Studies in New England transcendentalism

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STUDIES IN NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM

STUDIES IN NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM

CHAPTER I Unitarianism and Transcendentalism

The eighteenth century, we have often heard, was an age of prose and reason. The phrase is certainly a useful one, useful and illuminating; but we must be on our guard against too simple a formula for a period of extraordinary complexity. The eighteenth century was an age of transition ; it gathered up and criticized the life of Europe since the Renaissance ; it made ready, too, for the Europe that was to come. It was, in a peculiar sense, a meeting ground of the future and the past, a time, as Leslie Stephen has well put it, of compromise and truce. Such an age, manifestly, must refuse to be crowded into a pigeon-hole or to be embodied in a phrase. It was, for instance, not merely an era of prose and reason, but, as has often been pointed out, an era of the rebirth of emotion. Even in its earliest decades signs were not absent of a rekindling enthusiasm ; and more and more, as its years went by, imagination and poetry, spirituality and the sense of mystery, reawakened from torpor into a new life. The age of rationalism and the age of the return of feeling — while even this description is far from exhausting the nature of the time, the contrast which these two aspects of the century present, becomes, for the purposes of our study, highly significant.

For a long time the intellectual 1 and emotional currents of the eighteenth century flowed on with little or no blending of their streams, and neither of them, alone, it is clear, was adequate to bring the nineteenth century. The intellectual tendency was not adequate : the spirit of reason and criticism accomplished no transient nor despicable results, yet the logical end of the century's most radical, and it may be said, most progressive thought, was, as it took the genius of a Hume to

1 Those " intellectual " currents especially are meant which time has shown were really potential with great results.

perceive, the abyss of skepticism ; rationalism concluded, not unfittingly, its salutary reign — by digging its own grave. Here then, plainly, we have no sufficient explanation of the early nineteenth century with its intensity of life and action, its rich fruition of fresh ideals and faiths. Nor on the other hand is the new age to be fully accounted for by the emotional tendency of the preceding one: it, alone, could bring only a blind extravagance, a mawkish sentimentality, or a piety which, however beautiful, fixed its face resolutely on the past; the Richardsons, the Whitefields, and the Ossians were in no final sense the forerunners of the coming era.

Skepticism and sentimentalism — these, then, were the two gulfs that seemed to await the intellectual and emotional currents of the eighteenth century. But the age was destined to another end ; for once let these isolated streams of influence come together, once let this feeling and progressive thought unite, and instantly — whether positive or negative — a power was abroad in the land, a Rousseau, a Lessing, or a Tom Paine. Reason had germinated in the congenial soil of commonsense, but the seed could be saved from skeptical decay and death only as it forced its way up into the atmosphere of feeling. And this union of thought and feeling was, indeed, exactly what was taking place on all sides at the beginning of the revolutionary 1 era. Everywhere ideas were catching fire ; everywhere theories were being infused with the red blood of life. Pale abstractions, touched with passion, took on, in a moment, a strange vitality ; weak sentiment, fastening upon thought, assumed a sudden power. Out of this ferment of emotions and ideas, profound changes at the very heart of European life could scarcely fail to come. Far enough from revolutionary in temper was the author of the Essay on the Human Understanding, or the little English printer whose novels made the whole of Europe weep ; yet — we might almost say — Locke plus Richardson gives us Rousseau.

It is customary to regard the new era as a revolt from the

1 This term, throughout the discussion, it need hardly be said, is used with reference to the whole period of change at the end of the century, with no limited application to the French Revolution.

old. And so it was. But it was also its positive culmination. Indeed, as the scene shifts, it sometimes seems wellnigh impossible to tell whether the figures that we now behold have come to inter the dead bones of the passing age, or whether in these figures we see those very bones themselves, risen, reclothed in a new flesh and blood. If Wordsworth came to bury Pope's couplets, he came too to raise his pantheism from the dead. 1

Again and again it is possible to point out thoughts of the late eighteenth or of the nineteenth century which — as mere thoughts — seem hardly distinguishable from those of a hundred or a hundred and fifty years before ; but the spirit in which they are held and the implications they involve differ often as widely as the poles. It is a far cry from the social contract of Hobbes, or even of Locke, to the social contract of Rousseau ; from the pantheism of Spinoza to the pantheism of Schelling, or from that of the Essay on Man to that of Adonais; from Pope's " Whatever is, is right " to Browning's " God's in his heaven — All's right with the world ! " But the analogies are not merely fanciful. And so, during the great epoch of change of which we speak, we have a curiously ironic spectacle : we behold men repudiating the age that is passing, yet, not infrequently, accepting its thought and transforming its Cold intellectual propositions into their own revolutionary watchwords. The touch of feeling on eighteenth century thinking wrought a result scarcely less astonishing than the famous contact of Ithuriel's spear. Indeed, we might apply Milton's figure, in at least one case, in further detail. The orthodox would have been far from unwilling to compare early English deism with a toad, and the seeming half-heartedness of its apostles, in the age of prose and reason, made it appear, in many ways, as completely insignificant. But when at the touch of feeling English deism flared up in the figure of Thomas Paine, the orthodox surely must have admitted that the old enemy had assumed, if not a more diabolical, at least a far more dangerous and appalling form. The reason

1 Or, more strictly, the pantheism of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and others — the men from whom Pope got his own.

to which early eighteenth century thinkers appealed was a dim abstraction ; the Reason to whom the French Revolutionists built aliars was a living goddess.

Now this transformation of old ideas by new emotion, of which we have just given an example, let loose upon the planet sometimes constructive, sometimes destructive, forces. Indeed nothing could prove more clearly the point on which we are insisting, could show more conclusively that the world had reached one of the great turning points of its history, than the character of the French Revolution itself, a movement at once so conspicuously an end and a beginning.

" Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream,"

wrote Shelley, and he condensed a wonderful amount into those two short lines. Smiles and wrecks — these were the characteristic products of the age, blasted institutions and blossoming ideals ; and it is partly because they were its characteristic products that this age assumes, frequently, an aspect of such wild confusion. What can be more startling, for instance, than the fact that, at the very time when the historical way of regarding things was grounding itself firmly in the minds of men, a movement should occur whose very essence was the denial of history? — what more startling than at just the moment when the world was learning that society and civilization are the products of an evolution, to have the thesis propounded that both may be brought, outright, into perfect being ? Yet in this very paradox, this very contradiction, we perceive the contending forces of the age. Vitalized by passion, two mighty conceptions — and to recognize what those conceptions were we need only pronounce the names Rousseau and Burke — had come to the grapple, and each was to be vanquished, each victorious. Each was to be vanquished: the French Revolution was the funeral pyre alike of reason and the old regime. Each was to be victorious : the French Revolution was a terrible vindication of authority, experience, and the past, demonstrating, in the face of its own principles, the immense significance of historical continuity and evolution; but it was not less a staggering blow to all blind worship of custom and tradition, to all unreasoning acceptance of the sacredness of creeds and institutions.

And so, when the smoke of the Revolution began to clear away, to those who had eyes to see, both reason and the established order stood discredited. Never again with hope of general countenance could " reason " put forth such arrogant pretensions, never again could the established order, simply because it was the established order, claim such authority. The world was convinced that there was something rotten at the heart of the existing state; but the world began to look for some other means of removing that rottenness than the deification of reason, to search for some other avenue than that of the pure intellect through which to approach the deepest problems of life. A new standard of truth was demanded ; and seeking to discover such a standard, men began more and more to favor the belief that other faculties beside the understanding, that the imaginative, the practical, and moral sides of man's nature play a part in his apprehension of the truth. To the wonderful accuracy with which they embody this fundamental shifting of the view-point of the world, not less than to their own intrinsic merit, must be attributed the immense significance and influence of the two Critiques of Immanuel Kant, 1 and of the two parts of Goethe's Faust; while, on the other hand, the failure of a philosophy like that of Hegel to retain vitality and power must be attributed, in no small measure, to its vain attempt to re-enthrone the dialectic method. Varied as have been the faiths and ideals of the nineteenth century, it is not a little remarkable to note how the attempt to find some more satisfactory basis of truth to replace the rejected standard of pure reason imparts a certain unity of purpose to views of life which, in other respects, differ oftentimes widely enough. To take only a few examples where many might be chosen, and to confine these few to England : Coleridge's exaltation of " Reason " over the understanding, Wordsworth's natureworship, the mysticism of Shelley, Carlyle's gospel of work, the art-philosophy of Ruskin, the " culture " of Arnold, Tenny-

1 Kant's two Critiques (1781 and 1788), to be sure, both antedate the fall of the Bastile. 3 son's trust in " faith " and " wisdom " rather than in " knowledge," Browning's appeal from the intellect to the heart, even the agnosticism of Spencer, the utilitarianism of Mill, and the Catholicism of Newman — each of these reveals some aspect of this search for a deeper way of seeking after truth, each, in one manner or another, aims a blow at the ascendency of reason.

This much has been said of European tendencies in the eighteenth century, and of some of their results, because it is only in their light — or indeed as a part of them — that the story of American religious development can be understood. The history of American thought is, in its largest outlines, identical with that of Europe, though generally, save in politics, America lagged several decades, sometimes nearer a whole century, behind. Just as the various movements of the revolutionary age in Europe were both culminations of the eighteenth century and revolts against it, so New England transcendentalism — whatever else it may have been — was both a culmination of that typically eighteenth century movement, early American Unitarianism, and at the same time a revolt against it. Transcendentalism, furthermore, was just such a union of thought and feeling as those we have been describing. And just as there emerged in Europe with the passing of the age of reason the longing for a new and deeper standard of truth, so transcendentalism was, in part, a search for some such profounder and more comprehensive way of grasping the nature of man and of the world.

New England took no plunge, as England did, from the moral heights of Puritanism into the abyss of Restoration licentiousness. But there was a descent, which, if more gradual, was not on that account less real. Extreme Puritanism held within itself the germ of its own disintegration. As a mere matter of psychology, the intensity of Massachusetts Puritanism of the first generation could not be indefinitely continued, and some decline from earlier religious fervor was even more inevitable in a pioneer community where material development and protection from the Indians were crying necessities. Already, by the second generation, the falling off in piety was conspicuous, and at the time when Increase Mather was instrumental in calling the " Reforming Synod " of 1679 there was sad evidence, he believed, of " decay of godliness in the land ; of the increase of pride ; neglect of worship ; sabbath breaking ; lack of family government ; censurings, intemperance, falsehood, and love of the world." 1 Though the widespread belief in witchcraft and the frequent occurrence of witchcraft delusions throughout the seventeenth century may make one hesitate to say so, it seems difficult not to regard Salem Witchcraft, from some points of view at least, as the reductio< ad absurdum of the extreme religious spirit. It showed, apparently, that the old Puritanism had passed its prime, and it surely hastened the advent of more rational and common-sense ideas ; while, to make the reaction stronger, all through the eighteenth century, especially in the neighborhood of Boston, the commercial and political questions of the day were sufficient to render impossible any exclusive absorption of the community's attention in things religious.

But the causes of these changes in the spiritual atmosphere were not wholly indigenous. English rationalistic and freethinking tendencies penetrated to the colonies — and not always so slowly as might be imagined — and they had, particularly in the accessible region about Boston, their immediate effect. " Heresies " began to creep into the religious world. Reflecting the contemporary English interest in questions of morality, Arminianism 2 appeared in Massachusetts, giving an unorthodox importance to matters of conduct, and attacking, though insidiously, the Calvinistic doctrine of election. The early Arminians in America, though they still believed that man was saved by the sovereign grace and mercy of God, held nevertheless that man could aid the operation of that grace by putting himself in a proper attitude for its reception, by attending, as it were, to what were called the " means " of

1 Quoted from Williston Walker, A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States, 187.

2 See Ibid., 85 et seq., and 252 ; also, Cooke, Unitarianism in America, 37- grace ; and gradually more and more efficiency was attributed to these " means." Arianism, too, appeared, subtly undermining the doctrine of the Trinity.

Nothing could show more clearly the religious condition of New England during the first half of the eighteenth century than the career of Jonathan Edwards and the story of the Great Awakening. The apprehensions of Edwards were aroused by two causes, and the Great Awakening was designed to remedy two evils — the spiritual deadness and the doctrinal heresies of the time. It need hardly be added that to Edwards these were aspects of one thing. The great wave of enthusiasm that swept over the colony was the protest against the decline of piety, the treatise on The Freedom of the Will the most famous part of the protest against the doctrinal Arminianism of the day. But what could better prove that New England, too, was living in the same eighteenth century with Europe, and that she was even less ready than England for any high manifestation of feeling, than the rapidity with which the emotional wave subsided and the completeness with which the old apathy returned? While the religious views of Jonathan Edwards were too spiritually lofty and too intellectually original and profound to be properly termed retrogressive in any age, and while in him and in his remarkable wife we find many anticipations of transcendentalism itself, it cannot be denied that, historically, his influence proved on the whole reactionary. Put Edwards beside any one of his Boston Arminian opponents. Can there be a moment's hesitation as to which was the greater man, the greater genius? But on the other hand, can there be any more question as to which was in closer touch with the dominant spirit of the time? The Great Awakening is the American analog of the Methodist movement 1 — emotionally prophetic, theologically, in the main, reactionary.

The New England revival did not close the opening gulf in the religious world. It widened it rather. The efforts of Edwards had increased and consolidated the enemies he sought

1 The part that Whitefield played in the American movement is well known. For the influence of the Great Awakening on Wesley, see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 133.

to slay ; and the adherents of the opposing views continued in constantly diverging paths. The New Calvinists, 1 as the followers of Edwards were called, went on to develop an American theology, uninfluenced essentially by European thought, and the large product of doctrinal discussion that resulted is the orthodox contribution to the age of reason. The liberal school, on the other hand, confirmed by the excesses of the Great Awakening in their dislike of enthusiasm, and constantly closer in touch with various forms of English thinking, grew more and more liberal, until, as the differences between their own and the New Calvinist views became wider and wider, the term Unitarian was finally applied to them. 2

It must not be forgotten that this movement had little direct connection with the English Unitarianism of Priestley and that it exhibited practically none of his materialistic and Socinian tendencies. This is only one reason why the term Unitarian is in some ways unfortunate, in some ways apt to prove misleading. It must be made to cover — if names are to correspond with realities — the whole early movement for freedom of thought and release from tradition within the New England religious world, and of that movement, discussions of the Trinity and of the nature of Christ were manifestly but single aspects. 3 Unitarianism was something more than a passing agitation over a few theological doctrines. It was the product within this New England religious world of the combined rational and questioning tendencies of the age. It was . contributed to not merely directly, from within, by writers or thought-currents of a religious sort ; but it was contributed to also indirectly, from without, by whatever struck at tradition. Skeptical opinions that were in the air, the turmoil that accom-

1 The distinction between the Old Calvinists and the followers of Edwards may be practically neglected for the purposes of this essay.

2 The term was not employed until very late. See Walker, A History of the Cong. Churches in the U. S., 338.

3 Indeed the doctrines of total depravity and eternal punishment seem, in some ways, to have been even more conspicuously the center of the controversy.

parried the Revolutionary War, 1 speculations from France that preceded 1789 and echoes that followed it 2 — these things had various effects in various spheres of New England life, but within the religious sphere they tended, for the time, to strengthen the Unitarian position. Early American Unitarianism was eminently typical of the critical century in which it appeared. It seems, in many ways, much more a negative than a positive movement, or — if the term negative be objectionable — much more preparatory than final. Its essence consists more than in anything else in this : that it was a reaction from Calvinism. Its most immediate positive product was, perhaps, the atmosphere of tolerance it created.

If we have characterized the movement correctly, its continuity, then, cannot be insisted on too strongly. In 1785 King's Chapel became Unitarian by the revision of its liturgy 3 — the first open denial of the doctrine of the Trinity by a New England church organization. This year is accordingly frequently chosen to mark the beginning of the movement. But the singling out of any one initial date is useless and confusing. The King's Chapel event was but one incident in a long development, and its real significance is that of an unmistakable sign that toward the end of the century the struggle between

1 See, " Life in Boston in the Revolutionary Period," by Horace E. Scudder, being Chapter iv of Volume iii of The Memorial History of Boston.

2 William Ellery Channing's account of conditions at Harvard at the time he entered college (1794) gives an idea of the feeling of unrest that pervaded the country. " College was never in a worse state than when I entered it. Society was passing through a most critical stage. The French Revolution had diseased the imagination and unsettled the understanding of men everywhere. The old foundations of social order, loyalty, tradition, habit, reverence for antiquity, were everywhere shaken, if not subverted. The authority of the past was gone. The old forms were outgrown, and new ones had not taken their place. The tone of books and conversation was presumptuous and daring. The tendency of all classes was to skepticism." (Channing, 30. See also Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 253.)

3 Both the pastor, Rev. James Freeman, and the people were of advanced views, but Rev. William Hazlitt (father of the essayist), who was then in America, was especially influential in bringing about the change.

the liberals and the orthodox was approaching a critical stage. In this sense only it was a beginning.

In 1 80 1, because their new pastor (Rev. James Kendall) exhibited, they thought, too advanced views, half the members of the original Pilgrim Church at Plymouth withdrew, founding a new organization that kept to the old faith. In 1805 Harvard College, which from the first had been a stronghold of the more radical thought, passed into the complete control of the Unitarians by the appointment of Rev. Henry Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity 1 — an event which soon caused the establishment of Andover Theological Seminary by the opposition. Another influence toward liberalism was the Monthly Anthology." 1 This publication was begun (but soon abandoned) by a young graduate of Harvard. It was then assumed and continued through ten volumes by Emerson's father, the Rev. William Emerson, and the friends whom he gathered round him. This group was known as The Anthology Club, 3 and their organ, though dedicated to the service of literature and general culture, discussed theology to some extent. In 181 5 the whole controversy reached a climax, for then began — and continued for a quarter of a century — the open division of the Congregational churches 4 into the Unitarian and the Trinitarian, a division accelerated, and on the orthodox side embittered, by the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court in the famous Dedham Case. 5

When we remember the varied tides of emotion that during these years were sweeping over Europe, the condition of New England life in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century seems, at first sight at least, somewhat inexplicable. It is clear that there had come no general invasion of European enthusiasm. Beginning about 1790 — and lasting for two gen-

1 Cooke, Unitarianism in America, 94.

3 Other members were Samuel Cooper Thacher, Joseph Stevens Buckminster, Joseph Tuckerman, and John S. J. Gardiner. Ibid., 96.

5 For discussions of this decision, see Ellis, A Half-Century of the Unitarian Controversy, 415 ; Walker, A History of the Cong. Churches in the U. S., 342.

erations — a new series of revivals took place in the Trinitarian churches, and it is impossible to believe that these had no connection with the wider emotional currents of the day, though such a relationship it might be somewhat difficult to establish. It is obvious, too, that of the controversial sort there was no lack in the religious world of most intense and bitter feeling. But, after all, it seems plain that the spirit of the earlier eighteenth century, with all its lethargy and lack of fire, had lasted over, widely, in New England. Much of the community was still emotionally starved, and the young people especially must have looked about them in vain for that which could offer any lasting satisfaction to their deeper feelings.

The prevalent philosophy was the common-sense philosophy of Locke; the prevalent literature was still that of the uninspiring " classical " school. The educational world, conspicuously, within which the feelings of the young would naturally be fed, was infected with apathy. There is no reason to doubt that the descriptions given, for instance, by George Ticknor and James Freeman Clarke, 1 of conditions prevailing at Harvard, are just and characteristic. Of Professor John Farrar, who lectured in philosophy and the sciences, Clarke says, " He was a true teacher, but almost the only one in the whole corps of the professors." And then, as an example, is given an account of the Greek teacher, who never displayed any enthusiasm or the slightest appreciation of the poetry of the Iliad, The result was that the students' began seeking emotional satisfaction outside the curriculum. 2

It should be remarked too that, during much of the period we are discussing, the young New Englander who turned to politics did not find the prospect bright. New England, the stronghold of Federalism, was, during the ascendency of the Democratic party, to a considerable degree politically isolated.

1 J. F. Clarke, Autobiography, 36-39. Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, i, chapter xviii.

2 " They did not read Thucydides and Xenophon, but Macaulay and Carlyle. . . . Our real professors of rhetoric were Charles Lamb and Coleridge, Walter Scott and Wordsworth." — a statement which shows that the condition of emotional indifference still survived at the time when the writings of Macaulay and Carlyle were becoming known.

In the words of Professor Trent, " it was a period of American history in which politics offered no great allurements to young men trained as the best New Englanders were. Although Daniel Webster had already become the idol of his countrymen, it was plain that the democratic rule of Jackson offered more opportunities to the tricky politician than to the trained statesman," 1 — a condition of things highly favorable, it will be realized, to the advent of transcendentalism.

But this lack of enthusiasm, so widespread, was hardly anywhere more noticeable than in the Unitarian world. The Unitarians were, indeed, in a peculiarly untenable position. Their eighteenth century spirit had survived its usefulness — yet they clung to it tenaciously. The eighteenth century was an age of transition — and they were seeking to make its views and temper permanent. The eighteenth century was an age of compromise — and they would render its position final. The eighteenth century was an age of preparation — and they remained unwilling to advance. They had no philosophy to give their views consistency, and indeed no philosophy can be conceived that could have performed, even superficially, a task so hopelessly gigantic. With the orthodox and their " superstitions " on the one side and the kindly abyss that Hume with his logic had prepared for the reception of all rationalism on the other, the Unitarians were, most veritably, between the devil and the deep sea. And their enemies perceived their dilemma better, probably, than they did themselves. They were charged with lack of boldness in defending their position, even with cowardice and duplicity. Emerson's phrase " the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism " had, beyond doubt, justification, while Theodore Parker summed up their spiritual coldness in words that, at the same time, reveal how among the Unitarian preachers the eighteenth century interest in morality had still survived : " I felt early that the ' liberal ' ministers did not do justice to simple religious feeling; to me their preaching seemed to relate too much to outward things, not enough to the inward pious life ; their prayers felt cold ; but certainly they preached the importance and religious

1 A History of American Literature, 303.

value of morality as no sect, I think, had done before. . . . The defect of the Unitarians was a profound one. . . . It is a dismal fault in a religious party, this lack of Piety, and dismally have the Unitarians answered it; yet let their great merits and services be not forgot." 1 It is indeed important that the merits of the Unitarians — in spite of the fact that their present position was a prosaic and in some respects a ridiculous one — should be remembered, for many and high those merits surely were. The typical Unitarian of the time, 2 as far as there was any such, was a man of tolerance, of intellect, of cultured tastes, of unexceptionable private morality and notable civic virtue, as well as of many other admirable qualities, but not — let it be repeated — either metaphysical or emotionally spiritual in his temperament. Philosophy and enthusiasm he did not have; yet philosophy and enthusiasm were exactly the things of which his religion stood most lamentably in need.