and be a free man; the pack was too heavy; and he proceeded to lighten it with a thoroughness that startled Concord. He “signed off” from Dr. Ripley’s church; with Alcott, he refused to pay his poll tax: he severed his allegiance to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Federal government; he rid himself of all concern at what Concord thought of his ways; he spoke out his honest convictions in the village Lyceum--convictions about John Brown and slavery and Massachusetts’ part in sending negroes back to their masters--quite careless of the disapproval of Judge Hoar and other Concord dignitaries. Such a man had never before walked the village streets, and the spectacle filled his neighbors with amazement.

With so much useless luggage got rid of, Thoreau was ready to set about the high business of living. To outward appearance a somewhat angular Yankee, practical and capable, he was at heart a Greek, with the delight in the simple round of the seasons and a responsiveness to natural beauty that belonged to the older civilization. Brought up under the “pale negations” of Dr. Ripley’s theology, he emerged a pagan. He was the most widely read in Greek literature of the Concord transcendentalists; had translated Prometheus Bound, and much of Pindar; and was completely at home in the clear Greek atmosphere. Who but a Hellenist could utter such words as these which serve as his apology for the Walden experiment?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. (Walden, “What I Lived For.”)

To seek Pan in a tired world and recover joys that have long been forgotten is a business that only a romantic will engage in; yet Thoreau set out on the quest with a clear-eyed purpose:

... My Good Genius seemed to say,--Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day,--farther and wider,--and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night over-take thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like those sedges and brakes, which will never become English hay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmer’s crops? that is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let not to get a living by thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs. (Ibid., “Baker Farm.”)

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,--that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.... The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indiscernible as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. (Ibid., “Higher Laws.”)

To save one’s soul has always been accounted in New England a matter worthy of a man’s best effort, and Thoreau’s days were given over to it with a single-heartedness without parallel even in New England. The Puritan, he believed, had suffered his high spiritual mission to be sacrificed to the economic; he would recover that mission by sacrificing the economic to the spiritual; but he would interpret the spiritual as a Hellenist rather than a Hebraist. The Christian other-worldliness seemed to him unduly regardless of the loveliness of this world. “Christianity,” he says in the Week, “only hopes. It has hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land. It has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with joy.”

I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country’s God.... In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great God Pan is not dead, as was rumored. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine. (The Week, “Sunday.”)

His extraordinarily frank evaluation of the New Testament, and of Calvinistic New England that had too long chewed the cud of conscience--“they did not know when to swallow their cud, and their lives of course yielded no milk”--is the work of a pagan from whom all creeds slip easily. Few more searching sermons have been preached in Massachusetts than the sermon that composed itself as Thoreau’s boat floated down the Concord River, past the Billerica meeting-house where the honest villagers were worshiping the God of New England--a sermon that with fine irony summons minister and congregation to consider the deeper teachings of their sacred book.

I know of no book that has so few readers. There is none so truly strange, and heretical, and unpopular. To Christians, no less than Greeks and Jews, it is foolishness and a stumbling-block. There are, indeed, severe things in it which no man should read aloud but once. “Seek first the kingdom of heaven.”--“Lay not up for yourself treasures on earth.”--“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.”--“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”--Think of this, Yankees!... Think of repeating these things to a New England audience! thirdly, fourthly, fifteenthly, till there are three barrels of sermons! Who, without cant, can read them aloud? Who, without cant, can hear them, and not go out of the meeting-house? They never were read, they never were heard. Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house upon another.

... When one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest-looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall ere long cease to deform the landscape.... Really, there is no infidelity, now-a-days, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches. (The Week, “Sunday.”)

As Thoreau understood the problem of economics there were three possible solutions open to him: to exploit himself, to exploit his fellows, or to reduce the problem to its lowest denominator. The first was quite impossible--to imprison oneself in a treadmill when the morning called to great adventure, to burden oneself with useless fardels when the pack must be kept light, was the folly of a slave mind. He had observed his neighbors closely and found little good in their way of self-exploitation.

I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and field, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.... How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture and wood-lot.... The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. (Walden, “Economy.”)

To exploit one’s fellows seemed to Thoreau’s sensitive social conscience an even grosser infidelity. The leisure of a slave driver, got by imprisoning his fellows in a treadmill, was an ignoble leisure from which came the empty vulgarity of modern life. “If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations,” he said, “I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations, too.” Freedom with abstinence seemed to him better than serfdom with material well-being, for he was only giving up the lesser to enjoy the greater, as was the privilege of the philosopher.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.... When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. (Walden, “Economy.”)

It was the reply of the arch-individualist to the tyrannous complexities of society, and it set him apart even in the world of transcendentalism. Other members of the group professed to have found a better way out of the dilemma--the way of Brook Farm and Fruitland; a richer life was to be achieved not by espousing poverty but by coöperation. But Thoreau could not adopt the coöperative solution; he must either accept society as it was or remove. Convinced that it was not worth accepting--that one made a foolish bargain in selling oneself to it--he was content to remove to Walden Pond. “I came into this world,” he said, “not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.” “I desire to speak impartially on this point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of the present economical and social arrangement.” He did not advocate that other men should build cabins and live isolated. He had no wish to dogmatize concerning the best mode of living--each must settle that matter for himself. But that a satisfying life should be lived, that the fox should somehow get free even though he left his tail in the trap, he was vitally concerned about. “The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.” Let him at least rid himself of the false gospel of creature comforts, which men pay too high a price for.

The story of Thoreau’s emancipation from the lower economics is the one romance of his life, and Walden is his great book. More restrained than the Week and lacking the exuberant beauty of the latter--its noble talk and scathing criticism--it is “informed by a more explicit unifying philosophy.” It is a book in praise of life rather than of Nature, a record of calculating economies that studied saving in order to spend more largely. But it is a book of social criticism as well, in spite of its explicit denial of such a purpose, and in its speculations much of Carlyle and Ruskin and William Morris crops out. In considering the true nature of economy he concluded, with Ruskin, that “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Conceive of life as cheap, a poor thing to be exploited, and the factory system becomes the logical economic order; but conceive of it as dear, and the common happiness the great objective of society, and quite another sort of industrialism will emerge. Thoreau did not look with approval on the rising city of Lowell, with its multiplying spindles and increasing proletariat, and he did not understand why Americans should boast of a system that provided vulgar leisure for the masters at the cost of serfdom for the workers.

Where is this division of labor to end? [he asks] and what object does it finally serve? I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched. (Walden, “Economy.”)

The whole middle-class philosophy of exploitation was hateful to him, the middleman equally with the manufacturer. “Trade curses everything it touches; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.” Men have been deceived by a false economy--lured by the bog lights away from the open fields to flounder in the miasmic marshes. While Ruskin was still pottering over Turner, Thoreau was elaborating in Walden the text: The only wealth is life.

In other bits Walden is curiously like Hopes and Fears for Art, and the drift of the whole is one with the revolutionary teachings of Morris, that the abiding satisfactions are those which spring from free creative work. This Yankee Greek had learned that it is a beautiful life back of the tool that creates beauty, and that if the work of our hands is ugly, it is because our liver are mean and sordid, affording no outlet for the free creative spirit. In New England, Puritan and Yankee alike had conspired against beauty, and the gods had taken revenge by clothing life in drab.

Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeping.

What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder,--out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is no straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. (Walden, “Economy.”)

Thoreau needed only to have lived in a world that honored craftsmanship to have opened fully the vein of gold that Morris dug his philosophy from; he had the instinct of the craftsman but not his training. His turning from the workshop to the fields, hearing no call in the humdrum village economy to develop a beautiful craftsmanship, was an implied criticism of the common sterility of labor in every-day Concord; yet the honest sincerity of his nature led him to the conclusion that lies at the heart of the philosophy of the great English craftsman:

None have so pleasant a time as they who in earnest seek to earn their bread. It is true actually as it is true really; it is true materially as it is true spiritually, that they who seek honestly and sincerely, with all their hearts and lives and strength, to earn their bread, do earn it, and it is sure to be very sweet to them.

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. (Walden, “Economy.”)

At Walden Pond and on the Merrimac River Thoreau’s mind was serene as the open spaces; but this Greek serenity was rudely disturbed when he returned to Concord village and found his neighbors drilling for the Mexican War, and when authority in the person of the constable came to him with the demand that he pay a due share to the public funds. The war to him was a hateful thing, stupid and unjust, waged for the extension of the obscene system of negro slavery; and Thoreau was brought sharply to consider his relations to the political state that presumed to demand his allegiance, willing or unwilling, to its acts. Under the stress of such an emergency the transcendentalist was driven to examine the whole theory of the relation of the individual to the state. He was not political-minded; he had concerned himself little with political theory; he would gladly let the government alone if government would let him alone; he was even prepared to make excuses for government. But he would not compromise with his conscience; and when the state applied the principle of coercion, he applied the counter principle of passive resistance. It was while he was domiciled in Walden cabin that the hand of the law seized him and thrust him into Concord jail. He went with the constable quietly, but there was a dangerous contempt in his heart. It seemed absurd that a man could not go to the cobbler’s for a pair of mended boots, but he must be interfered with by a neighbor playing the rôle of constable. Constable, jailer, the magistrate on the bench, all the elaborate machinery of the law, Thoreau contemplated quizzically and judged his neighbors fools to have exchanged their freedom for such masquerades. Those who got anything from such instruments--lawyers and propertied men--might think well of them, but they were a mere impertinence to Thoreau who wanted to go huckleberrying. When they let him out he went quietly after his berries, and discovered there was “no state in sight among the berry bushes.” “I saw,” he remarked casually, “that the state was half-witted, that it was as timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it and pitied it.”

But Thoreau was not done with the comedy. It set him upon thinking, and the result was the essay, Civil Disobedience. Taken by itself alone, it is a somewhat astonishing performance. This Yankee transcendentalist quite evidently has turned philosophical anarchist. But read in the light of Emerson’s Journals, or in the light of Godwin’s Political Justice, it is easily comprehensible. It is no more than transcendental individualism translated into politics, with all comfortable compromises swept away. Its sources run straight back to eighteenth-century liberalism with its doctrine of the minimized state--a state that must lose its coercive sovereignty in the measure that the laws of society function freely. Very likely Thoreau had never read Godwin, yet his political philosophy was implicit in Political Justice. In Godwin’s thinking the problem of man in society is the problem of a voluntary adjustment of the individual to the state; and it is only by establishing economics and politics on morality, that political justice is possible. The moral law is the fundamental law, superior to statutes and constitutions; and to it the citizen is bound to render allegiance. “The object of the present state of society is to multiply labor,” asserted Godwin; “in another state it will be to simplify it.” “The only adequate apology of government is necessity.” “Government however reformed” is “little capable of affording solid benefit to mankind.” “Give us equality and justice but no constitution. Suffer us to follow without restraint the dictates of our own judgment, and to change our forms of social order as fast as we improve the dictates of our own judgment.” “The pretense of collective wisdom is the most palpable of all impostures.” “The true reason why the mass of mankind has so often been the dupe of knaves, has been the mysterious and complicated nature of the social system. Once annihilate the quackery of government, and the most homespun understanding will be prepared to scorn the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead him.”

By his own path Thoreau came to identical conclusions. There is little in Civil Disobedience that is not in Political Justice. To neither thinker is there an abstract state, society or nation--only individuals; and to both, the fundamental law is the law of morality. Political expediency and the law of morality frequently clash, and in such event it is the duty of the individual citizen to follow the higher law. Thoreau went even further, and asserted the doctrine of individual compact, which in turn implied the doctrine of individual nullification; no government, he said, can have any “pure right over my person or property but what I concede to it.”

I heartily accept the motto,--“That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,--“That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice.... We should be men first and subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.... How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.... There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.... It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.... If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.... As for adopting the ways which the state has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone.... Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union.... Why do they not dissolve it themselves,--the union between themselves and the state,--and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?[458] (Works, Vol. X, pp. 131-170.)

“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine”--in this doctrine of individual syndicalism Thoreau’s conception of the relation of the citizen to the state is tersely summed up. In so far as he was a democrat it was of the transcendental school, rather than the Jacksonian. He would be governed by the majority no more than by the minority. The scorn of a fine ethical mind for practical government by politicians could scarcely be more tellingly phrased than in the bit of verse he tucks into Civil Disobedience:

A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut, To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.

Such a man quite evidently would go for Nullification as fiercely as Garrison. Even though he might wash his hands of society, the cries of those who suffered injustice followed him, and when the Fugitive Slave Law passed, it robbed him of his peace, destroying his pleasure in wonted things. The slave hunters were in Boston streets, and justice in the person of Commissioner Loring was sending Anthony Burns back to slavery. As he contemplated the spectacle his wrath against a coercive government flamed up. “My thoughts are murder to the state,” he complained bitterly, “and involuntarily go plotting against her.”

I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.... I hear a good deal said about trampling this law under foot. Why, one need not go out of his way to do that. This law rises not to the level of the head or the reason; its natural habitat is in the dirt. It was born and bred, and has its life, only in the dust and mire, on a level with the feet; and he who walks with freedom, and does not with Hindoo mercy avoid treading on every venomous reptile, will inevitably tread on it, and so trample it under foot,--and Webster, its maker, like the dirt-bug and its ball. (“Slavery in Massachusetts,” in Works, Vol. X.)

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and order who observe the law when the government breaks it.

Thoreau was a stern judge, and he held his age in low esteem. His Concord neighbors seemed to him poor fellows with too little spirit to be free men; they were the raw material of standing armies, militia, jailors, constables, and the posse comitatus. And then one day into the field of his vision came a plain Yankee, primitive and heroic, John Brown of Ossawatomie. In the contemplation of his life and death Thoreau felt a shock of new faith run like an electric current through his veins. The age was no longer dead to him, for it had bred a man. “I rejoice that I live in this age,” he exclaimed, “that I am his contemporary.” He had found his hero--not in past times as Carlyle and Emerson had done, but in the present and among his own Yankee kind. He had talked with John Brown in Concord and recognized him as a primitive idealist of rugged mold, a stern moralist who set justice above the law. That this man should be so grossly misunderstood by lesser men, so foully slandered, filled him with sorrow and with wrath also. “When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves. I was not surprised that certain of my neighbors spoke of John Brown as an ordinary felon, for who are they? They have either much flesh, or much office, or much coarseness of some kind” (“The Last Days of John Brown,” in Works, Vol. X, p. 241). His trial and conviction Thoreau regarded as a judgment, not on John Brown, but upon America; the lawyers and editors and politicians who judged him were only convicting themselves.

His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. Each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions; apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity; ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for the benefit of his fellow-man. It may be doubted if there were so many more their equals in these respects in all the country,--I speak of his followers only,--for their leader, no doubt, scoured the land far and wide, seeking to swell his troop. These alone were ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. Surely they were the very best men you could select to be hung. That was the best compliment this country could pay them. They were ripe for her gallows. She has tried a long time, she has hung a good many, but never found the right one before.

I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases. Business men may arrange that among themselves. If they were the interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing. A counterfeiting law-factory, standing half in a slave land and half in a free! What kind of laws for free men can you expect from that? (“A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in Works, Vol. X, p. 197.)

In Thoreau the eighteenth-century philosophy of individualism, the potent liberalisms let loose on the world by Jean Jacques, came to fullest expression in New England. He was the completest embodiment of the laissez-faire reaction against a regimented social order, the severest critic of the lower economics that frustrate the dreams of human freedom. He was fortunate in dying before the age of exploitation had choked his river with its weeds; fortunate in not foreseeing how remote is that future of free men on which his hopes were fixed:

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all the muskrats ... such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning-star. (Walden.)

With the dawning of that day perhaps men will sit once more at the feet of the ancient wisdom and fashion their lives upon the principle that the soul is more than the meat and the body than raiment. Perhaps they may even shape for themselves new heroes--“above and after all, the Man of the Age, come to be called workingman.” He and his deeds are looked down upon in our time--“It is obvious that none yet speaks to his condition, for the speaker is not yet in his condition.” “Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future; how much to the East, how little to the West” (“Thomas Carlyle and his Works,” in Works, Vol. X, p. 118). One of the great names in American literature is the name of Henry Thoreau. Yet only after sixty years is he slowly coming into his own.

Footnotes

[458] Compare the following entry in his Journal under date of March 26, 1842: “I must confess I have felt mean enough when asked how I was to act on society, what errand I had to mankind. Undoubtedly I did not feel mean without a reason, and yet my loitering is not without defense. I would fain communicate the wealth of my life to men, would really give them what is most precious in my gift.... I know no riches I would keep back. I have no private good unless it be my peculiar ability to serve the public.... This is the only individual property.... It is hard to be a good citizen of the world in any great sense, but if we do render no interest or increase to mankind out of that talent God gave us, we can at least preserve the principal unimpaired.”Return to passage

IV. • Theodore Parker • Transcendental Minister

Theodore Parker was described by one of his biographers as “the best working-plan of an American yet produced,” and by a fellow minister as “a conscience since Luther unsurpassed.” The two comments suggest still another, that he was completely and adequately New England. Yankee and Puritan contributed equally to his making. His rich and plastic mind was two-sided: one-half was wholly English, practical, logical, concrete, lucid; loving fact and tireless in its acquisition; master of everyday affairs and competent in dealing with this world; the other was emotional, mystical, idealistic, deeply and spontaneously religious, living daily with God as a son with the Father, carrying the sorrows of men in his heart and the wrongs of the world on his conscience. One of the greatest of New England ministers, he was shepherd as well as counselor, pastor as well as teacher. “I wish to stand on the earth,” he said with true critical insight, “though I would look beyond the stars. I would live with men, but think with philosophers” (Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, Vol. I, p. 115). The generous amplitude of his nature was too large for the narrow walls of a church; he took all Boston for his parish, all New England for his congregation. Amazingly active and vital, he consumed whole libraries in his pursuit of knowledge. “His mind,” says Weiss, “was like the republican idea itself; it could afford to be hospitable, but could not afford to be exclusive” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 178). Conversant with many fields of knowledge, with a memory extraordinarily retentive, he was master of many languages--nineteen or twenty, according to Thomas Wentworth Higginson--and at home in the most abstruse subjects. He spent his vast energy with the prodigality of Cotton Mather, and he achieved what Cotton Mather with his inbred parochialism could not achieve, an intellectual cosmopolitanism that judged Boston by broader standards than it could gauge.

A first-class fighting-man was this child of yeoman New England--none braver, not even Garrison, none more effective; and yet tender-hearted, sympathetic, with the shrewd common sense of his homespun forebears. The son of a Lexington farmer and mechanic, self-trained, endowed with indomitable will, he came of the soundest stock in Massachusetts. His grandfather was captain of the Minute Men who faced the British troops on Lexington Common in April, 1775; and a conscious pride of ancestry broke out frequently in his speech. The words uttered before the Ministerial Conference in May, 1851, in justification of his repudiation of the Fugitive Slave Law, were characteristic: “I am not afraid of men, I can offend them. I care nothing for their hate, or their esteem. I am not very careful of my reputation.” He then goes on:

I have had to arm myself. I have written my sermons with a pistol in my desk,--loaded, a cap on the nipple, and ready for action. Yea, with a drawn sword within reach of my right hand. This I have done in Boston; in the midst of the nineteenth century; been obliged to do it to defend the (innocent) members of my church, women as well as men! You know that I do not like fighting.... But what could I do? I was born in the little town where the first bloodshed of the Revolution began. The bones of men who first fell in that war are covered by the monument at Lexington, it is “sacred to Liberty and the Rights of Mankind”; those men fell “in the sacred cause of God and their country.” This is the first inscription that I ever read. These men were my kindred. My grandfather drew the first sword in the Revolution; my fathers fired the first shot; the blood which flowed there was kindred to this which courses in my veins today. Besides that, when I write in my library at home, on the one side of me is the Bible which my fathers prayed over, their morning and evening prayer, for nearly a hundred years. On the other side there hangs the firelock my grandfather fought with in the old French war, which he carried at the taking of Quebec, which he zealously used at the battle of Lexington, and beside it is another, a trophy of that war, the first gun taken in the Revolution, taken also by my grandfather. With these things before me, these symbols; with these memories in me, when a parishioner, a fugitive from slavery, a woman, pursued by the kidnappers, came to my house, what could I do less than take her in and defend her to the last? (Additional Speeches, Vol. I, pp. 13-15.)

With his sensitive conscience visited by such memories--a child of ’76 living in the evil days of the Fugitive Slave Law, a devout freethinker borne on the crest of transcendental thought--Theodore Parker became the embodiment and epitome of the New England renaissance. More completely perhaps than any other representative, he gathered up and expressed the major revolutionary impulses of his time and world: the idealistic theism implicit in the Unitarian reaction from Calvinism; the transcendental individualism latent in the doctrine of divine immanence; and the passion for righteousness, to make the will of God prevail in a world where the devil quite openly kept his ledgers. He was an eager and thorough iconoclast, impatient to break the false images--the God of John Calvin with its slanders of human nature, and the god of State Street with its contempt for justice--which New England, he believed, had worshiped too long, forgetting the ideals of the Revolutionary fathers. The mind and conscience of Boston seemed to him stifled by the strait-jacket of respectability. Righteousness like a fugitive slave, was driven into hiding, or must walk the open streets with a Derringer in its pocket. As a free soul loving freedom, and a righteous man loving righteousness, he believed a duty was laid on him to cut away the strait-jacket, to shame the Boston that sold the poor in the gates for a pair of shoes. He must labor to set free the mind and conscience of Boston that they might go forth purified to work a beneficent work in a world that is God’s and not the devil’s. His attack was keen and unsparing; he laid on with gusto; he used homely words; he was just rather than polite. Impatient of humbug and self-seeking he dealt in searching criticism rather than conventional eulogy. At his touch distinguished reputations shrank to the mean and commonplace, and inflated dignitaries collapsed like a pricked balloon. Intellectually honest, he spoke the truth he had been at immense pains to gather, and in consequence those who suffered the sting of his attack--ministers and lawyers and merchants and politicians, men in high position, distinguished leaders of Boston society--were not slack in crying out against him as a demagogue and agitator. Next to Garrison he became the most hated man in New England; and something of that contemporary hatred, fierce and unforgiving, clings to his name still, coloring later estimates of his worth, hinting that his manners were not on a level with his morals.[459] An extraordinarily vital and interesting person, in short, was this Yankee preacher with his Puritan conscience--this transcendental critic with his quiver full of facts; one not to be ignored in casting up the accounts of the New England renaissance.

With his memorable sermon On the Transient and Permanent in Christianity, preached in May, 1841--a sermon that ranks in the history of Unitarianism with Channing’s Baltimore sermon--the Unitarian movement entered upon its second broad phase. It abandoned supernaturalism established on the sufficient authority of the Scriptures, and adopted the conception of an evolutionary theism, of God progressively revealing himself to the developing faculties of men and speaking through the conscience. Under Channing’s guidance Unitarianism had abandoned the major dogmas of Calvinism--total depravity, predestination, a God of wrath; it had shifted the emphasis from stable will to boundless love; and by such teachings it had captured the greater churches of Boston. By 1830 it had become securely established as the religion of Boston respectability, with implied bounds set to its intellectual liberalism. As the first ardor abated it fell to defining the new orthodoxy, resting content with what already had been won. It was against this new orthodoxy that held fast to the old supernaturalism that Theodore Parker protested. “The defect of the Unitarians was a profound one,” he pointed out; “ceasing to fear ‘the great and dreadful God’ of the Old Testament, they had not quite learned to love the all-beautiful and altogether lovely [God] of the universe.”[460] He would have no pausing of the movement of adventurous thought, no settling back into the ruts of dogmatism; and so he threw himself with immense energy into the work of liberating Unitarianism from a premature orthodoxy.

For this work he was admirably equipped. The greatest scholar of his generation of New England ministers, deep in German theology and philosophy, with the latest results of higher criticism on his study table, he was critically trained to separate historical fact from ecclesiastical tradition, and establish his theology on a basis of naturalism. He was at once scientific and transcendental. He had translated De Wette’s Introduction to the Old Testament and was intimately acquainted with Strauss’s Leben Jesu. He knew the oriental backgrounds of Hebraic thought, had studied comparative religion with its suggestive record of taboos and fetishism, and was gathering materials for a comprehensive history of religion from primitive times. Intellectually acquisitive and curious, he far outran the less informed and courageous of his Unitarian brethren. But he was far more than a critic, he may well be accounted a religious genius. A convinced intuitionist, he tested every authority by appeal to transcendental experience. He frankly abandoned faith in the supernatural, with its corollaries of miracles and its “fetishism of the Bible,” and was far advanced in a theism that compensated for the supernatural by a passionate love of God. Thus established in personal experience his religion issued in conduct. Love of God was more to him than historical faith embodied in an historical church; love to his fellow men was more appealing than dogma. Hence the profoundly ethical quality of his religion, warm, palpitating, generous, that set it apart from the colder and austerer ethicism of the conventional Unitarians. The spirituality of Channing was enriched in Parker by the ardency of his loving nature.

The three major doctrines of his theism, as elaborated in his “Letter to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society,” were the infinite perfection of God, the adequacy of man to all his functions, and the sufficiency of absolute, natural religion. In his elaboration of these doctrines the controlling influence of transcendental thought is everywhere apparent. A metaphysical optimism throws a golden light on all his thinking. The trinitarian Godhead, equally with the devil, vanishes in “the infinitely perfect God,” “immanent in the world of matter, and in the world of spirit, the two hemispheres which to us make up the universe”--a universe created “from a perfect motive, for a perfect purpose, of perfect substance, and as a perfect means.” Hence it follows in Parker’s logic, that

there must be a complete solidarity between God and the two-fold universe which He creates. The perfect Creator is thus also a perfect providence; indeed, creation and providence are not objective accidents of Deity, nor subjective caprices, but the development of the perfect motive to its perfect purpose, love becoming a universe of perfect welfare. I have called God Father, but also Mother ... to express more sensibility, the quality of tender and unselfish love, which mankind associates with Mother more than aught else beside. (“Letter,” etc., in Weiss, Vol. II, pp. 470-471.)

The doctrine of the adequacy of man flows logically from the doctrine of the immanence of God, but Parker was not content to rest it on such basis alone. The conception of human perfectibility, as it filtered down to him through different strata of thought, romantic and idealistic, found a high sanction in his transcendentalism; but his practical nature demanded that it be established if possible on a scientific foundation. Anthropology must substantiate philosophy. Parker was not convinced that it could be thus adequately established; nevertheless he would travel the objective path as far as it might lead. Darwin’s Origin of Species was published after Parker was seized with his fatal illness, yet in much of the latter’s thinking he was groping his way toward some similar conception of “the unity of life of the human race,” with its “progressive development” from “the state of ignorance, poverty, and utter nakedness of soul and sense, the necessary primitive conditions of the race, up to the present civilization.” In the deep-buried scattered records of the past, slowly being gathered together and interpreted by science, he found “proof of time immense, wherein man, this spiritual Cosmos, has been assuming his present condition, individual, domestic, social, and national, and accumulating that wealth of things and thoughts which is the mark of civilization.” The doctrine of human perfectibility might not be capable of scientific proof, but it was more than a reasonable hope; it was implicit in all the past.

But this progressive development does not end with us; we have seen only the beginning; the future triumphs of the race must be vastly greater than all accomplished yet. In the primal instincts and automatic desires of man, I have found a prophecy that what he wants is possible, and shall one day be actual.... What good is not with us is before, to be attained by toil and thought, and religious life. (Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 471-472.)

Of this slowly and painfully evolving man with his expanding ideals, religion Parker believed to be the highest ultimate expression; and religion, as the eyes of men slowly open to larger truths, will be seen to be answerable to the needs of daily life, to embody the highest ideal of social excellence. The noblest religion he believed was not supernatural, but natural. “The absolute religion which belongs to man’s nature, and is gradually unfolded thence,” “is the idea of humanity, dimly seen but clearly felt, which has flitted before the pious eyes of men in all lands and many an age, and been prayed for as the ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’” It is forever refashioning its ideal, re-embodying its vision, in every devout soul, in every creative age. “The religious history of the race is the record of man’s continual but unconscious efforts to attain this ‘desire of all nations’” (ibid., Vol. II, p. 475). But unhappily every new advance soon crystallizes in dogmas and institutions; taboos and fetishisms are quick to re-imprison the mind that struggles to be free. Old forms, therefore, must be daily broken to make room for evolving experience. Religion must be free; it must rise spontaneously from the depths of life. Christianity has suffered grievously from a fetishism of the Bible, from its worship of the supernatural, from an ungenerous sectarianism beloved of “ecclesiastic skeptics,” who believe “there is no place for the Christian Church or the Bible till they have nullified the faculties which created both, and rendered Bible-makers and Church-founders impossible.” Every age must write a new Bible out of its God-given instincts, permeated with the divine love that is slowly shaping society to the divine purpose.

No more is the atheistic mocker or the ecclesiastic bigot commissioned to stop the human race with his cry, “Cease there, mankind, thy religious search! for, thousand-million-headed as thou art, thou canst know nought directly of thy God, thy duty, or thyself. Pause, and accept my authenticated word; stop, and despair!” (Ibid., Vol. II, p. 475.)

It was this ethical quality of his religion that kept Theodore Parker so sensitive to wrongs and so generous in response to the call of social justice. His religion quickened his social conscience and summoned him to serve the plentiful reform movements of the day. With Garrison and Wendell Phillips he organized the militants of Boston radicalism. His political principles were simple and uncompromising, woven from the strands of English and French libertarianism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--from Sidney, Locke, Rousseau, the great leaders of the natural-rights school. One who accepted as axiomatic the nobility of human nature and the perfectibility of man, might be a political romantic, but he was certain to be a liberal. Parker was a primitive democrat, whose democracy was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. But the democracy that answered the needs of his dream of the kingdom was, like Emerson’s and Channing’s, ethical rather than political or economic--it was “the enactment of God’s justice into human laws” (“The Nebraska Question,” in Additional Speeches, Vol. I, p. 327). “The democratic idea has had but a slow and gradual growth even in New England,” he pointed out; nevertheless he was convinced that it was spreading, and “government becomes more and more of all, by all and for all”[461] (ibid., p. 33). He hated Federalism with an intensity equaling Jefferson’s, and ecclesiastical Federalism that twisted the authority of the church to the side of wealthy pewholders, using Scripture as a sanction for exploitation, he denounced as scathingly as Garrison. The power of the political state he feared, because he discovered the political state to be the friend of the rich rather than the poor, of selfish advantage rather than of God’s justice. With other Abolitionists he distrusted the machinery of centralization that was being skillfully erected at Washington. “Opposition to centralization of authority is very old in America,” he remarked; “I hope it will be always young” (ibid., Vol. II, p. 29). But he was no partisan to the rule of the majority, if it determined contrary to his conscience. A transcendental individualist, he went for the nullification of an immoral statute in the name of the Higher Law.[462]

Parker was never blind to the economic basis of politics. He saw so clearly, indeed, the close alliance between group interests and governmental statutes, that his political activities were almost wholly determined by that recognition. As a political critic he was the shrewdest realist of his generation. He was one constituent whom politicians talking for Buncombe could not befuddle. He was too deeply read in American history, gifted with too keen historical insight, to be impressed by the glittering rhetoric of the Rufus Choates. He had his own views of the American government, and majestic appeals to the Constitution left him cold. The Constitution, he asserted, “is a provisional compromise between the ideal political principles of the Declaration, and the actual selfishness of the people North and South.” America was not a democracy. It had thrown off theocracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, only to set in their places the “institution of money--the master of all the rest.” The economic basis of society in America he considered to be open and patent. In church and state, money “is this day the strongest power of the nation.” He declined to be deceived by party cries and platforms, either Whig or Democratic; both parties served economics rather than justice.

So there is a party organization about the dollar as its central nucleus and idea. The dollar is the germinal dot of the Whig party; its motive is pecuniary.... It sneers at the poor; at the many; has a contempt for the people. It legislates against the poor, and for the rich ... the few who are born with the desire, the talent, and the conventional position to become rich. “Take care of the rich, and they will take care of the poor,” is its secret maxim. Everything must yield to money.... With this party there is no Absolute Right, no Absolute Wrong.... There is Expediency and Inexpediency.... Accordingly a millionaire is reckoned by this party as the highest production of Society. He is the Whig ideal; he alone has attained “the measure of the stature of a perfect man.”

The Democratic party appeals to the brute will of the majority, right or wrong; it knows no Higher Law.... There is ... no vital difference between the Whig party and the Democratic party; no difference in moral principle. The Whig inaugurates the Money got; the Democrat inaugurates the Desire to get money. That is all the odds.... There is only a hand rail between the two, which breaks down if you lean on it, and the parties mix ... a Democrat is but a Whig on time; a Whig is a Democrat arrived at maturity; his time has come. A Democrat is a young Whig who will legislate for money as soon as he has got it; the Whig is an old Democrat who once hurrahed for the majority--“Down with money! there is a despot! and up with the desire for it! Down with the rich, and up with the poor!” The young man, poor, obscure, and covetous, in 1812 was a Democrat, went a-privateering against England; rich, and accordingly “one of our eminent citizens,” in 1851 he was a Whig, and went a-kidnapping against Ellen Crafts and Thomas Sims. (“The Nebraska Question,” in Additional Speeches, Vol. I, pp. 331-335.)

The America of Parker’s day was fast becoming middle class and Parker knew it, and like Lincoln he did not disapprove. Honest thrift he found wholly desirable, and wealth if it were honestly got. But speculation dissociated from creative work he regarded with old-fashioned distrust. “If a man fully pay in efficient, productive toil and thought, he is entitled to all he gets, one dollar or many million dollars ... and if his estate be but what he has thus actually and honestly paid for with service given, equivalent to the service received, what he can virtuously keep or humanely apply and expend, then it will never be too large.”[463] But he believed there were other gods, and greater, than the god of getting on; social justice was more desirable than unearned increment; and he set his face like flint against the common materialism of America. “I come to build up piety and morality; to pull down only what cumbers the ground,” he said; but he had learned that the temples of State Street were not easily leveled; that they would not fall without a mighty crash. A less courageous man would have hesitated, but Parker was utterly fearless. Boston he knew “was a Tory town.” “The Mother city of the Puritans is now the metropolis of the Hunkers” (Additional Speeches, Vol. I, p. 111). But the spirit of ’76 was strong in him and he would “appeal from Boston drunk with gold, and briefly mad with hate, to sober Boston in her hour to come.” He would appeal from Whiggish Boston to Revolutionary Boston; from State Street to Lexington common; from the Faneuil Hall of Rufus Choate to the Faneuil Hall of Sam Adams. He would awaken the ancestral idealism of Boston that slept uneasily under the spell of middle-class ambitions--that had sold its Puritan heritage for southern trade profits. Such an appeal Boston had never before listened to, ardent, unsparing, the Hebraic and the Yankee vernacular curiously mingled; and Boston writhed uncomfortably and pronounced the prophet ill-mannered.

When the Fugitive Slave Bill passed, the six New England states lay fast asleep: Massachusetts slept soundly, her head pillowed on her unsold bales of Cotton and of woolen goods, dreaming of “orders from the South.” Justice came to waken her ... and she started in her sleep, and being frightened, swore a prayer or two, then slept again. But Boston woke,--sleeping, in her shop, with ears open, and her eye on the market, her hand on her purse, dreaming of goods for sale,--Boston woke broadly up, and fired a hundred guns for joy. O Boston, Boston! if thou couldst have known, in that thine hour, the things which belong unto thy peace! But no: they were hidden from her eyes. She had prayed to her god, to Money; he granted her the request, but sent leanness into her soul. (“The Boston Kidnapping,” in Additional Speeches, Vol. I, p. 89.)

But he offended the Boston code of good breeding even more seriously. He became personal. He named names. Before vast congregations, in printed books, he pronounced judgment on Bostonians respected in the Back Bay, mighty in State Street. Boston gentlemen had never before suffered such tongue-lashings. How mercilessly he excoriated Commissioner Loring, judge of probate and Harvard professor, for soiling his hands in the Anthony Burns case! How neatly he pricked the empty culture of Edward Everett for his pro-slavery ardor--“a Cambridge professor of Greek, he studied the original tongue of the Bible to learn that the Scripture says ‘slaves,’ where the English Bible says only ‘servants’!” (Additional Speeches, Vol. II, p. 115.) What an utterly devastating attack he made on the great Webster for the latter’s subserviency to local economic interests! Much honest realism underlies that criticism, and much honest American history. The “Nebraska Address” and the “Webster Address” are notable historical documents, incisive analyses--rare in those romantic days--done by one who has kept a shrewd eye on current politics, and understands the hidden springs of party policy. Into the Webster address he put his vast knowledge, his power of analysis, his frank idealism. It was “a sad and dreadful day” when duty bade Theodore Parker speak on the man whose uncommon powers he had long admired; but he did his work thoroughly, refusing to shut his eyes to ugly fact, refusing to indulge in commonplace eulogy. It was the eighteenth-century economic realism of Webster that stirred the wrath of the transcendentalist--that and the lapses from integrity. Parker’s text was found in Webster’s dictum that “the great object of government is the protection of property at home, and respect and renown abroad”; and how starkly it runs counter to his own ideal of government, “the enactment of God’s justice into human laws,” is laid bare in page after page of scathing commentary. To the exacting ethics of Parker, Webster was wanting in principles; he followed expediency rather than justice; and how surely expediency digs pitfalls for its own undoing he discovered tragic illustration of in the career of the great senator. It is a hard fate for a politician, accustomed to the cheap praise of the gullible public, to fall into the hands of a critic who is honest and searching; and Webster had too many weak points to emerge from such an analysis with credit. It is probably the most critical examination of Webster’s career that has ever been made, and withal just.

Surprisingly modern, far more so than Channing, was this brilliant preacher--impulsive, colloquial, natural, whose every arrow was pointed with a fact and feathered to fly true; concerned more with righteousness than with policy; hating the dull commonplace and empty dignity of Tory ways; careless of convention, somewhat spectacular, with a keen relish for combat--a vital, vivid man, the apostle of conscience, the advocate of every unpopular cause. He possessed an amazing gift of words, yet he was too impatient, too practical, to become an artist; preferring immediate ends to more lasting reputation, and spending himself with a free prodigality. He was always the speaker rather than the writer and his printed pages bear the unmistakable marks of impetuous oral discourse. Emerson accounted him one of the four great men of the age. Whether or not that judgment holds, whether he was too eager a militant to become a great transcendental philosopher, the historian sees in Theodore Parker one of the greatest, if not the last, of the excellent line of Puritan preachers.

Footnotes

[459] See Wendell, Literary History of America, p. 348.Return to passage

[460] See “Letter to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society of Boston,” in Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, Vol. II, Appendix II, p. 482. This account of his “Experience as a Minister” constitutes a brief intellectual autobiography, of first importance to the student of Parker.Return to passage

[461] This phrase of Parker’s was probably the source of Lincoln’s phrase.Return to passage

[462] See “The Law of God and the Statutes of Men,” in Additional Speeches, Vol. II, p. 181.Return to passage

[463] Quoted in Weiss, Vol. II, p. 488.Return to passage

V. • Margaret Fuller • Rebel

The fame of Margaret Fuller has waned greatly since her vivid personality was blotted out in the prime of her intellectual development. Misunderstood in her own time, caricatured by unfriendly critics, and with significant facts of her life suppressed by her friends out of a chivalrous sense of loyalty, the real woman has been lost in a Margaret Fuller myth and later generations have come to underestimate her powers and undervalue her work. Yet no other woman of her generation in America is so well worth recalling. She was the completest embodiment of the inchoate rebellions and grandiose aspirations of the age of transcendental ferment; for to the many grievances charged against the times by other New England liberals, she added the special grievance of the stupid inhibitions laid upon women. Transcendental radical and critic, like Emerson and Thoreau and Parker, she was feminist also; and to the difficult business of freeing her mind from the Cambridge orthodoxies, she added the greater difficulty of freeing her sex.

The written record that Margaret Fuller left is quite inadequate to explain her contemporary reputation. In no sense an artist, scarcely a competent craftsman, she wrote nothing that bears the mark of high distinction either in thought or style. Impatient of organization and inadequately disciplined, she threw off her work impulsively, not pausing to shape it to enduring form. Yet she was vastly talked about, and common report makes her out to have been an extraordinary woman who creatively influenced those with whom she came in contact. Like Alcott, her power lay in brilliant talk. Her quick mind seems to have been an electric current that stimulated other minds to activity, and created a vortex of speculation wherever she passed. Hungry for ideas, intellectually and emotionally vibrant, she caught her inspirations from obscure impulses of a nature thwarted and inhibited from normal unfolding; and in her sensitive oscillations she was often drawn away from polar principles to which she would later swing back. There was quite evidently a fundamental unrest within her, a conflict of impulses, that issued in dissatisfaction; and this contradiction was aggravated by intense emotions, which both quickened her mind and distorted it.

A product of Cambridge bookishness, Margaret Fuller was both a wonder and a riddle to a generation that made little account of the psychology of sex. She was commonly looked upon as an intellectual monstrosity, the most fearful of Yankee bluestockings, and a later Bostonian has gone so far as to suggest that she was “an unsexed version of Plato’s Socrates” (Wendell, Literary History of America, p. 300). But to present-day psychology her character is an extraordinarily suggestive document, and a recent critic has read her seeming contradictions like an open book.[464] Before Miss Anthony’s penetrating analysis the Margaret Fuller myth vanishes, and a very real, natural, and unfortunate woman takes its place. She came of vigorous stock, independent, outspoken, opinionated. Her grandfather was a clergyman who was unfrocked by his church for being lukewarm in the Revolutionary War. Her father, Timothy Fuller, and her four uncles, worked their way through Harvard. In Timothy Fuller there was a large measure of Puritan grimness and severity that locked the door on the passions of his heart, that none might know of them; yet there seems to have been a volcano in the man who held off the world so brusquely. The rebel was strong in him. The Fullers were not of Brahmin stock and had no wish to please their social superiors. While a Harvard undergraduate, Timothy Fuller turned Jeffersonian republican and lost his place as first honor man by joining in an undergraduate protest against certain hated regulations. As a lawyer and politician he repudiated respectable Federalism, and although he was representative in Congress for four terms and enjoyed certain other offices, his non-conformity in the end cost him dear. No doubt he had counted on that, for he was stubborn oak that might break but would not bend. The tragedy of Margaret Fuller’s life seems to have been sketched before in the life of Timothy Fuller.

To an extraordinary degree the daughter was the child of the father, in ideas and sympathies as well as blood. Like him she was a rebel, but for the daughter to turn rebel involved greater hazards than for the father. Her sex was a heavy handicap, for the experience of Fanny Wright and Lucretia Mott had revealed that American chivalry had definite bounds; it did not shield the woman who ventured beyond the pale. Yet considering her blood and training, how could she help thus venturing into freer fields without? From her earliest years her father treated her as a comrade and gave her the training of a boy. In her studies he dealt with her as James Mill dealt with his brilliant son. Perhaps it was a mistake to force her into the rigid groove of classical learning when she should have been playing with her dolls. From it she got very unusual acquisitions, but overstimulation broke her health, and isolation turned her mind in upon itself and made her the victim of somnambulism and freaks of imagination. The result was the development, on one side of her nature, of a female counterpart of Cotton Mather--precocious, domineering, moody, visionary, given to long hours of greedy reading, gorging herself on books and well-nigh ruining her intellectual digestion as well as her health. Against this unfortunate overstimulation her vigorous nature struggled for years, and never quite successfully. Her emotions were forever embroiling her intellect. To conceive of her as sexless is curiously to miss the point of her emotionalism. She was rather the victim of sex. Her ardent friendships with other women, her flashes of mystical experience, her fondness for children, her love of luxury and creature comforts, her eager love affair with James Nathan who unchivalrously found safety in flight, her friendship with Mazzini and her more intimate friendship with Count Ossoli, that ended in an unconventional marriage after her situation rendered it necessary--such reactions can be explained on no other hypothesis. Her ardent nature was the victim of disastrous frustrations, rendered the more acute by premature development. If she had married early, as Harriet Beecher did, and her excessive energy had been turned into domestic channels, her life must have been less tragic, whatever the effect might have been on her intellectual development.

The acutest contemporary analysis of her contradictory character is that given by her friend William Henry Channing, who found his clue in the clash between endowment and environment:

Here was one fond as a child of joy, eager as a native of the tropics for swift transition from luxurious rest to passionate excitement, prodigal to pour her mingled force of will, thought, sentiment, into the life of the moment, all radiant with imagination, longing for communion with artists of every age in their inspired hours, fitted by genius and culture to mingle as an equal in the most refined circles of Europe, and yet her youth and early womanhood had passed away amid the very decent, yet drudging, descendants of prim Puritans. Trained among those who could have discerned her peculiar power, and early fed with the fruits of beauty for which her spirits pined, she would have developed into one of the finest lyrists, romancers and critics, that the modern literary world has seen. This she knew; and this tantalization of her fate she keenly felt. (Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, by R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke, Vol. II, pp. 36-37.)

This disastrous clash between endowment and environment is strikingly exemplified in her delight in Europe when at thirty-four she found herself there--in her admiration for Georges Sand, and in particular the extravagance of her love for Rome, where her starved heart found satisfactions she had long dreamed of. “Italy receives me as a long-lost child, and I feel myself at home here,” she wrote in 1847; and a few weeks later, “I find how true was the lure that always drew me towards Europe. It was no false instinct that said I might here find an atmosphere to develop me in ways I need. Had I only come ten years earlier! Now my life must be a failure, so much strength has been wasted on abstractions, which only came because I grew not in the right soil” (ibid., Vol. II, p. 225). She was too eagerly pagan to be satisfied with either Puritan or Yankee Cambridge. The pale ethicism of New England was thin gruel for such an appetite for life. Even Emerson she found cold, and her stomach rebelled at the food he throve on. But this was only half the story; the other half was this:

But the tragedy of Margaret’s history was deeper yet. Behind the poet was the woman,--fond and relying, the heroic and disinterested woman. The very glow of her poetic enthusiasm was but an outflush of trustful affection; the very restlessness of her intellect was the confession that her heart had found no home. A “book-worm,” a “dilettante,” a “pedant,” I had heard her sneeringly called; but now it was evident that her seeming insensibility was virgin pride, and her absorption in studying the natural vent of emotions, which met no object of life-long attachment. At once, many of her peculiarities became intelligible. Fitfulness, unlooked-for changes of mood, misconceptions of words and actions, substitutions of fancy for fact ... were now referred to the morbid influence of affections pent up to prey upon themselves. And, what was still more interesting, the clue was given to a singular credulousness, by which, in spite of her unusual penetration, Margaret might be led away blindfold. As this revelation of her ardent nature burst upon me, and ... I saw how faithful she had kept to her life purposes,--how patient, gentle, and thoughtful of others, how active in self-improvement and usefulness, how wisely dignified she had been,--I could not but bow to her in reverence. (Ibid., Vol. II, p. 37.)

The inchoate rebellions in her heart were stimulated and given form by her reading. From the English, French, and German romantics she drew much of her intellectual food. The long hours spent with her father over Jefferson’s letters were the best of preparation for Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft, and French romanticism provided an excellent introduction to the German. Her emotions were in high ferment when she came upon the German school, and she yielded her heart to it without reserve. Novalis, Richter, above all Goethe, became a passion and swept her along the path that Hedge and James Freeman Clarke were following. For years she gathered materials for a life of Goethe, but a feeling of self-distrust held back the project. Her love for him was the great literary enthusiasm of her life. “It seems to me,” she wrote in 1832, “as if the mind of Goethe had embraced the universe.... I am enchanted while I read. He comprehends every feeling I have ever had so perfectly, expresses it so beautifully; but when I shut the book, it seems as if I had lost my personal identity; all my feelings linked with such an immense variety that belongs to things I had thought so different” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 119). Later, with more critical analysis of Goethe, she found her enthusiasm modifying; she was repelled by his calm, aloof intellectuality;[465] but she never wavered in loyal recognition of his commanding powers.

Her romantic idealism was in full career when the transcendental movement caught her up and put its stamp upon her. It came as an emotional appeal to the vague aspirations of a life inadequately motivated, and she threw herself eagerly into the new philosophy and became the most hectic of its expounders. The intellectual foundations of her transcendentalism were so slight in comparison with the equipment of Hedge and Parker as scarcely to justify her pretentions to their fellowship. But what she lacked in knowledge of Kant and Fichte she made up in enthusiasm, and none questioned her right to speak for the group. The editorship of the Dial provided a convenient safety valve for her energy, but it neither absorbed her nor sufficed to satisfy her limitless desires. She needed to espouse a cause more concrete and dramatic, personal in its demands, calling for high sacrifice. Abolitionism was at hand, but it repelled her by its narrow dogmatisms. Garrison was never a hero of hers. She regarded him with “high respect” for his “noble and generous” course; but “he has indulged in violent invective and denunciation till he has spoiled the temper of his mind” (“Frederick Douglass,” in Life Without and Life Within, p. 122). Later, when she was in Europe, she looked back half regretfully at her indifference to the movement.

How it pleases me here to think of the Abolitionists! I could never endure to be with them at home; they were so tedious, often so narrow, always so rabid and exaggerated in their tone. But, after all, they had a high motive, something eternal in their desire and life. (Memoirs, Vol. II, p. 229.)

Even Brook Farm repelled her as much as it attracted her. Though she loved many of the members, bore her share in the discussions preliminary to its establishment, and often visited there, she would not join the venture. She had had enough of farm life at Groton. To open a road to Utopia with a common plow was, perhaps, too prosaic a business for her romantic nature, and when the Fourier Phalanx was introduced she grew skeptical. Fourierism seemed to her too mechanical a conception, in spite of her sympathy for the humanitarian spirit that lay behind it. As she looked back upon it from the vantage point of her French experience, she modified her judgment somewhat, although the old transcendental bias that Emerson had voiced still colored her views.

The more I see of the terrible ills which infest the body politic of Europe, the more indignation I feel at the selfishness or stupidity of those in my own country who oppose an examination of these subjects,--such as is animated by the hope of prevention. Educated in an age of gross materialism, Fourier is tainted by its faults; in attempts to reorganise society, he commits the error of making soul the result of health of body, instead of body the clothing of the soul; but his heart was that of a genuine lover of his kind, of a philanthropist in the sense of Jesus; his views are large and noble; his life was one of devout study on these subjects, and I should pity the person who, after the briefest sojourn in Manchester and Lyons, the most superficial acquaintance with the population of London or Paris, could seek to hinder a study of his thoughts, or be wanting in reverence for his purposes. (Ibid., Vol. II, p. 206.)

It was in part from Fourier, certainly from the collectivistic theories discussed so generally by the transcendental group, that she received her equipment for the cause which, more than any other except the dramatic Roman revolution, appealed to the deeper rebellions of her soul. She had dealt much with the woman question in her “Conversations,” and in 1844 she published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, a work that made a great stir in America. The “little book was the first considered statement of feminism in this country” (Katharine Anthony, Margaret Fuller, p. 80), and its novelty was emphasized by its boldness. The question of woman’s place had emerged sharply from the Abolition movement, when the appearance of women on the platform had aroused opposition even from radical reformers, and Angelina Grimké had encountered insults when she spoke at Abolition meetings. But Margaret Fuller was the first since Mary Wollstonecraft, fifty years before, to undertake a reasoned defense of the claims of woman to emancipation from man-made custom. It was a somewhat shocking book to fling at respectable Boston bluestockings--male as well as female--for not only did she discuss equality of economic opportunity and equality of political rights for women, but she went further and spoke frankly about sex equality, marriage, prostitution, physical passions--pretty much everything that was taboo in Boston society. It was a bold thing to do, needing more courage even than to engage in a Fourieristic onslaught upon the conventions of private property. Only a first-class rebel would have had the temerity to offer such morsels to wagging tongues.

This was her parting shot at a world that had done its best to stifle her. Thenceforth her field was to broaden out immensely. In 1844 she went to New York to live in the family of Horace Greeley and write critical reviews for The Tribune--a shift that marked the beginning of her intellectual maturity, the end of her mystical sentimentalism. She was thirty-four years of age, and she plunged vigorously into the work of criticism, never perhaps very successfully, certainly never with high distinction. Her judgments were penetrating and individual, she awakened some Cambridge animosities by her comment on certain Cambridge poets, but she was not a notable critic. A fine craftsmanship she never attained. A light touch she could never command. Nevertheless the experience was sobering. Honest, practical Horace Greeley, with his pugnacious fondness for social reform, was an excellent antidote to Concord transcendentalism; and an awakening sociological interest discovered ample opportunities in New York for the expression of her mother-instinct. She took to her stormy bosom the inmates of Sing Sing prison, the poor and outcast of the city. At last she went to Europe, fell in with Mazzini, and found a cause dramatic enough and real enough to satisfy her rebellious instincts. She was profoundly stirred by the Roman revolution, took charge of one of the hospitals, and spent her strength freely. On the tragic failure of the revolt she started home with her husband and child, only to perish on the sandy shores of Fire Island--a fate she did not turn her finger to escape. Perhaps it was well. She had only too good reason to be fearful of her reception and of the future. Tongues that had wagged before would certainly have risen to a virtuous gabble over her misadventure in Italy. On the whole one must be glad that her friends refused to permit her good name to be thrown to the gossips. Why shouldn’t gentlemen lie stoutly if by so doing they can cheat the salacious?

A sensitive emotional nature offers the best of social barometers, and Margaret Fuller’s tragic life, despite its lack of solid accomplishment, was an epitome of the great revolt of the New England mind against Puritan asceticism and Yankee materialism. She was the emotional expression of a rebellious generation that had done with the past and was questioning the future. Not a scholar like Theodore Parker, not a thinker like Thoreau, not an artist like Emerson, she was a ferment of troubled aspiration, an enthusiasm for a more generous culture than New England had known--the logical outcome of the romantic revolution which, beginning with Channing’s discovery of humanitarian France, and leading thence to idealistic Germany, was to break the indurated shell of life in New England, and release its conscience and its mind. She was the spiritual child of Jean Jacques even more than of Goethe--a fact that she eventually came to realize. Writing from Paris in 1847, she said:

To the ... Chamber of Deputies, I was indebted for a sight of the manuscripts of Rousseau, treasured in their library. I saw them and touched them,--those manuscripts just as he has celebrated them, written on fine white paper, tied with ribbon. Yellow and faded age has made them, yet at their touch I seemed to feel the fire of youth, immortally glowing, more and more expansive, with which his soul has pervaded this century. He was the precursor of all we most prize. True, his blood was mixed with madness, and the course of his actual life made some detours through villainous places; but his spirit was intimate with the fundamental truths of human nature, and fraught with prophecy. There is none who has given birth to more life for this age; his gifts are yet untold; they are too present with us; but he who thinks really must often think with Rousseau, and learn him ever more and more. Such is the method of genius,--to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat they complain. (Memoirs, Vol. II, pp. 206-207.)

The rebel pays a heavy price for his rebellions, as Margaret learned to her cost. She suffered much in her daily life, but it was her art that suffered most. She was evidently a far richer nature than her printed works reveal. Intense in her extravagant demands upon life, a radical humanitarian in all her sympathies and instincts, generous in response to whatever was fine and high, living unduly an inner life as became a daughter of Puritanism--Margaret Fuller was too vivid a personality, too complete an embodiment of the rich ferment of the forties, to be carelessly forgotten. The deeper failure of her career--its vague aspirations and inadequate accomplishment--was a failure that may be justly charged against the narrow world that bred her. Perhaps no sharper criticism could be leveled at New England than that it could do no better with such material, lent it by the gods.

Footnotes

[464] See Katharine Anthony, Margaret Fuller, A Psychological Biography.Return to passage

[465] See Life Without and Life Within, pp. 23-60.Return to passage

I. • The Reign of the Genteel

I

The discussion of the New England mind hitherto has kept pretty much to the outskirts of Boston, to Concord and Roxbury and undistinguished precincts; it has not penetrated the Back Bay where dwelt the authentic representatives of Brahminism, nor has it concerned itself greatly with Cambridge that was a lesser Back Bay. Nevertheless there were other ideals than those of transcendentalism and social reform in the New England of the renaissance--ideals of culture, of scholarship, of belles lettres, to which the Brahmin mind contributed, and which after the subsidence of the ferment came to dominate genteel New England and for a generation largely influenced American letters. To the revolutionary aspirations of the forties the Back Bay contributed little. Brahmin Boston might turn Unitarian with Channing, but it was at heart neither French romantic nor German idealist; it desired rather culture for its own sake, and scholarship it regarded as the handmaid of culture. It hoped of course that righteousness and the will of God should ultimately prevail in human affairs, but it was not exigent in its demands. Occasion and means it willingly left to God, anticipating that the walls of Jericho must fall of their own weakness. It is surprising how little the greater issues of the time ruffled the serenity of the Brahmin mind, and how uncritical were its judgments on such issues as came under its review. Divided between State Street and the Back Bay, its life ran a smoothly agreeable course with no hint of potential antagonisms between exploitation and culture. It followed so strictly the injunction, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, that the two were almost total strangers to each other. Like Edith Wharton’s contemporary Knickerbockers, the Brahmins conceived the great business of life to be the erection of barriers against the intrusion of the unpleasant. They took it ill when those barriers were assaulted by rude militants, and when indisputable Brahmins--men like Edmund Quincy and Wendell Phillips--took part in the assault, the Back Bay regarded them as more than a little queer.

The immediate consequence of this concern for defensive breastworks was the reign of the genteel in life and letters, a reign that set up a court of critical jurisdiction over the domain of American letters. The essence of the genteel tradition was a refined ethicism, that professed to discover the highest virtue in shutting one’s eyes to disagreeable fact, and the highest law in the law of convention. Gone were the franker days of Robert Treat Paine when a wit might find his choicest bons mots in the bottom of his cups. Coarseness had given way to refinement. It was the romanticism of Brahmin culture, with all Falstaffian vulgarity deleted, and every smutch of the natural man bleached out in the pure sunshine of manners. It was Victorianism of a more maidenly purity than the English strain, so carefully filtered by passing through the close Puritan mesh that the smallest impurities were removed. The first of literary commandments was the commandment of reticence. Literature was conceived of as belonging to the library and the drawing-room, and it must observe the drawing-room amenities. Only a vulgarian would lug a spade there. Any venture into realism was likely to prove libidinous, and sure to be common. Certainly Margaret Fuller had overstepped the bounds of decency with her remarks about women of the streets. The Adamite school was the vulgar expression of the natural man, and Continental realism--the French and the Russian--was only bringing the gutter into the library. Literature must be fine and pure and noble, and as such it will serve decency and manners; what excuse is there for it otherwise? The case for the true church of literature, as against the Adamite and other heresies, was admirably stated by Lowell:

I have not seen Swinburne’s new volume--but a poem or two from it which I have seen shocked me, and I am not squeamish.... Why should a man by choice go down to live in his cellar, instead of mounting to those fair upper chambers which look towards the sunrise of that Easter which shall greet the resurrection of the soul from the body of this death? Virginibus puerisque? To be sure! let no man write a line that he would not have his daughter read.... But I have outlived many heresies, and shall outlive this new Adamite one of Swinburne. The true Church of poetry is founded on a rock, and I have no fear that these smutchy back-doors of hell shall prevail against her. (Letters, Vol. I, p. 377.)

II

Though it willingly recognized the superior claims of poetry and the essay, the Brahmin mind found a more congenial field for its literary ambitions in history; and the quiet scholarship that it pursued with exemplary diligence was likely to flower in substantial historical studies. Excellent work much of it is, brilliant in certain instances; yet it too is subtly marked by the psychology of the environment that produced it. The renaissance of Boston scholarship began with Everett and Ticknor, whose German training was imposed on natures instinctively aristocratic, swayed by the older Federalist prejudices. The latter applied himself to Spanish literature, but his colleague and fellow historian, Jared Sparks, proved that in the American field even painstaking scholarship could not subdue the temptation to improve upon reality. Sparks applied Boston ethics to biography and conceived that his mission in writing the life of a great American like Washington was to portray a national hero as a model to the youth of the land. In pursuance of this aim he studiously perfected nature by correcting all the little blemishes of manner and little weaknesses of character in order to produce an immaculate effect. He edited Washington’s letters with a free hand, not only correcting the grammar and spelling, but silently deleting such passages as did not become the hero he had in mind. He did not of course go to the absurd lengths of Parson Weems in inventing episodes and effects, but he refused to deal with his materials realistically and the result was a falsifying of the total impression.

The greatest and in certain respects the most characteristic work of the period was George Bancroft’s History of the United States, to which with single-minded purpose he devoted sixty laborious years. Trained in Göttingen, he gathered his materials with German thoroughness, but the underlying spirit and purpose of his exposition were native to the ardent nationalism of Jacksonian America. Bancroft was the only important member of the New England group of historians who was a militant Democrat, and he set out to justify to the world the ways of democratic America. It was a great undertaking and in the opinion of Ranke, the German historian, it justified itself. “Your history is the best book ever written from the democratic point of view,”[466] he wrote Bancroft. The praise was perhaps not excessive. Conceived in the early days of the Jacksonian triumph, it reflects the grandiose conception of the future of America and the beneficent influence of republican institutions on western civilization, that were common in the golden days of equalitarianism and that even such a scholarly legalist as Hugh Legaré shared. But unfortunately, with his generation Bancroft had lost his economic bearings, and he drove forward somewhat too confidently into the new seas of political idealism trusting to the pole-star of emancipated human nature. As a democrat he was too easily persuaded that democratic America lay in the particular keeping of Providence, and he assumed too readily that the democratic development of American institutions was in response to the divine will. It reflects something of the partisanship of honest patriots who believe God is on their side; but it served to correct the teachings of Federalists like Richard Hildreth who insisted that God was on the side of Federalism. Till Bancroft took up his pen the bias of American chronicles had been anti-democratic. Every Federalist with leisure, a quill, and a smattering of historical knowledge, had added his mite to the Federalist myths that long constituted the body of our history. The democratic interpretation ran so counter to Boston tradition that Bancroft found little congeniality amongst his fellow historians, and he eventually quitted his native state and took up his home in Washington.

More representative of the Brahmin spirit was the work of William H. Prescott, John L. Motley, and Francis Parkman, who constitute what may be called the romantic school of Boston historians. They sought the romantic in theme and aspired to the romantic in treatment quite as consciously as did the contemporary novelists. Of excellent Brahmin strain, with leisure, wealth, opportunity, they were free to pick and choose as they would. Prescott and Motley turned away from the partisanships of America, and while Jacksonianism was in full swing the former wrote his Ferdinand and Isabella, and while the country was wrangling over slavery the latter wrote his Rise of the Dutch Republic. Broad in conception and dramatic in treatment, they are admirable works, yet they suggest that aloofness from the sordid realities of America so characteristic of the Brahmin mind. Far more brilliant and significant was the work of Francis Parkman who turned his imagination to the far West over which the struggle for exploration and conquest had long persisted between the French and English. In his twenties he had made a venturesome trip to the great plains, and that experience gave life and vitality to his later historical writings, that were enriched by close research, a brilliant style, and a creative imagination. The theme he set himself was not alone a “history of the American forest,” but a clash between civilizations--the “feudal, militant, and Catholic France in conflict with democratic, industrial, and Protestant England”; and with fine tenacity of purpose, in the teeth of ill health, he wrought at his project till the America of the old French War times was gathered into his pages. The Brahmin mind has contributed to American letters no more brilliant work than came from the pen of Francis Parkman.

III

If the highest aspirations of the Brahmin nature sought satisfaction in poetry, Longfellow may be reckoned its most characteristic product. In his work the romantic, the sentimental, and the moralistic, blended in such just proportions, and expressed themselves with such homely simplicity as to hit exactly the current taste and establish a reputation that later generations have difficulty in understanding. A gentle, lovable soul, widely read and in maturer years possessing a ripe literary scholarship, he was a skillful purveyor of gentle, lovable ideals. Although he drew his materials from Spain and Sweden and Italy, from primitive New England and aboriginal America, it was Germany that largely provided the staple of his romance. With Emerson and Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker, he found Germany a singularly congenial land--not Königsberg with its transcendental metaphysics, nor Weimar with its pagan culture, nor Tübingen with its higher criticism. Such things, transcendental and critical, he was not concerned about; it was the minor romantics, Freiligrath rather than Heine, the gentle melancholy and pervasive Sehnsucht of the German folk-nature, that drew him irresistibly and quickened his sympathetic pen. There was little intellect in Longfellow, little creative originality. He was the poet of an uncritical and unsophisticated generation, as yet untroubled by science and industrialism, and his mind was detached from politics and his conscience rarely disturbed by social questions. He came of excellent Federalist stock, his father having been a delegate from Maine to the Hartford Convention; and with his courteous manners he fitted easily into the little world of Cambridge Brahmins. However one might question his poetry, none could question that he was a gentleman amongst gentlemen.

If he was never the omnivorous bookman that Lowell was, he was distinctly a poet of the library. His placid and singularly happy life was pretty much bounded by his library walls. One could scarcely have lived more detached from contemporary America, more effectively insulated against the electric currents of the times. Though Thoreau might flee to Walden he carried his questioning intellect with him; even the constable would not leave him alone there. But Longfellow’s door shut securely against all intrusion. The winds of doctrine and policy might rage through the land, but they did not rattle the windows of his study to disturb his quiet poring over Dante. The translation of the Divina Commedia would go forward even while the country was being torn asunder. In a sense such work was his refuge against the storm and stress of malignant forces that troubled him. He did not like the tumult and the shouting, and much of Longfellow is compressed into the sonnets that preface the translation, much of the gentleness of his evasion, and much of the finer craftsmanship of his later years.

Oft have I seen at some cathedral door A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat, Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor Kneel to repeat his paternoster o’er; Far off the noises of the world retreat; The loud vociferations of the street Become an undistinguishable roar. So, as I enter here from day to day, And leave my burden at this minster gate, Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray, The tumult of the time disconsolate To inarticulate murmurs dies away, While the eternal ages watch and wait.

How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers! This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers, And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers! But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves, And underneath, the traitor Judas lowers! Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain, What exultations trampling on despair, What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong, What passionate outcry of a soul in pain, Uprose this poem of the earth and air, This mediaeval miracle of song!

A single incursion Longfellow made into the field of Abolition controversy, prompted perhaps by Dickens, whose “grand chapter on slavery” in American Notes he had read in London. The seven poems were written to beguile the tedium of a sea voyage. They are unreal enough to seem quite harmless, yet they created a decided stir on their appearance. For a Harvard professor to express publicly even a mild sympathy with the Abolition movement, may well have been somewhat perilous, considering the fate of Professor Follen; and the sacred institution may have scented a real danger in such romanticisms. Grotesque as these academic poems were, with their burnt-cork figures, they perhaps served to romanticize and sentimentalize the negro for northern minds, as Uncle Tom’s Cabin did a decade later with tremendous effect. Slavery had no weapon against such an attack, and no doubt Longfellow’s contributions proved serviceable to the cause of Abolitionism. But this one venture satisfied him, and having got safely back to his library, he shut the door on the whole vexatious question of slavery. He was not made for battle, and causes commanded an unwilling allegiance. Little remained of his Puritanism save conscience, a sense of struggle against somewhat vague and indolent powers of evil, a pleasant melancholy that transmuted itself into pleasant verse. He lived vicariously the lives of other poets, sharing their emotions, repeating their thoughts, reproducing their pictures; yet adding some individual color from his own sincere nature. Not richly endowed, he was more than an echo. He marked the transition from the nebulous ferment of the creative renaissance to the scholarly culture of Brahmin Cambridge. After Longfellow came Charles Eliot Norton in whose blameless life that culture flowered, and after that came sterility.

Footnotes

[466] Quoted in Stanton, Manual of American Literature, p. 101.Return to passage

II. • Nathaniel Hawthorne • Skeptic

After his immersion for some months in the Utopian dreams of Brook Farm, Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance discovered that he had drifted far from reality. “No sagacious man,” he remarked, “will long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint.”

It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with the conservatives, the writers of the North American Review, the merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those respectable blockheads who still, in this intangibility and mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue since yesterday morning.

In this suggestive pronouncement the intellectual position of Hawthorne is revealed. Cool, detached, rationalistic, curiously inquisitive, he looked out upon the ferment of the times, the clash of rival philosophies and rival interests, only to bring them into his study and turn upon them the light of his critical analysis. One after another he weighed the several faiths of New England, conservative and transcendental and radical, and ended skeptic. He was too much of a realist to change fashions in creeds. Time, experience--he is always remembering--have created men as we find them, and very likely only time and experience can make them over into something different. The conservatives would seem to have common sense on their side, for they are seeking to retain what has hitherto been won; but the reformers are not without justification as well, for impelled by an ardent faith they are seeking to win new conquests. But whether that which the conservatives defend so valiantly is worth defending, or whether the goal towards which the reformers drive so furiously is worth the trouble, are questions about which the rationalist may be permitted his doubts. The universe in which he found himself was a moral universe, Hawthorne on the whole believed; and if that were true then man’s chief business and urgent problem was the matter of a sufficient morality.

Radical in his intellectual processes, he could never become greatly interested in specific radicalisms. He is often thought of as a transcendentalist, and his association with the Peabodys and his venture into Brook Farm might seem to lend color to such an interpretation. Yet nothing in his intellectual sympathies marks him as of the school. The polar conceptions of transcendentalism repelled rather than attracted him. Political and metaphysical speculation left him cold, and the twin revolutionary forces of the time, French romanticism and German idealism, never deeply affected his thinking. Amid all the flux he retained much of the older Calvinist view of life and human destiny. Though nominally a Unitarian he did not share Channing’s faith in the perfectibility of man. The buried voice of God that the transcendentalists professed to have discovered in instinct, he greatly distrusted. Man seemed to him quite as likely to turn out to be a child of the devil as the first-born of God. Perhaps through a long and uncertain process he may grow into something nobler than he now is, but for the present the fact remains that the human heart, if not desperately wicked, is at least on familiar terms with evil; too often it is cold, selfish, malignant, and its secret promptings need watching. Doubting the indwelling presence of the divine Over-soul, he could find no justification for the transcendental faith in the excellence of the universe, out of which came the genial optimism of the Emersonians. Too pronounced a rationalist to comprehend the mysticism that lurked in the heart of the transcendental faith, he remained cold to the revolutionary criticism that was eager to pull down the old temples to make room for nobler. Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, Utopia is only the shadow of a dream. And so while the Concord thinkers were proclaiming man to be the indubitable child of God, Hawthorne was critically examining the question of evil as it appeared in the light of his own experience. It was the central, fascinating problem of his intellectual life, and in pursuit of a solution he probed curiously into the hidden, furtive recesses of the soul.

The isolation in which he chose to brood over the problem, seeking to take the solution by surprise in unguarded moments, was the natural consequence of his temperament and his habits. He lived singularly remote from common interests, singularly self-sufficient. Both as thinker and artist he suffered from his self-imposed isolation. The twelve years of his apprenticeship, closely immured and given over to spinning cobwebs about the old Puritan rafters, drawing the stuff of his romance out of his own bowels, may have facilitated the development of technic, but it laid narrow limitations on the matter of his art. Intellectually unlocalized in his Yankee world, he was the romancer of a dead but unforgotten past, at home only where the New England conscience brooded over sin--subduing the old nightmares to less terrifying dreams, intruding his doubts into old dogmas yet never emerging from the old shadows. Although he was a child of the liberation and had broken the web that Calvinism had woven about the mind of New England, he did not choose to quit the world from whose bondage he had freed himself. He would examine the old problem in a new light. In rejecting Calvinism as a religion, he retained it as a background for his inquisitive probing. It appealed to his imagination after his reason had rejected its dogmas; it determined his art after it had ceased to command his loyalty. In consequence, all his life Hawthorne dwelt between worlds. Though at times he tried to establish contact with Yankee reality, though he essayed to establish an intellectual rapport with his generation, he never quite succeeded, but remained to the last isolated, a frequenter of the twilight.

Only in a narrow and very special sense was Hawthorne a romantic. With the romance of love and adventure he was never concerned; what interested him was the romance of ethics--the distortions of the soul under the tyranny of a diseased imagination. How little he shares in common with other romantics is revealed in his detachment from his native Salem. The place was not lacking in picturesque charm, present and past. During the long years he spent in his Salem study, the city was rising to the zenith of its brisk sea life, with its ships in the China trade, its venturesome fisheries, its echoes of the whaling industry at Nantucket. Materials for romance were lying all about the Salem wharves--such a show of canvas and spars and rigging, such briny smells, such suggestions of far voyages to outlandish places, such strange figures slipping in from the ends of the earth--such romantic promptings in short as would have intoxicated the imagination of Herman Melville, and that Joseph Hergesheimer wove into the rich tapestries of Java Head. A romantic could scarcely have found in America a setting better calculated to awaken a sense of brave adventure than in old Salem; yet for three years Hawthorne sat in the Custom House, with such materials all about him, and then turned away to the seventeenth century to write of Hester Prynne. For a man gifted with imagination to fail to lift his eyes to the horizon beyond which the hurrying ships were seeking strange markets, and instead to turn them in upon a shadowy world of half unreal characters; to overlook the motley picturesque in the foreground of the actual, in order to brood over an old adultery and twist it into theological sin, can be explained only on the ground that Hawthorne was concerned with ethical rather than romantic values, that he was interested rather in the problem of evil than in the trappings of romance. Aloofness of time and place served to isolate the problem, stripping away the wrappings of the physical, delocalizing it, transmuting the individual act into the universal. Thus isolated, Hester’s sin becomes a symbol of that ancient evil which forever waylays human life and by strange perversions brings havoc to our hopes--the greatest havoc to him whose heart, like Chillingsworth’s, is cold, selfish, malignant.

This temperamental aloofness from objective reality was both the strength and the weakness of Hawthorne’s art. In choosing to follow the way of the inner life he was true to his Puritan breeding. The perpetual turning-in of the mind upon itself, the long introspective brooding over human motives, came naturally to one who lived in the shadow of a Puritan past. In their anxious concern over sin the Puritans had become in some measure psychologists; how else could the secret impulses of the soul be probed and its dark workings laid bare? Hawthorne was only doing what Jonathan Edwards before him had done in his psychological clinic of the Great Awakening--examining the reactions of sin on conscience and character. From this comes the simplicity of his theme and the compelling unity of his handling. To be sure it is pathological phenomena that he deals with, as the phenomena that Edwards dealt with in his Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God, were pathological; and like Edwards, Hawthorne is led into insubstantial and tenuous regions where he breathes with difficulty. The substantial world of Puritan reality that Samuel Sewall knew, Hawthorne seems scarcely to have been aware of; he created instead his own Puritanism, fantastic and unreal. He was forever dealing with shadows, and he knew that he was dealing with shadows, and this consciousness was a perennial source of doubt and uncertainty that bred self-distrust. In setting himself the task of dramatizing sin rather than sinners, of creating romance out of the problem of evil, he encountered difficulties that oppressed him. The well-springs of his imagination were constantly running dry and he must wait till they filled again slowly. Hence the “development of his art is towards ever greater elaboration of scantier and scantier materials, until the joy of the whole becomes lost at last in the milder pleasures of detail.”[467]

From the grave difficulties inherent in his theme came the inveterate habit of sliding into symbolism and allegory--from this and from the narrowness of his emotional life and the restrictions of his sympathies. The cold thin atmosphere of his work, one comes increasingly to feel, was due not alone or chiefly to the severity of his artistic restraint that forbade all rioting of the sensuous imagination; it was due rather to a lack of nourishment, to a poverty of ideas and sensuous imagery. His inveterate skepticism robbed him of much, but his inhibitions robbed him of more. A romantic uninterested in adventure and afraid of sex is likely to become somewhat graveled for matter. Like the Pyncheon fowls, Hawthorne’s imagination had suffered from too long inbreeding; it had grown anemic, and every grain of fancy is clucked over and picked at and made much of. Once an idea comes into his head he is loath to let it go, but he must turn it about curiously and examine it from every angle. The striking chapter in The House of the Seven Gables, where the death of Judge Pyncheon is played upon so persistently, is only an extreme example of his habitual method. The tongues that wagged over the minister’s black veil were no more inquisitive and tireless than Hawthorne’s when his imagination is fired by a vivid image. He will not let it go till it is sucked as dry as last year’s cider cask. It is the way of one to whom ideas are few and precious. Knowing how little is in the bottle he will linger out the flavor of every drop. Hence his fondness for symbolism, and hence his frequent lapse into allegory when imagination grows dull. Because Hawthorne was an artist he was saved from the shipwreck that such a method might seem to invite; yet perhaps it is not unreasonable to suggest that he was an artist for the reason that only through the mastery of a refined technic could his scanty stock of ideas make any show at all.

The intellectual poverty that resulted from his long immuring himself in a void is sufficiently revealed in his American Note-Books. In the somewhat tedious volume covering the eighteen years between 1835 and 1853--the most vigorous years of the renaissance--there is no suggestion of interest in the creative ideas of the time, in metaphysics or politics or economics or humanitarianism. It is the occasional record of one who lived an unintellectual life, and it makes but a paltry showing when set beside the journals of Emerson for the same years. Few books are referred to; systems of thought lie beyond his ken. Compared with the thinkers and scholars of the time he is only an idler lying in wait for such casual suggestions as he may turn into stories. Almost childish is his delight in marvels. There is something of the spirit of Cotton Mather in his persistent recording of the gruesome and fantastic, in the hope that they will open a quarry for his art. In the year that Emerson wrote Nature, Hawthorne set down the following amongst some dozens of similar suggestions: “A snake taken into a man’s stomach and nourished there from fifteen to thirty-five years, tormenting him most horribly. A type of envy or some other evil passion.” The Note-Books, of course, are very inadequate records of his life, and yet that a mind should lie in wait for such grotesqueries, and treasure them, offers food for speculation. After his marriage they are much less frequent and his jottings become more normal--a change which the Freudians, no doubt, would be ready enough to explain.

The one great adventure of Hawthorne’s life was the plunge into Brook Farm Utopianism, a plunge that only proved the waters colder and less hospitable than he had hoped. It was a curious adventure for one of his temperament to engage in, and his eventual disillusion might have been foretold. Perhaps it may be explained as reaction from his long isolation. The glowing enthusiasms of the times must often have tempted him to leave his narrow walls, and share the intellectual and emotional stimulus that others professed to discover in the work of making society over. Whatever the explanation the venture turned out to be a failure. His skepticism followed him there and came to later expression in The Blithedale Romance, a work as thin and unreal as anything he ever did. It is worse. There is in its pages more than a hint of ill humor that colors his interpretation of the Fourieristic stage of the experiment, and slips out in his portraiture of the major characters. Hollingsworth both fascinates and repels him. A dramatization of the intransigent spirit of reform, his single-minded zeal for righteousness, is subtly fused with an intolerant egotism that destroys Zenobia, cows Priscilla, and wrecks the venture. Perhaps Albert Brisbane may have been in the background of Hawthorne’s mind when he drew Hollingsworth, for it was Brisbane who influenced the change he seems to have resented; perhaps Garrison may have served to fill out the picture. Whoever it was, the figure of Hollingsworth is Hawthorne’s reply to the summons of the social conscience of the times, done by a critic whose insistent skepticism will not shut its eyes, but discovers under a new masquerade the ancient evil of a cold imperious heart. Seventeen years before he wrote The Blithedale Romance, he had jotted down in his Note-Book the conception out of which came the later portrait:

A sketch to be given of a modern reformer,--a type of the extreme doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and other such topics. He goes about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the point of making many converts, when his labors are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the keeper of a mad-house, whence he has escaped. Much may be made of the idea. (American Note-Books, pp. 20-21.)

Hawthorne’s interpretation of Margaret Fuller is not so easily explained. Perhaps it came out of a subconscious personal spleen. Her rich paganism may well have disturbed a nature so reticent as his, so restrained by certain Puritan inhibitions. In an early sketch he commented on the unfitness of authorship for women, on the ground that “there is a delicacy ... that perceives, or fancies, a sort of impropriety in the display of woman’s natal mind to the gaze of the world, with indications by which its inmost secrets may be searched out” (quoted by Amy Louise Reed, “Self-Portraiture in the Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne”). Margaret’s frankness in displaying her natal mind to the gaze of the world, her bold discussion of prohibited subjects like prostitution, could not fail to rub across Hawthorne’s deepest prejudices. She was too vigorous and outspoken, too consciously endowed with sex, too frankly feminist, not to have ruffled his instinctive squeamishness. It was not her radical feminism in the abstract that offended him, if he may be trusted; but certainly in the concrete. A sexless feminism would not greatly disturb a mind tolerantly familiar with the current radicalisms; but the frank avowal of sex touched a sensitive nerve. It offended certain latent Puritanisms in him. He was fascinated by Zenobia and yet afraid of her--or of himself; so his hero falls in love with the anemic and witless Priscilla. How characteristic of a mind long fed on symbols, to turn away from the wealth of reality and prefer a shadow!

After Brook Farm came no further experiments in the unsatisfactory business of a rapprochement with his generation. His marriage with Sophia Peabody brought with it the prosaic duties of providing for a family, and he had no leisure to play with social reform. Abolitionism he would have none of, nor perfectionism, nor Jacksonianism--the futility of such things became for him a fixed idea. That he once had the courage to make his plunge he seems to have rejoiced over: “Whatever else I may repent of,” Miles Coverdale wrote, “let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor follies that I once had faith and force enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny,--yes!--and to do what in me lay for their accomplishment.” Yet the truer Hawthorne is to be found in the judgments set down in the Note-Book: “It is my opinion that a man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.” “Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionably brutified.” The man who wrote that had much to learn about life and society, much that he might have learned from Thoreau. But Hawthorne never grappled with economics as Thoreau did, and he learned no more from him than from Melville, or from Emerson, or from any of the books he read by the wise of other days. Self-sufficient he remained to the last, hard-headed and practical, yet missing many a deeper truth that more receptive minds discover. He was traveling the path that leads to sterility, and the lifelong business of playing Paul Pry to the secrets of the conscience brought him at last to the comment, “Taking no root I soon weary of any soil in which I may be temporarily deposited. The same impatience I sometimes feel, or conceive of, as regards this earthly life.” He was the extreme and finest expression of the refined alienation from reality that in the end palsied the creative mind of New England. Having consumed his fancies, what remained to feed on?

Footnotes

[467] Amy Louise Reed, “Self-Portraiture in the Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Studies in Philology, Vol. XXIII, No. I.Return to passage

III. • The Authentic Brahmin

I • Oliver Wendell Holmes • Beacon Street Wit

Since the death of Holmes in 1894, his reputation has shrunk and dwindled with that of his group. With the rise of other literary schools, New England standards have been submitted to a somewhat rude overhauling, and Brahmin ideals are no longer reckoned so authoritative as they were once believed to be, nor the supremacy of Boston genius so indisputable. Concord has risen as Cambridge and Beacon Street have declined, and in the shadow of Emerson and Thoreau, the wit of Back Bay is in danger of being obscured. Unsupported by his physical presence, his writings seem far less vital than they did when the echoes of his clever talk were still sounding through them. Certain intellectual shortcomings are more obvious when his works are brought together in a library edition: in the mass his prose seems far more discursive and his verse thinner and more jingly than when the several bits appeared singly, personally sponsored by the author in whose cleverness everybody delighted. Read with sprightly vivacity to a group of sympathetic listeners at the mellowest hour of the dinner, his occasional verse must have sparkled brightly and have gone off with such a crackle of laughter as to convince the Back Bay that the asthmatic little gentleman with bubbling spirits was a veritable poet, on the same friendly footing with the muse that he was with Beacon Street. So frequently on pleasant occasions did Holmes appear before his classmates and friends copy in hand, so often and so happily did he respond to the invitation to write something, that it would have been ungenerous of Boston--and Boston meant the Back Bay, the Saturday Club and Harvard College--not to have crowned him with a wreath of her own ivy.

For upwards of half a century, throughout the prime and on past the Indian Summer of the New England renaissance. Holmes was Boston’s own wit, inexhaustible in clever sayings, bubbling over with satire and sentiment, the autocrat of her social gatherings, the acknowledged head of her mutual admiration society. Not since Robert Treat Paine had there been such a master of Yankee small talk. If he monopolized the conversation he dealt generously with his listeners. The stream was copious and the waters were never bitter or astringent, but with just enough effervescence to suit the Boston palate. As a young man the wit sparkled more brightly; as an old man the humor exuded more gently. At twenty-five he described William IV of England with republican irreverence: “The King blew his nose twice, and wiped the royal perspiration repeatedly from a face which is probably the largest uncivilized spot in England”; late in life he commented on his obvious fondness of praise: “I was always patient with those who thought well of me, and accepted all their tributes with something more than resignation.” Taste had changed with the times in Boston. Wit was yielding place to humor; eighteenth-century frankness had given way to nineteenth-century refinement; Victorianism was in full and vigorous bloom in the Beacon Street of 1850, and so Holmes became a Yankee Victorian. The morals of an impeccable society required no castigation, and he was under no obligation to satirize vice. Audacious sallies would have been reckoned in bad taste. If the old-fashioned masculine wit of Robert Treat Paine, with its echoes of Charles Churchill, had presumed to intrude itself into the teacup society of Back Bay drawing-rooms, the indignant Doctor would have shown it the door, and the small talk would have flowed again, decorous and clean and amiable, far more refined than the wit that had delighted their fathers.

And yet, though a full-blown Victorian in manners and tastes, Holmes was something of a child of the eighteenth century at heart. The situation in which he found himself might have proved disconcerting if he had chosen to speculate upon it. By nature a thoroughgoing rationalist, he lived in a romantic age. A gentleman of “parts and learning,” with a quick and lively fancy that blossomed in the pat phrase and neat couplet, he loved wit and hated dullness with true Augustan zeal. The great days of Queen Anne were a perennial inspiration to him. He clung to the heroic couplet through all the changes of romantic styles. He moralized in rime with the fluency if not the finish of Pope.[468] He satirized Calvinism with an honest wrath that he might have learned of Swift. He commented in his table-talk on the manners of the times with the chatty discursiveness of Addison. Like the earlier wits, he discovered a deep sympathy for the maturity and ripe wisdom of the classics. Writing to his friend John O. Sargent, he remarked:

I wish I had become as familiar with some classic author as you are with Horace. There is nothing like one of those perennial old fellows for good old gentlemenly reading; and for wit and wisdom, what is there to compare with the writings of Horace? You make me envious,--I vow I shall have to get up Juvenal or Catullus, naughty but nice, or somebody that nobody else knows.... I get so tired of the damp sheets of all sorts of literati (worse than the “screeching women of Marblehead”) and clamorous essayists, that I want something always by me, calm, settled beyond cavilling criticism,--a cool, clear draught of Falernian that has been somewhere near two thousand years in the cellar. (Morse, Life and Letters, Vol. II, p. 311.)

But unhappily what could he do? He was the most sociable of persons, and he lived and moved in an atmosphere surcharged with various and sundry romanticisms. How could he preserve the spirit of quiet rationalism, or assure himself gentlemanly leisure, with a host of “isms” clamoring in his ears? He was amongst them even if he was not of them. He strove to keep himself aloof, unfuddled by heady idealisms and untroubled by strident reforms, but he could not shut his study door against the infection. He could not deny his generation, and inevitably he suffered his thought to be streaked and pied with the current romanticism. He gave Lyceum lectures on Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, and their influence seeped into his verse. The Longfellow fame was all about him, and he fell to composing ballads and idyls and tales, quite as if he did not know better. Romantic garments fitted him ill, yet he persisted in trying them on. He even got to like them, and came finally to prefer The Chambered Nautilus above his other poems--a strange perversion of taste for a rationalist. The One-Hoss Shay is worth a volume of such pretty moralizing. Parson Turell’s Legacy and The Moral Bully are in better vein--witty, lucid, critical--than any half-hearted ventures in romanticism. The eighteenth-century wit does not appear to advantage patched with Victorian sentiment, and he should have been rationalist enough to know it.

As a Beacon Street Victorian Holmes was as full of virtuous prejudices as an egg is full of meat; but as a rationalist, with a modest scientific equipment that came from his professional training, he kept the windows of his mind open to the winds of scientific inquiry that were blowing briskly to the concern of orthodox souls. Many a barnacled craft was foundering in those gales, and Holmes watched their going-down with visible satisfaction. He was perhaps the most militant Unitarian amongst Boston laymen. Hatred of Calvinistic dogma was an obsession with him; it dominated his thought and colored much of his work, Elsie Venner and his table-talk as frankly as The One-Hoss Shay. The criticism to which he subjected the old-school dogmas was always vehement, often vindictive. Long after the battle had been won he kept annoying the retreating enemy. His father, Abiel Holmes, was a rigorous follower of the Edwardean school, who after nearly forty years’ service lost his pulpit for refusing to compromise with Unitarian liberalism that had gained the fortress of the near-by College Yard; and the stalwart among his congregation, having to yield the building, the endowment and the communion plate, were forced to establish themselves anew. In this unhappy schism that came about the time Oliver Wendell Holmes was graduating from Harvard in 1829, the latter went with the liberals. He had broken with the Calvinism of his father, and in the reaction he went further than most along the path of Unitarian rationalism--not the path of Channing that led to French romanticism and transcendentalism, but the path of Andrews Norton that led to a harder-headed rationalism. The reasons for this shift are sufficiently evident in his writings. At his father’s table he had watched too many “whey-faced” brethren to like the breed--men with “a weedy flux of ill-conditioned hair,” whose

acrid words Turn the sweet milk of kindness into curds, Or with grim logic prove, beyond debate, That all we love is worthiest of hate, As the scarred ruffian of the pirate’s deck, When his long swivel rakes the staggering wreck!

(The Moral Bully.)

The words are bitter, but they reveal the length of his reaction from the Calvinism on which he had been over-fed at home and at Phillips Andover Academy; and they suggest also why, next to Theodore Parker, Holmes came to be the best hated of Boston Unitarians amongst the orthodox. On this one subject he was militantly radical, never shirking debate, but whetting the edge of his satire and impaling his victim neatly with his logic. He took sardonic delight in turning Calvinism against itself, in the clever reductio ad absurdum of the Edwardean argument. Perhaps this major intellectual interest appears most adequately in his picture of the Master, the autobiographical rationalist whom he introduces into The Poet of the Breakfast Table. A dabbler in the law, theology and medicine, a philosophic contemplator of the Order of Things, who refused to permit “the territory of a man’s mind” to be “fenced in,” who agreed with the Poet in thinking somewhat ill of the specialist who dedicated his life to the study of beetles, preferring to range widely through time and eternity, who followed Darwin and was deep in bacteriology, trying “curious experiments in spontaneous generation”--this was Holmes on the intellectual side, a genial disseminator of the latest scientific speculations, a tolerant amateur of the things of the mind, a friendly dabbler in absolute moralities, who hoped “to do some sound thinking in heaven” if he ever got there, but who was too pleasantly engaged with Beacon Street to settle things now.

In his own special way, then, as a Brahmin of the Brahmins, Holmes was a rebel, a puller-down of worm-eaten structures, a freethinker rejoicing when free thought tossed a cargo of obsolete dogma into Boston Bay, or drew out a linchpin of some respectable social coach. He loved Boston the more because he believed that Boston was the home of free thought and free speech, the capital of American brains, the intellectual rebel of the continent. He did not agree with Emerson’s strictures, or Parker’s. He would not concede that Boston was the “home of the Hunkers.” It was provincial; it had crooked little streets; but

I tell you Boston has opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead men--I don’t care how broad their streets are, nor how high their steeples. (The Professor at the Breakfast Table, p. 4.)

When he contemplated the future of America, with Boston as its intellectual leader, he was carried on the crest of an exuberant optimism:

A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of ’em for washbasins! A new race, and a whole new world for the new-born human soul to work in! And Boston is the brain of it, and has been any time these hundred years! That’s all I claim for Boston--that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the planet. (Ibid., p. 104.)

If the mind is free other things will take care of themselves--this pretty much sums up Holmes’s social philosophy. Only, he would add, when the mind is used to its freedom, it will create a culture that is well-mannered, that does not run to extravagant agitation, that considers time, place, and outward circumstance in effecting needful changes--the quiet decency of Channing rather than the noisier way of Parker. The Brahmin way, after all, was the better way, Holmes believed; and Channing was a Brahmin:

Parson Channing put a little oil on one linchpin, and slipped it out so softly, the first thing they knew about it was the wheel of that side was down. T’other fellow’s at work now; but he makes more noise about it. When the linchpin comes out on his side, there’ll be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the old cart, and they pretend to say that there are valuable things in it which may get hurt. Hope not--hope not. But this is the great macadamizing place--always cracking up something. (Ibid., p. 19.)

Certainly not on the intellectual side could Holmes be set down as a conservative. He did not relish any such imputation and defended himself with vigor:

If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up and keep the soul’s windows down--to shut out the sun from the east and the wind from the west--to let the rats run free in the cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul’s typhus is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or rave in its delirium--I, Sir, am a bonnet-rouge, a redcap of the barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative. (Ibid., p. 18.)

It was this spirit of rationalism that made him--at some risk of unpopularity--an unsparing critic of romantic equalitarianism. Here again is an echo of the older century. Neither the Jacksonian nor the transcendental version of the new gospel found favor in his eyes; both seemed to run counter to the open facts of history. As a realist he discovered justification for John Adams’s doctrine of economic determinism: all society, he was convinced, tends to stratify in lines of wealth distribution, in America as well as in Europe, and no dogmas can prevent it. He went further and insisted that the possession of wealth makes possible comfort, ease, leisure, culture; that those lacking wealth are necessarily unfree and their lives in consequence are meaner and narrower. Much of his criticism of Yankee villagers and countrymen--and except Cooper, he was perhaps the most critical commentator on Yankee provincialisms of speech and manners--springs from the conviction that a niggardly economics had created a niggardly society. He desired more wealth to the end of more culture. He was too completely Brahmin to set material well-being as the ultimate goal of the competitive struggle; that seemed to him the object of State Street and of the plutocracy he frankly detested. In The Poet at the Breakfast Table he apologizes for calling one of his characters a capitalist, on the ground that “the word seems to be equivalent to highway robbery in the new gospel of Saint Petroleum.” Wealth as a means to power he would have none of; but wealth as a means to leisure, and leisure as a means to cultivated living, he was fond of extolling. The machinery of Brahmin life must be well oiled, but the life is more than the machinery. Always he returned to the intellectual as the hallmark of every society that may be accounted excellent, and his instinctive dislike of the middle class was founded on its intellectual sterility. It lived opulently but meanly; its rich dinners wanted the spice of wit, its ostentatious display lacked the salt of manners. It was vulgar at heart, and Holmes hated vulgarity even more than he hated John Calvin’s dogmas.

Unfortunately his Brahminism sealed pretty tightly certain windows of his mind that might better have been kept open. A radical in the field of theology where personal concern brought him to serious grappling with the problem, a tolerant rationalist in the realm of the intellect, he remained a cheerfully contented conservative in other fields. He was unconsciously insulated against the currents of social and political thought flowing all about him. Economic inequality he accepted rather too complacently. His daily life ran so easy and comfortable a course as never to prod him into questioning how other lives might be running. By instinct and training he was an aristocrat, and he was never at pains to conceal his preference for the well born and well mannered. He professed a philanthropic sympathy for the cause of the slave, but he shared the Beacon Street dislike of agitation--it was not well bred and it might bring down more things than he cared to have brought down. The most completely class-conscious of the Boston writers, he deprecated all proletarian appeals. They were not, in his opinion, “wholesome moral entertainment for the dangerous classes. Boys must not touch off their squibs and crackers too near the powder-magazine.” The less said about the wrongs of labor, the better--at least publicly. Social strata being determined by economics, the agitator is little better than a firebrand.

You can’t keep a dead level long, if you burn everything down flat to make it. Why, bless your soul, if all the cities of the world were reduced to ashes, you’d have a new set of millionaires in a couple of years or so, out of the trade in potash. In the meantime, what is the use of setting the man with the silver watch against the man with the gold watch, and the man without any against them both?... Here we are travelling through the desert together like the children of Israel. Some pick up more manna and catch more quails than others, and ought to help their hungry neighbors more than they do; ... but we don’t want the incendiary’s pillar of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to lead us in the march to civilization, and we don’t want a Moses who will smite the rock, not to bring out water for our thirst, but petroleum to burn us all up with. (The Poet at the Breakfast Table, pp. 5-6.)

In his attitude toward the present comfortable arrangement of society, Holmes was no rebel. He was not callous to the evils of society, but he was willing to take a longer time in the march towards civilization than more exigent souls wished; it was a pleasant march on the whole, and why quarrel over the difference in packs? If his attitude was not the indifferentism of the well-to-do, it was near kin to it. He reflected the negative qualities of Unitarianism, rather than the positive, the free mind rather than the tender conscience. His social bias is sufficiently revealed in the tributes of praise he bestowed so generously. Among those whom he delighted to honor, the names of Garrison, Phillips, Parker, Thoreau, Greeley, John Brown, do not appear; instead he offered his praises to Everett, Webster, Bryant, Whittier, Agassiz, Parkman, Wilkie Collins, the Grand Duke Alexis, and a host of lesser celebrities known to the Back Bay. His heroes were respectable souls rather than militant. As a critic his vision seems to have been blurred by certain astigmatisms, and he discovered heroic qualities more readily in the militant dead than in the militant living. He delighted in the Boston of ’76, but it is reasonably certain that if he had lived then he would have walked the streets of that older Boston as a genial Tory, and would have suffered the fate of other gentlemen who found it desirable to withdraw with Gage’s Redcoats--unless, indeed, his love of the place had held him despite his politics.

In his literary work Holmes was always the talker rather than the writer. The charm of the vivid and racy colloquial marks every page. A clever aphorism or telling pun is the objective of every paragraph, and it explodes with a brilliant shower of sparks. But like every talker his discursiveness is inveterate; he wanders far in pursuit of his point and sometimes returns empty-handed. He was always an amateur; life was too agreeable for him to take the trouble to become an artist. The essay was his most congenial form--his novels are to be taken no more seriously than his occasional verse. Elsie Venner wraps up the familiar problem of moral determinism in pleasantly discursive chat of Yankee bumpkinism in contrast with Yankee Brahminism, and he returns his impeccable hero to Beacon Street, after his sojourn in the provinces, to reward him with the Brahmin rewards--a munificent practice, a charming wife, and an exalted social position. What richer reward could be desired by one who had tasted to the full the mellow flavor of that society? Staid, delightful, self-satisfied, righteous little Beacon Street! Last refuge and citadel of the old Brahmin respectability; basking in the afternoon sunshine of its culture, not realizing that its sun is already well past the meridian; in love with its own virtues and unaware that the morrow will see the invasion of the Huns and Vandals of plutocracy, to whose plethoric bank books Brahmin culture must eventually bow--who would not have liked it? It was something after all to have been its favorite wit, its ready oracle, its clever poet, who in praising his fellow Brahmins was well aware that he discreetly praised his own admirable qualities. Kindly, delightful, fortunate Dr. Holmes! chief citizen of the Hub of the Universe! He was born and lived with a silver spoon in his mouth, and if a grudging posterity inclines to rate him and his little world somewhat lower than he rated them, what difference can that make to him? Tolerant himself, we should perhaps emulate his example, and not insist too rudely that he is only a minor figure in American literature.

II • James Russell Lowell • Cambridge Brahmin

Whatever the critics may eventually come to say about Lowell, he was certainly the ablest and most distinguished of the old Cambridge breed, in the days when the Brahmin caste was disintegrating and Brahmin ideals losing their hold on New England--a man of fine native abilities in whom Harvard culture did its best to strike fire and light and understanding to serve as a beacon to the rest of America. He was not of the Concord line of transcendental individualists, nor of the militant strain of reforming enthusiasts; but of the true Brahmin line of Josiah Quincy and Edward Everett and Oliver Wendell Holmes--men of sound culture who could serve God valiantly in the social station in which He had placed them, without wanting to pull down the old church to build a new. Like Charles Eliot Norton--clarum et venerabile nomen--he had no plans of a new building in his pocket, but was content to enlarge and embellish the old. He would serve culture rather than causes. His gifts were Brahmin gifts, his prejudices were Brahmin prejudices; and so in spite of a “certain sprightliness of brain” that tempted him to rebel at the aridity of the scholastic commons on which he fed, and in spite of certain youthful vagaries and incursions into indiscreet places, he remained at bottom a Harvard conservative, content with his birthright, hopeful that his ways were God’s ways. This suffices to explain the extraordinary reputation of Lowell in Cambridge circles, and the difficulty with which it made headway elsewhere. Though he traveled much in his library--as Thoreau would say--his prejudices remained narrowly local. To the last he remained extraordinarily parochial.

Yet the culture he served so faithfully never fruited in wisdom. He was never quite certain of himself, of what he really believed. He was fond of standing off and studying himself quizzically, to learn what sort of person he was; yet he was swayed by so many impulses he was never quite sure what sort of legs were under him. He was hopelessly bewildered by his own vast disorder. His mind was as cluttered as a garret, filled with an endless miscellany of odds and ends. Life puzzled him, as it puzzles every serious mind; but he allowed himself to be too easily discouraged by his inveterate unwillingness to think. He never speculated widely or analyzed critically. Ideas, systems of thought, intellectual and social movements, he had no interest in; he was content to remain a bookish amateur in letters, loitering over old volumes for the pleasure of finding apt phrases and verbal curiosities. With all his reading, history remained a blank to him; and science he would have none of. “I hate it,” he confessed late in life; “I hate it as a savage hates writing, because I fear it will hurt me somehow.” A good many things hurt him in those later years, and it was characteristic of him to say, “I continue to shut my eyes resolutely in certain speculative directions.” He defined culture as “intelligent purpose”; yet of such intelligent purpose his intellectual life revealed little. Naturally he did not relish the theological unsettlement that came with the advance of scientific inquiry. Leslie Stephen’s rationalism troubled him, and after reading the former’s English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, he wrote, “I am very much in the state of mind of the Bretons who revolted against the Revolutionary Government and wrote upon their banners, ‘Give us back our God!’” (Letters, Vol. II, p. 168.) Neither did he relish the economic unsettlement the industrial revolution was bringing to Cambridge and America, but he looked back longingly to the quiet days “before our individuality had been trampled out of us by the Irish mob.” Standing between the older America and the new, with the foundations disintegrating under his feet, he confused the disorder in his own mind with the disorder in the external world of society, and desperately sought to cling to his ancient hopes. A pathetic yearning for orderliness in an age that has grown heedless of it was natural enough in a mind that had come to expect little of life; but surely orderliness, like charity, should begin at home.

It was, perhaps, not altogether his fault. His impulses were liberal and his mind generous, but he was never strong enough to overcome the handicap of the Lowell ancestry and training. When he spoke of himself half whimsically as a natural Tory, he was putting his finger on the Brahmin strain. The sanctity of the Lowell blood is a commonplace in New England; but that it was Tory blood is less frequently remarked. His grandfather, John Lowell, to be sure, was visited by certain humanitarian compunctions, and in 1772 convinced himself that at Common Law slavery could not stand, and was eager to put it to the test in Massachusetts. But John Lowell was high in the councils of the Federalist party, and a judge, and it is a safe guess that his radicalism did not go deep. Certainly, the next generation was stalwartly conservative. The three brothers represented the three major professions of law, theology, and business, that constituted the New England hierarchy. His father, Charles Lowell, after traveling abroad, was settled as pastor of the West Church, Boston--Jonathan Mayhew’s church--a post he held for fifty-six years. He was a stout Federalist, a good hater of Jefferson,[469] a pleasant, cautious gentleman who refused to be drawn into the bitter Unitarian-Trinitarian controversy of the day--as unlike the militant Mayhew as a conventional soul could well be.[470] His uncle, John Lowell, was a capable lawyer-politician, one of the directing minds of the Federalist machine, earnestly engaged in defending Massachusetts against the wicked Republicans. Another uncle, Francis Cabot Lowell, was an enterprising capitalist, founder of the city of Lowell, whose multiplying spindles, it was hoped, would turn the wives and daughters of Yankee farmers, and the poverty-stricken Irish immigrants, into efficient revenue-producers for State Street securities.

From this pleasant background of Brahmin conservatisms, Lowell went forth into a world given over to momentous changes, contemptuous of all Brahmin standards, to find his way as he might. An original mind would have marked out its own path, as Emerson did; a conventional mind would have gone with the better sort, as Josiah Quincy did; but Lowell was neither Emerson nor Quincy. Sensitive to change, he was rarely self-reliant; generous in sympathies, he was timid in convictions. He was no Come-outer to stand alone against the world, but unconsciously he took color from his environment and was always glad to find a staff to lean on. It was fortunate for his peace of mind that he never realized how frequently he was no more than an echo of other minds; yet the confusions and contradictions that mark off the several periods of his life can be explained in no other way. From Brahminism he drifted to radicalism, and from radicalism back to a modified Brahminism; and these changes resulted from no native intellectual unfolding, but from certain dominant personalities who drew him aside from his natural orbit. He quitted college as a pleasant young Tory, who paused in his Commencement Poem to address some pointed remarks at Abner Kneeland--the last man imprisoned in Massachusetts for religious opinion--upon the wickedness of an atheism that denied the faith of Charles Lowell. But the ferment of the times was already working in him, and when he was nineteen he wrote with youthful fervor, “I am fast becoming ultra-democratic.... Liberty is now no longer a cant word in the mouths of knaves and fools” (Letters, Vol. I, p. 33). Within a year he had met Maria White, whose influence till her death in 1853 was the determining factor in his intellectual life. She was an ardent Abolitionist and reformer, and under her pleasant tutelage Lowell was indoctrinated in the current philosophy of radicalism. He spoke at Abolition meetings, and contributed to the Abolition press. More important, he conceived that he had come upon his true mission in letters. In an ode beginning “In the old days of awe and keen-eyed wonder,” he put into verse his new creed, a prose statement of which he elaborated in a letter explaining his Prometheus in 1843, a year before his marriage to Miss White:

Although such great names as Goethe, Byron, and Shelley have all handled the subject in modern times, you will find that I have looked at it from a somewhat new point of view. I have made it radical, and I believe that no poet in this age can write much that is good unless he give himself up to this tendency. For radicalism has now for the first time taken a distinctive and acknowledged shape of its own. So much of its spirit as poets in former ages have attained (and from their purer organization they could not fail of some) was by instinct rather than by reason. It has never till now been seen to be one of the two great wings that upbear the universe.... The proof of poetry is, in my mind, that it reduces to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy which is floating in all men’s minds, and so renders it portable and useful and ready to the hand. (Letters, Vol. I, p. 73.)

Six years later he asserted confidently, “I am the first poet who has endeavored to express the American Idea, and I shall be popular by and by.” Yet within a few months he found the vein nearing exhaustion. In a survey of his course up to 1850, he remarked that he had served love and freedom hitherto, and he now proposed to serve beauty, adding the significant comment, “I find that Reform cannot take up the whole of me, and I am quite sure that eyes were given us to look about us sometimes, and not to be always looking forward.... I am tired of controversy” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 173). Between these several confessions lies the bulk of Lowell’s contribution to the “causes” of the times, and how adequately he served them is revealed in the successive poems that came from his pen.[471] Their equal as a whole is not to be found in the work of other contemporary radicals. The better work is solidly vigorous, with competent iambs that often rise to the dignity of such lines as “Slowly the Bible of the race is writ.” The eager rhetoric of The Present Crisis was the highwater mark of Abolition argument in verse; but its serviceableness for quotation cannot make it so good a poem as Prometheus with its muscular blank verse, or as A Glance behind the Curtain with its portrait of Cromwell, strong in his faith, ready for all needful iconoclasms:

I have no dread of what Is called for by the instinct of mankind; Nor think I that God’s world will fall apart Because we tear a parchment more or less.

This is frank transcendental radicalism, yet the truer Lowell of those days of youthful enthusiasm is found in the Biglow Papers, first written with spontaneous gusto out of his hatred of the imperialism of the Mexican war, and later carefully embedded in the heavy machinery of the prose setting. The native clutter of Lowell’s mind is there laid bare--the grotesque mixture of homely satire, moral aphorisms, Yankee linguistics, literary criticism--an unwieldy mass that he could neither simplify nor reduce to order. The machinery spoils the propaganda and weighs down the satire; yet the verse has survived because for once Lowell let himself go and hit such heads as he had a mind to.

Lowell saw fit to retain most of his radical verse in the definitive edition of his works, but his radical prose he disowned, and it was left for pious hands to gather together long after his death. It was perhaps as well for his reputation that the ambassador at the Court of St. James’s should not be plagued by his youthful indiscretions. In those prose writings were combustible materials. He went with the Abolitionists in their brisk assaults on law, order, and the Constitution. Whatever revolution was stirring anywhere found him sympathetic. He was strong for the workingman’s revolution of 1848 in France; it was social injustice that was to blame for mob violence, and the fetish of laissez faire was a sorry enough god to worship.

The great problem of the over-supply of labor is not to be settled by a decimation of the laboring class, whether by gunpower or starvation.... The giant Labor did not merely turn from one side to the other for an easier position. Rather he rose up, “Like blind Orion hungry for the morn.”... They had learned by bitter experience that it was on the body of old King Log Laissez-faire that King Stork perched to devour them. Let-alone is good policy after you have once got your perfect system established to let alone. (Quoted in Scudder, James Russell Lowell, Vol. I, pp. 205-206.)

In common with the Abolitionists, Lowell appealed to the Declaration of Independence against the Constitution. He took delight in satirizing his Federalist forebears, who, he asserts, beginning to fear the light of freedom, ingeniously constructed a “Sacred Parasol” for the new Goddess of Liberty, “to prevent her from being tanned”:

A stout machine of parchment was accordingly constructed, and, under the respectable name of a Constitution, was interposed wherever there seemed to be danger from the hostile incursions of light. Whenever this is spread, a dim twilight, more perplexing than absolute darkness, reigns everywhere beneath its shadow.... This contrivance of ours, though the work of our own hands, has acquired a superstitious potency in our eyes. (Ibid., Vol. I, p. 210.)

No wonder Lowell later disowned such apostasies, for after Maria White’s death in 1853 came the dun professorial period of his life, when Harvard laid hands on him and came near to reducing him to its own ways. It revived the old Brahmin instincts that had lain dormant during the years of his Abolitionism, without reviving the old sanctions. Left without a cause, half ashamed of his youthful indiscretions yet ill content to drift, he turned bookman and for twenty-one years wandered with Norton and Longfellow and Child in the Sahara of medieval scholarship. It was not a happy time with him. There is plenty of evidence of his restlessness and dissatisfaction that occasionally prompted the wish to turn wholly scholar and keep his note-books in order; that prodded him to salvage the mass of his accumulation by turning his lecture-notes into literary essays; and that in other moods induced him to turn half savagely upon his dead enthusiasms and find solace in clever satire. His vigorous salvagings were scarcely worth the trouble. He had nothing important to say about Dante or Pope or Wordsworth, and he said it with a good deal of needless verbal exertion. The essay on Thoreau, written in 1865, was a different matter. Here he was brought face to face with a past which it still hurt him to remember; and the ill nature that colors his comment is sufficient testimony to the painfulness of his memories. Certainly he did not understand Thoreau, was incapable of understanding him; yet might not his dislike have been prodded by the consciousness that Thoreau had refused to make terms with Harvard culture as he had done? An intelligent reading of Thoreau must have been an unpleasant experience in Lowell’s mood, keenly aware of certain backslidings of his own; and the essay is suggestive for the light it throws on Lowell, not on Thoreau.

To this period belong most of the essays on which rests Lowell’s reputation as a critic of letters and politics. Bright as that reputation long was, it is beginning to show tarnish. Subjected to the scrutiny of eyes unblinded by the congenialities of the Cambridge coterie, it appears that Lowell’s brilliancy covered over certain grave shortcomings that unfitted him for serious critical judgment.[472] He had no standards other than ethical, only likes and dislikes; no interest in ideas, only a pottering concern for the text; no historical backgrounds, only isolated figures dwelling in a vacuum. He was puzzled over new schools and unfamiliar technic, and was at ease only in praising established reputations and confirming approved judgments. He scoffed at Taine instead of going to school to him, and made merry over Masson’s Life of Milton; yet he was wholly incapable of dealing with men from whose fruitful minds came ideas that summoned throngs of followers. In almost the last year of his life he spent weeks rereading Rousseau, and was satisfied to dismiss him with the comment, “a monstrous liar, but always the first dupe of his own lie” (Letters, Vol. II, p. 424). Leaves of Grass he dismissed as affected, not original. He was shocked at Swinburne’s “Adamite” heresy--“When a man begins to lust after the Muse instead of loving her, he may be sure that it is never the Muse that he embraces” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 377). He admired Howell’s prose style and loved the man, but he could not bring himself to approve his literary and social theories.

During those sterile professorial years he was closing one door after another. Scarcely an important movement of contemporary thought awakened his interest. The hypothesis of evolution he rejected somewhat flabbily. “I think the evolutionists will have to make a fetish of their protoplasm before long,” he said in 1879. “Such a mush seems to me a poor substitute for the Rock of Ages--by which I understand a certain set of higher instincts which mankind have found solid under their feet in all weathers” (ibid., Vol. II, p. 245). And as late as 1886 he wrote, “I am a conservative (warranted to wash) and keep on the safe side--with God as against evolution.” Naturally so provocative a doctrine as economic determinism never showed its face in his study; Karl Marx was not one of his intellectual companions. Even the home-bred knight-errant, Henry George, did not greatly interest him. “Why, who in the world buys such a book as that,” he exclaimed of Progress and Poverty; and learning that a friend had subscribed for a thousand copies, he remarked, “He must be getting eccentric.”[473]

The political principles that he discovered in the smoke of his professor’s pipe were equally naïve. He took himself seriously as a guide and mentor in matters political. He was fond of talking about the “noble science of politics”; yet he never took the trouble to ground himself in the elements of the subject. He had scarcely read the primer of political theory. Burke was probably the only political writer who ever made any impression on his mind. Of American constitutional history he was as ignorant as a politician, and when in Civil War days he began to scratch the field of politics, he only uncovered certain old Federalist prejudices that lay hidden under his later accumulations. The extreme parochialism of the Brahmin mind is revealed in Lowell’s incapacity to understand the South. The comment on Sibley’s Harvard Graduates--“I do not know when the provincialism of New England has been thrust upon me with so ineradicable a barb”--should be turned upon Lowell’s dogmatic essays in American politics. He had not the slightest comprehension of Calhoun’s doctrine of majorities; yet he dismissed it contemptuously, after attributing it to one of Calhoun’s followers.[474] He speaks of the “weak and wicked element” of states rights--which he supposes the South owed to “the unhappy ingenuity of Mr. Jefferson”--as an unhistorical repudiation of the principle of coercive sovereignty established by the fathers, quite overlooking the Hartford Convention. His treatment of Jefferson Davis and Andrew Johnson is marked by the dogmatisms of one who is defending God’s will against the devil’s sophistries. He will have no other interpretation of history than an ethical interpretation, in which good and evil are eternally at combat; and he closes his volume of political essays with a comment that embodies for him the sum of all political wisdom:

We have only to be unswervingly faithful to what is the true America of our hope and belief, and whatever is American will rise from one end of the country to the other instinctively to our side, with more than ample means of present succour and of final triumph. It is only by being loyal and helpful to Truth that men learn at last how loyal and helpful she can be to them. (Ibid., Vol. V, p. 326.)

Into the stagnant atmosphere of the Elmwood study came on a happy day in the middle sixties the vibrant personality of Edwin Lawrence Godkin, and under the stimulus of his crisp thinking there began for Lowell what may perhaps be reckoned an intellectual renaissance. Godkin was a moderate English liberal, a man of complete self-assurance, whose tart comment on politics and economics was pointed by a conviction of the finality of his own conclusions. Under such teaching Lowell made rapid progress in the new school of criticism fathered by The Nation. The delight with which he read Godkin’s comment and the eager faith with which he greeted his ideas suggest that his own ethical interpretation of politics was giving way under the strain of post-war experience. From Godkin he got some casual instruction in laissez faire, and certain of its teachings snuggled down comfortably in his mind beside the principles of coercive sovereignty and a centralizing state, without awakening any suspicion of their incompatibility of temperament. He never went over wholly to laissez faire; he was too strongly Brahmin Federalist for that; but his leanings often carried him into the English camp. It was a tonic to his native conservatism that was troubled about the new theories of collectivism, and it awakened strong doubts about the experiment in democracy. The reaction against the radicalism of his Abolition days became sharp and final. “We have got to work back from a democracy to our original institution as a republic again,” he wrote Leslie Stephen in 1879 (Letters, Vol. II, p. 161); and in 1888 he asserted that the republic would endure only “so long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant” (The Independent in Politics, Vol. VI, p. 207). He warned Thomas Hughes against the extension of suffrage in England,[475] and he was more and more inclined to think that democracy meant a slough of mediocrity underlain with the mud of corruption--that it might prove to be “a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools” (Letters, Vol. II, p. 159).

From the vigorous movements of protest of the seventies and eighties, the agrarian uprising of the Middle Border and the proletarian organization in the industrial centers, he drew added confirmation of his fears. In his attitude towards both he was little more than an echo of Godkin, who was laying about him briskly, hitting both farmer and workingman with fine impartiality. He shared the latter’s contempt for all agrarian programs, without quite understanding them. He knew little of America. The continent was scarcely more than a hinterland to Cambridge, a hinterland that he explored with some bewilderment on a trip that carried him as far as Cincinnati. Equally ignorant of economics and of the Middle Border, he had no basis for any opinion; a juster man would have put the agrarian question aside as beyond his competency; at least he would have been careful to clear his mind of prejudice. But Lowell was as much a victim of capitalistic prejudice as Thomas Bailey Aldrich and other Boston pseudo-intellectuals. The old Brahminism was close to the surface in those later years, and a scratch would reveal it. In the matter of the “Haymarket Riot” he wrote Howells that “he thought those Chicago ruffians well hanged”--a comment that recalls the Abner Kneeland episode of fifty years before. Physically Lowell was in close proximity to the labor problem, but intellectually he was worlds removed. He looked upon the labor unions with heavy misgivings. He frankly feared the power of the proletariat and was bitter in denunciation of social legislation. In 1869 he wrote Godkin, “Pray give Henry Wilson a broadside for dipping his flag to that piratical craft of the eight-hour men.... I have a thorough contempt for a man who pretends to believe that eight is equal to ten” (Letters, Vol. II, p. 31). And somewhat later he wrote Norton:

I sometimes feel a little blue over the outlook here, with our penny-paper universal education and our workingmen’s parties, with their tremendous lever of suffrage, decrying brains.... But the more I learn, the more am I impressed with the wonderful system of checks and balances which history reveals (our Constitution is a baby-house to it!) and the more my confidence in the general commonsense and honest intention of mankind increases.... I take great comfort in God. I think He is considerably amused with us sometimes, but that He likes us, on the whole, and would not let us get at the match-box so carelessly, as He does, unless He knew that the frame of His Universe was fire-proof. How many times have I not seen the fire-engines of Church and State clanging and lumbering along to put out--a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty! (Ibid., Vol. II, p. 51.)

The ways of the Gilded Age were a rude shock to Lowell’s ill-grounded idealism. The crude post-war exploitation and the political corruption that marked the buccaneer stage of the rising plutocracy filled him with anxiety. As an honest man he was angered by the common scoundrelism of the politicians and the press and troubled at the apathy of the public, but his dislike for economics did him a grave disservice. In seeking out the guilty he went wide of the mark. To trace the source of the virus that was poisoning the public life to an exploiting economics, would have brought him close home. He chose to think it was spread rather by western agrarians and city ringsters, than by respectable New Englanders; yet after passing through the Crédit Mobilier scandal he was visited by unpleasant suspicions. “I suspect,” he wrote after his return from the Cincinnati Convention in 1876, “that few of our Boston men who have had to do with Western railways have been more scrupulous [than the western Grangers.] I rather think they set the example of tempting legislators with the hope of questionable gains” (Letters, Vol. II, p. 170). With the open facts of a Congressional investigation before him, Lowell got no deeper than that. Yet his indignation must find outlet and he contributed two poems to The Nation--“The World’s Fair, 1876,” and “Tempora Mutantur”--in one of which he wrote:

Show ’em your Civil Service, and explain How all men’s loss is everybody’s gain; ... Show your short cut to cure financial ills By making paper-collars current bills; Show your new bleaching-process, cheap and brief, To wit: a jury chosen by the thief; Show your State legislatures; show your Rings; And challenge Europe to produce such things As high officials sitting half in sight To share the plunder and to fix things right; If that don’t fetch her, why, you only need Your latest style in Martyrs--Tweed: She’ll find it hard to hide her spiteful tears At such advance in one poor hundred years.

(Letters, Vol. II, p. 155.)

This is Godkin translated into the Lowell vernacular, and what issued from his indignation was Godkin also--an apostolic ardor for civil service reform. He had learned at least, that democracy had not yet been achieved in America; that, indeed, such spontaneous liberalism as had been bred by free land was in danger of being destroyed by evils that issued from the loins of this same heedless frontier order.[476] In 1876 he wrote, “Let us all work together (and the task will need us all) to make Democracy possible. It certainly is no invention to go of itself any more than the perpetual motion” (Letters, Vol. II, p. 159). Yet in spite of his zeal, one may be permitted to doubt that Lowell really desired any other than a Brahmin democracy. In those later years his conception of an ideal society was unconsciously colored by memories of Cambridge fifty years before--a simple, patriarchal world, amenable to the rule of the better sort. In such a world democracy seemed possible; but in the rising proletarian-plutocratic order, what reasonable hope was there?

From his growing perplexities Lowell found a happy relief in his mission abroad. The experience was a godsend to a mind that was growing torpid. In 1869 he had written, “I fancy if I were suddenly snatched away to London, my brain would prickle all over, as a foot that has been asleep when the blood starts in it again. Books are good dry forage; we can keep alive on them; but, after all, men are the only fresh pasture” (ibid., Vol. II, p. 24). London, in this mellow autumn of his life, ripened Lowell. He slipped into the congenial environment as easily as Irving had done a generation before, and found English society as delightful. He loved England with unaffected heartiness, and under the stimulating experience he expanded into a kindly English Liberal. The extreme Liberals--men like Mill and Arnold and John Morley--he found less sympathetic; and radical thinkers like William Morris he seems not to have known of. But English Liberalism of the Gladstone type was own cousin to Cambridge Brahminism; it united dignity and conscience; it seemed to him the ideal type of government--the rule of God-fearing gentlemen who strove to be faithful to their trusteeship, and who ruled because they were best fitted to rule. Into such a world no other American of the times could have entered more appreciatively than Lowell. If congeniality to the host be a prime requisite in an ambassador, President Hayes made no mistake in sending him to the Court of St. James’s. He was a distinguished representative of Brahmin culture; but whether he was a representative of the solid realities of America is not so certain.

Footnotes

[468] See A Rhymed Lesson.Return to passage

[469] See Letters, Vol. I, p. 82.Return to passage

[470] See Hale, James Russell Lowell and His Friends, p. 10.Return to passage

[471] The more significant titles are: Prometheus and A Glance behind the Curtain, 1843; Columbus and The Present Crisis, 1844; On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves near Washington, 1845; Biglow Papers, begun in 1846; The Pioneer, 1847; Bibliolâtres, 1849; Anti-Apis, 1851.Return to passage

[472] See C. Hartley Grattan, “Lowell,” in The American Mercury, Vol. II, pp. 63-69.Return to passage

[473] Five years later he was more sympathetic, but hopelessly confused. See Democracy, Vol. VI, p. 35.Return to passage

[474] See “The Rebellion,” in Prose Works, Vol. V, p. 134.Return to passage

[475] See Letters, Vol. II, p. 175.Return to passage

[476] See The Independent in Politics, Vol. VI, pp. 204-209.Return to passage

Conclusion

To the ebullient romanticisms with which the foregoing pages have dealt, the Civil War brought diverse fortunes; and from the titanic conflict emerged an America rid of one of the feculent sources of domestic schism. The romantic imperialisms of the slave economy were gone forever. So much at least was cleared from the path of its destiny, and the field of potential conflict was narrowed to the rival imperialisms of eastern capitalism and western agrarianism. Both had been vastly strengthened by the war. In the eastern centers was a greatly stimulated industrialism, fed from the reservoirs of liquid capital gathered in the process of financing the northern armies, ready to turn to transcontinental railway-building, large-scale manufacture, and a gigantic exploitation of the raw materials of mine and forest and field. Along the Middle Border the old romance of the settlement came to new life as the flood of homesteaders, augmented by disbanded soldiers, poured over the prairie spaces beyond the Mississippi, to repeat there the story of commonwealth building. East and West would eventually clash, for their diverse economic needs were driving towards a collision; but that would not come for a generation till the conflict of interests was thrust into sharper relief.

In the meantime many familiar things were becoming anachronisms over night, though they might linger on for years. As the romantic revolution began with the laying aside of the smallclothes and tie-wig of eighteenth-century aristocratic conservatism, so the new age began with the putting away of the outworn dress of eighteenth-century romantic liberalism. In the hurrying new days there was no time or place for abstract theories of natural rights, for equalitarian democracy, for local home rule--these relics of the past were thrust aside in the scramble for wealth and power. The old philosophies were swept out on the rubbish heap--Jefferson and Lincoln with Calhoun and Stephens--and Hamilton and Marshall came to their own again. The lost cause carried down to defeat much more than slavery, it carried down the old ideal of decentralized democracies, of individual liberty; and with the overthrow of the traditional principles in their last refuge, the nation hurried forward along the path of an unquestioning and uncritical consolidation, that was to throw the coercive powers of a centralizing state into the hands of the new industrialism. Here was a revolution that was to engulf the older romantic America, its dignified literary ideals as well as its democratic political theory. In the world of Jay Cooke and Commodore Vanderbilt, the transcendental dream was as hopelessly a lost cause as the plantation dream; it was in even worse plight, for it left no tragic memories to weave a new romance about the fallen hopes. Emerson in Concord was as much out of date as Lowell in Cambridge, or Gilmore Simms in Charleston. A new age had come and other dreams--the age and the dreams of a middle-class sovereignty, that was busily surveying the fields of its future conquests. From the crude and vast romanticisms of that vigorous sovereignty emerged eventually a spirit of realistic criticism, seeking to evaluate the worth of this new America, and discover if possible other philosophies to take the place of those which had gone down in the fierce battles of the Civil War. What form this critical spirit assumed, and what replies it returned to the strident challenge of the time, are questions not to be answered here.

Bibliography

Only the more important titles dealt with in the present study are listed hereunder, together with selected biographical and critical material. The invaluable bibliographies in the Cambridge History of American Literature, 4 vols., New York, 1917-22, cover most of the writers considered, and the reader is referred to them.

I. Part I

Information will be found in the Library of Southern Literature by E. A. Alderman and others (16 vols., New Orleans, 1908-13) and in Montrose J. Moses, Literature of the South (New York, 1910). See also Carl Van Doren, The American Novel (New York, 1921).

I. The Old Dominion. See Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia (Charlottesville, Va., 1910).

II. For the economics of Jeffersonianism, see Charles A. Beard, The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York, 1915; Chapter XII). Also Charles Gide and Charles Rist, A History of Economic Doctrines (translated by W. Smart and R. Richards, Boston).

John Taylor: His works are out of print. Important titles are: An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the United States (Fredericksburg, Va., 1814). New Views of the Constitution of the United States (Washington, 1823). Correspondence (edited by W. E. Dodd, Richmond, 1908).

See “John Taylor, Prophet of Secession” (by William E. Dodd, in Branch Historical Papers, II, Richmond, 1908). See also Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy.

III. John Marshall: Sufficient materials will be found in Albert J. Beveridge, Life of John Marshall (4 vols., New York, 1916-19).

IV. For the plantation tradition, see Francis Pendleton Gaines, The Southern Plantation (New York, 1924).

William Wirt: His works are out of print. Letters of a British Spy (Richmond, 1803). The Old Bachelor (2 vols., Richmond, 1810). Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, 1817; also several later editions).

See John P. Kennedy, Memoirs ... of William Wirt (Philadelphia, 1849).

Nathaniel Beverley Tucker: His works are out of print. George Balcombe; a Novel (2 vols., New York, 1836).--The Partisan Leader; a Tale of the Future, by Edward William Sidney (printed for the publishers, by J. Caxton, 1856 [i.e., Washington, printed by Duff Green, 1836], 2 vols.): reissued as A Key to the Disunion Conspiracy: The Partisan Leader (2 vols. in one, New York, 1861); edition issued at Richmond, 1862.

Some information about Tucker will be found in W. P. Trent, William Gilmore Simms (Boston and New York, 1892).

V. William Alexander Caruthers: The Kentuckian in New York. Or, the Adventures of Three Southerns. By a Virginian (2 vols., New York, 1834).--The Cavaliers of Virginia, or the Recluse of Jamestown. An Historical Romance of the Old Dominion (2 vols., New York, 1834-1835).--The Knights of the Horse-Shoe; a Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion (Wetumpka, Ala., 1845; New York, 1882, 1909).

John P. Kennedy: Works (3 vols., New York, 1854; 9 vols., New York, 1871, with life by H. T. Tuckerman, Vol. X). Swallow Barn, or a Sojourn in the Old Dominion (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1832; several later editions). Horse-Shoe Robinson; a Tale of the Tory Ascendency (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1835; numerous later editions, the latest in 1906). Rob of the Bowl; a Legend of St. Inigoe’s (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1838; later editions). Quodlibet: Containing Some Annals Thereof ... (Philadelphia, 1840; 1860).

Edgar Allan Poe: The bibliography is extensive. See the Cambridge History of American Literature.

I. Part II

II. John C. Calhoun: Works (6 vols., Columbia, S. C., 1851; New York, 1853-55). Correspondence, edited by J. F. Jameson (American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1899, Vol. II).

Biographies: W. E. Dodd, in Statesmen of the Old South (New York, 1911). H. von Holst, John C. Calhoun (American Statesmen Series, Boston, 1882, 1899). W. M. Meigs, Life of John Caldwell Calhoun (2 vols., New York, 1917). G. M. Pinckney, Life of John C. Calhoun (Charleston, 1903). W. P. Trent, Southern Statesmen of the Old Régime (New York, 1897).

Alexander H. Stephens: Constitutional View of the War between the States (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1868).

See L. B. Pendleton, Alexander H. Stephens (Philadelphia, 1908).

Francis Lieber: The Stranger in America (2 vols. in one, London, 1834). Political Ethics (Philadelphia, 1838; edited by Theodore D. Woolsey, Philadelphia, 1890; with introduction by Nicholas Murray Butler, Philadelphia, 1911). Essays on Property and Labor (New York, 1841). Civil Liberty and Self-Government (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1853; London, 1859; edited by Theodore D. Woolsey, Philadelphia, 1891). Miscellaneous Writings (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1881; edited by Daniel C. Gilman, Philadelphia, 1916).

See L. R. Harley, Francis Lieber: His Life and Political Philosophy (New York, 1899).

III. For the southern position, see Jeannette Reid Tandy, “Pro-Slavery Propaganda in American Fiction in the Fifties” (in South Atlantic Quarterly, January March, 1922). Francis Pendleton Gaines, The Southern Plantation (New York, 1924; Chapter III).

William J. Grayson: The Hireling and the Slave (Charleston, 1856).

IV. William Crafts: A Selection in Prose and Poetry, from the Miscellaneous Writings of the Late William Crafts. With Memoir by Samuel Gilman (Charleston, 1828).

Hugh Swinton Legaré: Writings (2 vols., Charleston, 1846; with memoir).

William Gilmore Simms: His works have never been collected and most of them are out of print. Border Romances (17 vols., New York, 1859, 1866, 1879; 10 vols., New York, 1882; 15 vols., Chicago, 1885; 17 vols., Chicago, 1888; 17 vols., Atlanta, 1901 [?]). See W. P. Trent, William Gilmore Simms (New York, 1892)--an excellent study. Also see J. Erskine, Leading American Novelists (New York, 1910).

I. Part III

Excellent bibliographical material for western literature will be found in Ralph Leslie Rusk, The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier (2 vols., New York, 1925). See also W. H. Venable, The Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley (Cincinnati, 1891).

II. Interesting material will be found in Claude G. Bowers, Party Battles of the Jackson Period (Boston, 1922).

III. Timothy Flint: His works are out of print and rare. Recollections of the Last Ten Years (Boston, 1826). Francis Berrian, or the Mexican Patriot (Boston, 1826; Philadelphia and London, 1834). The Life and Adventures of Arthur Cleaning (Philadelphia, 1828). George Mason, the Young Backwoodsman; or, “Don’t Give up the Ship” (Boston, 1829; with changed title, London, 1833). The Shoshonee Valley; a Romance (Cincinnati, 1830).

See John Ervin Kirkpatrick, Timothy Flint, Pioneer, Missionary, Author, Editor (Cleveland, 1911)--an excellent study with bibliography.

James Hall: Works (4 vols., New York, 1853-56). Legends of the West (Philadelphia, 1832, 1833; five later editions).--The Soldiers Bride; and Other Tales (Philadelphia, 1833).--The Harpe’s Head; a Legend of Kentucky (Philadelphia, 1833); as Kentucky. A Tale (London, 1834, 2 vols.).--Tales of the Border (Philadelphia, 1835). The Wilderness and the War Path (New York, 1846; New York and London, 1849).

See J. L. Davis, “Judge James Hall, a Literary Pioneer of the Middle West” (in Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society Publications, October, 1909).

Augustus Longstreet: Georgia Scenes (Atlanta, Ga., 1835; New York, 1840; several later editions).

See John Donald Wade, Augustus Longstreet, a Study of the Development of Culture in the South (New York, 1924), an excellent study with bibliographical material.

Davy Crockett: Five titles are grouped under the name of Crockett: Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee (1833). A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (Philadelphia, 1834; seven editions in one year). Life of Martin Van Buren (1835). An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (1835). Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas (1836). The Narrative is reprinted with an introduction by Hamlin Garland, in The Modern Student’s Library, under the title, The Autobiography of David Crockett (New York, 1923).

There is no life of Crockett; such so-called works are uncritical jumbles of fact and fiction. Some information will be found in John Donald Wade, “The Authorship of David Crockett’s Autobiography” (Georgia Historical Quarterly, September, 1922); S. H. Stout, “David Crockett” (American Historical Magazine, Vol. VII, No. I, Jan., 1902)--uncritical; Chester T. Crowell, “Davy Crockett” (American Mercury, Vol. IV, No. 13).

Book II

For Philadelphia, see Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, The Literary History of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1906). Also H. M. Ellis, “Joseph Dennie and His Circle” (University of Texas Bulletin). For the politics of New York, see Dixon Ryan Fox, The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York (New York, 1918).

I. Charles Brockden Brown: The Novels of Charles Brockden Brown ... with a Memoir (Boston, 1827; Philadelphia, 1857, 1887). Wieland; or the Transformation (New York, 1798; best recent edition in American Authors Series, New York, 1926). Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (Philadelphia, 1799; Second Part, New York, 1800; numerous later editions).

No adequate life has been written. The best is by William Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1815). See John Erskine, Leading American Novelists (New York, 1910), and Annie R. Marble, in Heralds of American Literature (Chicago and London, 1907).

Robert Montgomery Bird: For a list of his plays, see A. H. Quinn, A History of the American Theatre (New York, 1923).

Calavar; or, the Knight of the Conquest: a Romance of Mexico (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1834; about ten later editions).--The Hawks of Hawks-Hollow. A Tradition of Pennsylvania (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1835; two London editions).--The Infidel; or, The Fall of Mexico (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1835; London, 1835).--Nick of the Woods, or, the Jibbenainosay. A Tale of Kentucky (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1837; upward of twenty later editions).

For his life, see Clement Foust, Life and Dramatic Works of Robert Montgomery Bird (1919).

II. James Kent: Commentaries on American Law (4 vols., New York, 1826-1830; many later editions).

For his life, see William Kent, Memoirs and Letters of James Kent (Boston, 1898).

Fitz-Greene Halleck: Poetical Works (New York and Philadelphia; eight editions between 1847 and 1859). Poetical Writings with Extracts from those of Joseph Rodman Drake (edited by J. G. Wilson, New York, 1869, 1885).

For a life, see J. G. Wilson, The Life and Letters of Fitz-Greene Halleck (New York, 1869). Also see W. C. Bryant, Some Notices on the Life and Writings of Fitz-Greene Halleck (New York, 1869).

III. Washington Irving: The standard edition of his works is in forty volumes, New York, 1887.

The standard life is by Pierre M. Irving, The Life and Letters of Washington Irving (4 vols., London, 1864; New York, 1879, 1883).

See also The Letters of Washington Irving to Henry Brevoort (edited by George S. Hellman, 2 vols., New York, 1915). A recent study is George S. Hellman, Washington Irving, Esq. (New York, 1925).

James Kirke Paulding: Works (15 vols., New York, 1834-1839; 4 vols., 1867-1868).--The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan (New York, 1812).--Letters from the South (2 vols., New York, 1817).--The Backwoodsman. A Poem (Philadelphia, 1818).--Salmagundi, Second Series (2 vols., New York, 1820).--Koningsmarke, the Long Finne, A Story of the New World (New York, 1823; 2 vols., New York, 1834; three London editions, and a German).--Westward Ho! A Tale (2 vols., New York, 1832, 1845; three London editions, a French and a German).--The Dutchman’s Fireside. A Tale (2 vols., New York, 1831; latest edition, 1900).--The Puritan and his Daughter (New York, 1849, 1850; also London, 1849, two editions, and one German).

No adequate life has been written, but see W. I. Paulding, Literary Life of James K. Paulding (New York, 1867).

IV. James Fenimore Cooper: The editions of Cooper’s novels are numerous; as good as any is the one in thirty-two volumes (New York, 1895, 1896-97). Much of his controversial work and critical articles have not been reprinted. See Notions of the Americans; Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1829). A Letter to His Countrymen (New York, 1834). The American Democrat; or Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States (Cooperstown, 1838). The History of the Navy (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1839). Also his eight volumes of European travels.

No satisfactory life has been written. The best is by T. R. Lounsbury, James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1883). See also Correspondence of James Fenimore-Cooper (edited by his grandson, James Fenimore Cooper, 2 vols., New Haven, 1922). W. C. Brownell, in American Prose Masters (New York, 1909). Carl Van Doren, in The American Novel (New York, 1921).

V. William Cullen Bryant: The standard edition is edited by Parke Godwin (6 vols., New York, 1883-1889: 1-2, Biography, 1883, 3-4, Poetical Works, 1883, 1901; 5-6, Prose Writings, 1884-1889). Much information on his work in journalism will be found in Allan Nevins, A Century of Journalism (New York, 1921).

Horace Greeley: His works have not been collected. See Hints towards Reform (New York, 1850). Recollections of a Busy Life (New York, 1868). Essays Designed to Elucidate the Science of Political Economy (Boston, 1870). The American Conflict (Hartford and Chicago, 1864-1866).

For his life, see James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley (Boston, 1868). Charles Sotheran, Horace Greeley (New York, 1915). See also John R. Commons, “Horace Greeley and the Working-Class Origins of the Republican Party” (Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XXIV, pp. 468-488).

Herman Melville: The best edition is The Standard (16 vols., London, 1922-23). Also see Works (4 vols., edited by A. Stedman, New York, 1892, 1896; Boston, 1900, 1910). Convenient editions of Typee, Omoo, and Moby-Dick are plentiful.

The indispensable life is Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (New York, 1921), with bibliography. Also see John Freeman, Herman Melville (in English Men of Letters Series, New York, 1926).

III. Part I

I. For the political backgrounds, see A. E. Morse, The Federalist Party in Massachusetts to the Year 1800 (Princeton, 1909). W. A. Robinson, Jeffersonian Democracy in New England (New Haven, 1916). Samuel Eliot Morison, Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis (2 vols., Boston. 1913).

Fisher Ames: Works (with memoir by J. T. Kirkland, Boston, 1809). Works, with a Selection from his Speeches and Correspondence (edited by his son, Seth Ames, 2 vols., Boston, 1854).

Robert Treat Paine: Works in Prose and Verse (with memoir, Boston, 1812).

II. Joseph Story: Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (3 vols., Boston, 1833; numerous later editions).

See W. W. Story, Life and Letters of Joseph Story (2 vols., Boston, 1851).

Daniel Webster: The best edition of his works is The National--The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster (18 vols., Boston, 1903). Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster (2 vols., Boston, 1857). Letters (edited by C. H. Van Tyne, New York, 1902).

See George Ticknor Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster (2 vols., New York and London, 1870). For a critical contemporary estimate see Theodore Parker, Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Daniel Webster (Boston, 1853). See also Charles A. Beard, The Economic Basis of Politics (New York, 1922).

III. Part II

I. Unitarianism: See George Willis Cooke, Unitarianism in America: A History of its Origin and Development (Boston, 1902). Williston Walker, A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States (New York, 1894).

William Ellery Channing: Works (5 vols., Boston, 1841; sixth volume added in 1843; numerous later editions).

An excellent life is J. W. Chadwick, William Ellery Channing, Minister of Religion (Boston, 1903). See also William H. Channing, Memoir of William Ellery Channing (3 vols., Boston, 1848).

II. Perfectionism: For materials see Garrison, Life of William Lloyd Garrison (4 vols., New York, 1885-1889).

Brook Farm: See Lindsay Swift, Brook Farm; Its Members, Scholars and Visitors (New York, 1906; contains bibliography). J. T. Codman, Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs (Boston, 1894). Nathaniel Hawthorne, Blithedale Romance.

Abolitionism: Sufficient materials will be found in Garrison, Life of William Lloyd Garrison (4 vols., New York, 1885-1889). See also Catherine N. Birney, Sarah and Angelina Grimké (Boston, 1885); and James C. Birney and His Times, by His Son, William Birney (New York, 1890).

III. William Lloyd Garrison: See Garrison, Life of William Lloyd Garrison (4 vols., New York, 1885-1889).

John G. Whittier: The Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier (Riverside Edition, 7 vols., Boston, 1885-1889).

See G. R. Carpenter, John Greenleaf Whittier (in American Men of Letters Series).--T. S. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (2 vols., Boston, 1894).--F. H. Underwood, John Greenleaf Whittier. A Biography (Boston, 1884).

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Works (Riverside Edition, 16 vols., Boston, 1896; with life by Mrs. Field, 17 vols., 1898).

See Mrs. J. T. Fields, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston, 1897).

III. Part III

I. Transcendentalism: The literature is abundant. See _The Dial_ (4 vols., Boston, 1840-1844).--The Harbinger (4 vols., New York, 1844-1848).--Harold Clarke Goddard, _Studies in New England Transcendentalism_ (New York, 1908).--O. B. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England. A History (New York, 1876).--See also Sylvester Judd, Margaret. A Tale of the Real and Ideal (2 vols., Boston, 1845; revised edition, 1851).

II. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Works (Riverside Edition, edited by James Eliot Cabot, 12 vols., Boston, 1884-1893; London, 1884-1893; Centenary Edition, with biographical introduction and notes by E. W. Emerson, 12 vols., Boston, 1903-04; London, 1904).--Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with Annotations (edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, 10 vols., Boston, 1909-1914).--Uncollected Writings. Essays, Addresses, Poems, Reviews and Letters by Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York [1912]).

See George Willis Cooke, Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1908). James Eliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2 vols., Boston, 1887). George Willis Cooke, Ralph Waldo Emerson; His Life, Writings, and Philosophy (Boston, 1881). Oscar W. Firkins, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1915). W. C. Brownell, American Prose Masters (New York, 1909).

III. Henry David Thoreau: Works (Riverside Edition, 11 vols., Boston, 1894; Manuscript Edition, 20 vols. [Vols. VII-XX contain the Journals], Boston, 1906).

See Francis H. Allen, A Bibliography of Henry David Thoreau (Boston and New York, 1908). William E. Channing, Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist (Boston, 1873, 1902). F. B. Sanborn, Henry D. Thoreau (in American Men of Letters Series, Boston, 1882, 1910); The Personality of Thoreau (Boston, 1901); The Life of Henry David Thoreau (Boston and New York, 1917). Léon Bazalgette, Henry Thoreau--Bachelor of Nature (translated by Van Wyck Brooks, New York, 1924).

IV. Theodore Parker: Collected Works (edited by F. P. Cobbe, 14 vols., London, 1863-71). The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Theodore Parker (Boston, 1843). Speeches, Addresses and Occasional Sermons (2 vols., Boston, 1876). The American Scholar (with notes by George Willis Cooke, Boston, 1907).

An excellent study is J. W. Chadwick, _Theodore Parker, a Biography_ (Boston, 1900), containing a bibliography John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker (2 vols., New York, 1864)--indispensable.

V. Margaret Fuller: Her works have not been collected. Important titles are: Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York and London, 1845; with additional papers and introduction by Horace Greeley, New York, 1855). Life Without and Life Within (Boston, 1860; New York, 1869). Papers on Literature and Art (2 vols., New York and London, 1846).

An excellent study is Katharine Anthony, Margaret Fuller: A Psychological Biography (New York, 1920). See also R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (2 vols., Boston, 1833). Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (in American Men of Letters Series, Boston, 1884), containing bibliography.