THE CONCORD WRITERS.
1837-1861.
There has been but one movement in the history of the American mind
which has given to literature a group of writers having coherence
enough to merit the name of a school. This was the great humanitarian
movement, or series of movements, in New England, which, beginning in
the Unitarianism of Channing, ran through its later phase in
transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the antislavery
agitation and the enthusiasms of the civil war. The second stage of
this intellectual and social revolt was transcendentalism, of which
Emerson wrote, in 1842: "The history of genius and of religion in these
times will be the history of this tendency." It culminated about
1840-41 in the establishment of the _Dial_ and the Brook Farm
Community, although Emerson had given the signal a few years before in
his little volume entitled _Nature_, 1836, his Phi Beta Kappa address
at Harvard on the _American Scholar_, 1837, and his address in 1838
before the Divinity School at Cambridge. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82)
was the prophet of the sect, and Concord was its Mecca; but the
influence of the new ideas was not confined to the little group of
professed transcendentalists; it extended to all the young writers
within reach, who struck their roots deeper into the soil that it had
loosened and freshened. We owe to it, in great measure, not merely
Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau, but Hawthorne, Lowell,
Whittier, and Holmes.
In its strictest sense transcendentalism was a restatement of the
idealistic philosophy, and an application of its beliefs to religion,
nature, and life. But in a looser sense, and as including the more
outward manifestations which drew popular attention most strongly, it
was the name given to that spirit of dissent and protest, of universal
inquiry and experiment, which marked the third and fourth decades of
this century in America, and especially in New England. The movement
was contemporary with political revolutions in Europe and with the
preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in sociology, in science,
education, medicine, and hygiene. New sects were formed, like the
Swedenborgians, Universalists, Spiritualists, Millerites, Second
Adventists, Shakers, Mormons, and Come-outers, some of whom believed in
trances, miracles, and direct revelations from the divine Spirit;
others in the quick coming of Christ, as deduced from the opening of
the seals and the number of the beast in the Apocalypse; and still
others in the reorganization of society and of the family on a
different basis. New systems of education were tried, suggested by the
writings of the Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi, and others. The
pseudo-sciences of mesmerism and of phrenology, as taught by Gall and
Spurzheim, had numerous followers. In medicine, homeopathy,
hydropathy, and what Dr. Holmes calls "kindred delusions," made many
disciples. Numbers of persons, influenced by the doctrines of Graham
and other vegetarians, abjured the use of animal food, as injurious not
only to health but to a finer spirituality. Not a few refused to vote
or pay taxes. The writings of Fourier and Saint-Simon were translated,
and societies were established where co-operation and a community of
goods should take the place of selfish competition.
About the year 1840 there were some thirty of these "phalansteries" in
America, many of which had their organs in the shape of weekly or
monthly journals, which advocated the principle of Association. The
best known of these was probably the _Harbinger_, the mouth-piece of
the famous Brook Farm Community, which was founded at West Roxbury,
Mass., in 1841, and lasted till 1847. The head man of Brook Farm was
George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman, who had resigned his pulpit in
Boston to go into the movement, and who after its failure became and
remained for many years literary editor of the _New York Tribune_.
Among his associates were Charles A. Dana--now the editor of the
_Sun_--Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others not unknown to
fame. The _Harbinger_, which ran from 1845 to 1849--two years after
the break-up of the community--had among its contributors many who were
not Brook Farmers, but who sympathized more or less with the
experiment. Of the number were Horace Greeley, Dr. F. H. Hedge--who
did so much to introduce American readers to German literature--J. S.
Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the poet, and younger men,
like G. W. Curtis and T. W. Higginson. A reader of to-day, looking
into an odd volume of the _Harbinger_, will find in it some stimulating
writing, together with a great deal of unintelligible talk about
"Harmonic Unity," "Love Germination," and other matters now fallen
silent. The most important literary result of this experiment at
"plain living and high thinking," with its queer mixture of culture and
agriculture, was Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, which has for its
background an idealized picture of the community life; whose heroine,
Zenobia, has touches of Margaret Fuller; and whose hero, with his hobby
of prison reform, was a type of the one-idea'd philanthropists that
abounded in such an environment. Hawthorne's attitude was always in
part one of reserve and criticism, an attitude which is apparent in the
reminiscences of Brook Farm in his _American Note Books_, wherein he
speaks with a certain resentment of "Miss Fuller's transcendental
heifer," which hooked the other cows, and was evidently to Hawthorne's
mind not unsymbolic in this respect of Miss Fuller herself.
It was the day of seers and "Orphic" utterances; the air was fall of
the enthusiasm of humanity and thick with philanthropic projects and
plans for the regeneration of the universe. The figure of the
wild-eyed, long-haired reformer--the man with a panacea--the "crank" of
our later terminology--became a familiar one. He abounded at
non-resistance conventions and meetings of universal peace societies
and of woman's rights associations. The movement had its grotesque
aspects, which Lowell has described in his essay on Thoreau. "Bran had
its apostles and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs,
tailored impromptu from the tar-pot. . . . Not a few impecunious
zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people),
professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . .
Communities were established where every thing was to be common but
common sense."
This ferment has long since subsided, and much of what was then
seething has gone off in vapor or other volatile products. But some
very solid matters have also been precipitated, some crystals of poetry
translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The immediate practical outcome
was disappointing, and the external history of the agitation is a
record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies,
and sects founded only to dwindle away or to be re-absorbed into some
form of orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conservative, or the
worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the
enigmatic utterances of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides
of transcendentalism were naturally uppermost. Nevertheless the
movement was but a new avatar of the old Puritan spirit; its moral
earnestness, its spirituality, its tenderness for the individual
conscience. Puritanism, too, in its day had run into grotesque
extremes. Emerson bore about the same relation to the absurder
out-croppings of transcendentalism that Milton bore to the New Lights,
Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, etc., of his time. There is in him that
mingling of idealism with an abiding sanity, and even a Yankee
shrewdness, which characterizes the race. The practical, inventive,
calculating, money-getting side of the Yankee has been made
sufficiently obvious. But the deep heart of New England is full of
dreams, mysticism, romance:
"And in the day of sacrifice,
When heroes piled the pyre,
The dismal Massachusetts ice
Burned more than others' fire."
The one element which the odd and eccentric developments of this
movement shared in common with the real philosophy of transcendentalism
was the rejection of authority and the appeal to the private
consciousness as the sole standard of truth and right. This principle
certainly lay in the ethical systems of Kant and Fichte, the great
transcendentalists of Germany. It had been strongly asserted by
Channing. Nay, it was the starting-point of Puritanism itself, which
had drawn away from the ceremonial religion of the English Church, and
by its Congregational system had made each church society independent
in doctrine and worship. And although Puritan orthodoxy in New England
had grown rigid and dogmatic it had never used the weapons of
obscurantism. By encouraging education to the utmost, it had shown its
willingness to submit its beliefs to the fullest discussion and had put
into the hands of dissent the means with which to attack them.
In its theological aspect transcendentalism was a departure from
conservative Unitarianism, as that had been from Calvinism. From
Edwards to Channing, from Channing to Emerson and Theodore Parker,
there was a natural and logical unfolding; not logical in the sense
that Channing accepted Edwards's premises and pushed them out to their
conclusions, or that Parker accepted all of Channing's premises, but in
the sense that the rigid pushing out of Edwards's premises into their
conclusions by himself and his followers had brought about a moral
_reductio ad absurdum_ and a state of opinion against which Channing
rebelled; and that Channing, as it seemed to Parker, stopped short in
the carrying out of his own principles. Thus the "Channing
Unitarians," while denying that Christ was God, had held that he was of
divine nature, was the Son of God, and had existed before he came into
the world. While rejecting the doctrine of the "vicarious sacrifice"
they maintained that Christ was a mediator and intercessor, and that
his supernatural nature was testified by miracles. For Parker and
Emerson it was easy to take the step to the assertion that Christ was a
good and great man, divine only in the sense that God possessed him
more fully than any other man known in history; that it was his
preaching and example that brought salvation to men, and not any
special mediation or intercession, and that his own words and acts, and
not miracles, are the only and the sufficient witness to his mission.
In the view of the transcendentalists Christ was as human as Buddha,
Socrates, or Confucius, and the Bible was but one among the "Ethnical
Scriptures" or sacred writings of the peoples, passages from which were
published in the transcendental organ, the _Dial_. As against these
new views Channing Unitarianism occupied already a conservative
position. The Unitarians as a body had never been very numerous
outside of eastern Massachusetts. They had a few churches in New York
and in the larger cities and towns elsewhere, but the sect, as such,
was a local one. Orthodoxy made a sturdy fight against the heresy,
under leaders like Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart, of Andover, and
Lyman Beecher, of Connecticut. In the neighboring State of
Connecticut, for example, there was until lately, for a period of
several years, no distinctly Unitarian congregation worshiping in a
church edifice of its own. On the other hand, the Unitarians claimed,
with justice, that their opinions had, to a great extent, modified the
theology of the orthodox churches. The writings of Horace Bushnell, of
Hartford, one of the most eminent Congregational divines, approach
Unitarianism in their interpretation of the doctrine of the Atonement;
and the "progressive orthodoxy" of Andover is certainly not the
Calvinism of Thomas Hooker or of Jonathan Edwards. But it seemed to
the transcendentalists that conservative Unitarianism was too negative
and "cultured," and Margaret Fuller complained of the coldness of the
Boston pulpits; while, contrariwise, the central thought of
transcendentalism, that the soul has an immediate connection with God,
was pronounced by Dr. Channing a "crude speculation." This was the
thought of Emerson's address in 1838 before the Cambridge Divinity
School, and it was at once made the object of attack by conservative
Unitarians like Henry Ware and Andrews Norton. The latter, in an
address before the same audience, on the _Latest Form of Infidelity_,
said: "Nothing is left that can be called Christianity if its
miraculous character be denied. . . . There can be no intuition, no
direct perception, of the truth of Christianity." And in a pamphlet
supporting the same side of the question he added: "It is not an
intelligible error, but a mere absurdity, to maintain that we are
conscious, or have an intuitive knowledge, of the being of God, of our
own immortality, . . . or of any other fact of religion." Ripley and
Parker replied in Emerson's defense; but Emerson himself would never be
drawn into controversy. He said that he could not argue. He
_announced_ truths; his method was that of the seer, not of the
disputant. In 1832 Emerson, who was a Unitarian clergyman, and
descended from eight generations of clergymen, had resigned the
pastorate of the Second Church of Boston because he could not
conscientiously administer the sacrament of the communion--which he
regarded as a mere act of commemoration--in the sense in which it was
understood by his parishioners. Thenceforth, though he sometimes
occupied Unitarian pulpits, and was, indeed, all his life a kind of
"lay preacher," he never assumed the pastorate of a church. The
representative of transcendentalism in the pulpit was Theodore Parker,
an eloquent preacher, an eager debater, and a prolific writer on many
subjects, whose collected works fill fourteen volumes. Parker was a
man of strongly human traits, passionate, independent, intensely
religious, but intensely radical, who made for himself a large personal
following. The more advanced wing of the Unitarians were called, after
him, "Parkerites." Many of the Unitarian churches refused to
"fellowship" with him; and the large congregation, or audience, which
assembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons was stigmatized as a
"boisterous assembly" which came to hear Parker preach irreligion.
It has been said that, on its philosophical side, New England
transcendentalism was a restatement of idealism. The impulse came from
Germany, from the philosophical writings of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and
Schelling, and from the works of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had
domesticated German thought in England. In Channing's _Remarks on a
National Literature_, quoted in our last chapter, the essayist urged
that our scholars should study the authors of France and Germany as one
means of emancipating American letters from a slavish dependence on
British literature. And in fact German literature began, not long
after, to be eagerly studied in New England. Emerson published an
American edition of Carlyle's _Miscellanies_, including his essays on
German writers that had appeared in England between 1822 and 1830. In
1838 Ripley began to publish _Specimens of Foreign Standard
Literature_, which extended to fourteen volumes. In his work of
translating and supplying introductions to the matter selected, he was
helped by Ripley, Margaret Fuller, John S. Dwight, and others who had
more or less connection with the transcendental movement.
The definition of the new faith given by Emerson in his lecture on the
_Transcendentalist_, 1842, is as follows; "What is popularly called
transcendentalism among us is idealism. . . . The idealism of the
present day acquired the name of transcendental from the use of that
term by Immanuel Kant, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of
Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was
not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there
was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not
come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that
these were intuitions of the mind itself, and he denominated them
_transcendental_ forms." Idealism denies the independent existence of
matter. Transcendentalism claims for the innate ideas of God and the
soul a higher assurance of reality than for the knowledge of the
outside world derived through the senses. Emerson shares the "noble
doubt" of idealism. He calls the universe a shade, a dream, "this
great apparition." "It is a sufficient account of that appearance we
call the world," he wrote in _Nature_, "that God will teach a human
mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent
sensations which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade.
In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my
senses, to know whether the impressions on me correspond with outlying
objects, what difference does it make whether Orion is up there in
heaven or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?" On
the other hand, our evidence of the existence, of God and of our own
souls, and our knowledge of right and wrong, are immediate, and are
independent of the senses. We are in direct communication with the
"Over-soul," the infinite Spirit. "The soul in man is the background
of our being--an immensity not possessed, that cannot be possessed."
"From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and
makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all." Revelation
is "an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the
individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life." In
moods of exaltation, and especially in the presence of nature, this
contact of the individual soul with the absolute is felt. "All mean
egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see
all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am
part and particle of God." The existence and attributes of God are not
deducible from history or from natural theology, but are thus directly
given us in consciousness. In his essay on the _Transcendentalist_
Emerson says: "His experience inclines him to behold the procession of
facts you call the world as flowing perpetually outward from an
invisible, unsounded center in himself; center alike of him and of
them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective
or relative existence--relative to that aforesaid Unknown Center of
him. There is no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect,
ceases, and God, the cause, begins. We lie open on one side to the
deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God."
Emerson's point of view, though familiar to students of philosophy, is
strange to the popular understanding, and hence has arisen the
complaint of his obscurity. Moreover, he apprehended and expressed
these ideas as a poet, in figurative and emotional language, and not as
a metaphysician, in a formulated statement. His own position in
relation to systematic philosophers is described in what he says of
Plato, in his series of sketches entitled _Representative Men_, 1850:
"He has not a system. The dearest disciples and defenders are at
fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not
complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this, and another
that; he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in
another place." It happens, therefore, that, to many students of more
formal philosophies, Emerson's meaning seems elusive, and he appears to
write from temporary moods and to contradict himself. Had he attempted
a reasoned exposition of the transcendental philosophy, instead of
writing essays and poems, he might have added one more to the number of
system-mongers; but he would not have taken that significant place
which he occupies in the general literature of the time, nor exerted
that wide influence upon younger writers which has been one of the
stimulating forces in American thought. It was because Emerson was a
poet that he is our Emerson. And yet it would be impossible to
disentangle his peculiar philosophical ideas from the body of his
writings and to leave the latter to stand upon their merits as
literature merely. He is the poet of certain high abstractions, and
his religion is central to all his work--excepting, perhaps, his
_English Traits_, 1856, an acute study of national characteristics; and
a few of his essays and verses, which are independent of any particular
philosophical stand-point.
When Emerson resigned his parish in 1832, he made a short trip to
Europe, where he visited Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and Landor at
Florence. On his return he retired to his birthplace, the village of
Concord, Massachusetts, and settled down among his books and his
fields, becoming a sort of "glorified farmer," but issuing frequently
from his retirement to instruct and delight audiences of thoughtful
people at Boston and at other points all through the country. Emerson
was the perfection of a lyceum lecturer. His manner was quiet but
forcible, his voice of charming quality, and his enunciation clean-cut
and refined. The sentence was his unit in composition. His lectures
seemed to begin anywhere and to end anywhere and to resemble strings of
exquisitely polished sayings rather than continuous discourses. His
printed essays, with unimportant exceptions, were first written and
delivered as lectures. In 1836 he published his first book, _Nature_,
which remains the most systematic statement of his philosophy. It
opened a fresh spring-head in American thought, and the words of its
introduction announced that its author had broken with the past. "Why
should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why
should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of
tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of
theirs?"
It took eleven years to sell five hundred copies of this little book.
But the year following its publication the remarkable Phi Beta Kappa
address at Cambridge, on the _American Scholar_, electrified the little
public of the university. This is described by Lowell as "an event
without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be
always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its
inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows
clustering with eager heads, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" To
Concord come many kindred spirits, drawn by Emerson's magnetic
attraction. Thither came, from Connecticut, Amos Bronson Alcott, born
a few years before Emerson, whom he outlived; a quaint and benignant
figure, a visionary and a mystic even among the transcendentalists
themselves, and one who lived in unworldly simplicity the life of the
soul. Alcott had taught school at Cheshire, Conn., and afterward at
Boston on an original plan--compelling his scholars, for example, to
flog _him_, when they did wrong, instead of taking a flogging
themselves. The experiment was successful until his _Conversations on
the Gospels_, in Boston, and his insistence upon admitting colored
children to his benches, offended conservative opinion and broke up his
school. Alcott renounced the eating of animal food in 1835. He
believed in the union of thought and manual labor, and supported
himself for some years by the work of his hands, gardening, cutting
wood, etc. He traveled into the West and elsewhere, holding
conversations on philosophy, education, and religion. He set up a
little community at the village of Harvard, Massachusetts, which was
rather less successful than Brook Farm, and he contributed _Orphic
Sayings_ to the _Dial_, which were harder for the exoteric to
understand than even Emerson's _Brahma_ or the _Over-soul_.
Thither came, also, Sarah Margaret Fuller, the most intellectual woman
of her time in America, an eager student of Greek and German literature
and an ardent seeker after the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. She
threw herself into many causes--such as temperance and the higher
education of women. Her brilliant conversation classes in Boston
attracted many "minds" of her own sex. Subsequently, as literary
editor of the _New York Tribune_, she furnished a wider public with
reviews and book notices of great ability. She took part in the Brook
Farm experiment, and she edited the _Dial_ for a time, contributing to
it the papers afterward expanded into her most considerable book,
_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_. In 1846 she went abroad, and at
Rome took part in the revolutionary movement of Mazzini, having charge
of one of the hospitals during the siege of the city by the French. In
1847 she married an impecunious Italian nobleman, the Marquis Ossoli.
In 1850 the ship on which she was returning to America, with her
husband and child, was wrecked on Fire Island beach and all three were
lost. Margaret Fuller's collected writings are somewhat disappointing,
being mainly of temporary interest. She lives less through her books
than through the memoirs of her friends, Emerson, James Freeman Clarke,
T. W. Higginson, and others who knew her as a personal influence. Her
strenuous and rather overbearing individuality made an impression not
altogether agreeable upon many of her contemporaries. Lowell
introduced a caricature of her as "Miranda" into his _Fable for
Critics_, and Hawthorne's caustic sketch of her, preserved in the
biography written by his son, has given great offence to her admirers.
"Such a determination to _eat_ this huge universe!" was Carlyle's
characteristic comment on her appetite for knowledge and aspirations
after perfection.
To Concord also came Nathaniel Hawthorne, who took up his residence
there first at the "Old Manse," and afterward at "The Wayside." Though
naturally an idealist, he said that he came too late to Concord to fall
decidedly under Emerson's influence. Of that he would have stood in
little danger even had he come earlier. He appreciated the deep and
subtle quality of Emerson's imagination, but his own shy genius always
jealously guarded its independence and resented the too close
approaches of an alien mind. Among the native disciples of Emerson at
Concord the most noteworthy were Henry Thoreau, and his friend and
biographer, William Ellery Channing, Jr., a nephew of the great
Channing. Channing was a contributor to the _Dial_, and he published a
volume of poems which elicited a fiercely contemptous review from Edgar
Poe. Though disfigured by affectation and obscurity, many of
Channing's verses were distinguished by true poetic feeling, and the
last line of his little piece, _A Poet's Hope_,
"If my bark sink 'tis to another sea,"
has taken a permanent place in the literature of transcendentalism.
The private organ of the transcendentalists was the _Dial_, a quarterly
magazine, published from 1840 to 1844, and edited by Emerson and
Margaret Fuller. Among its contributors, besides those already
mentioned, were Ripley, Thoreau, Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Charles
A. Dana, John S. Dwight, C. P. Cranch, Charles Emerson, and William H.
Channing, another nephew of Dr. Channing. It contained, along with a
good deal of rubbish, some of the best poetry and prose that has been
published in America. The most lasting part of its contents were the
contributions of Emerson and Thoreau. But even as a whole it was a
unique way-mark in the history of our literature.
From time to time Emerson collected and published his lectures under
various titles. A first series of _Essays_ came out in 1841, and a
second in 1844; the _Conduct of Life_ in 1860, _Society and Solitude_
in 1870, _Letters and Social Aims_ in 1876, and the _Fortune of the
Republic_ in 1878. In 1847 he issued a volume of _Poems_, and 1865
_Mayday and Other Poems_. These writings, as a whole, were variations
on a single theme, expansions and illustrations of the philosophy set
forth in _Nature_, and his early addresses. They were strikingly
original, rich in thought, filled with wisdom, with lofty morality and
spiritual religion. Emerson, said Lowell, first "cut the cable that
bound us to English thought and gave us a chance at the dangers and
glories of blue water." Nevertheless, as it used to be the fashion to
find an English analogue for every American writer, so that Cooper was
called the American Scott, and Mrs. Sigourney was described as the
Hemans of America, a well-worn critical tradition has coupled Emerson
with Carlyle. That his mind received a nudge from Carlyle's early
essays and from _Sartor Resartus_ is beyond a doubt. They were
life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's _Representative
Men_ is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's _Hero Worship_. But
in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlyle's
pessimism and dissatisfaction with the general drift of things gained
upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist to the
end. The last of his writings published during his life-time, the
_Fortune of the Republic_, contrasts strangely in its hopefulness with
the desperation of Carlyle's later utterances. Even in presence of the
doubt as to man's personal immortality he takes refuge in a high and
stoical faith. "I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary
conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life
shall continue it will continue, and if not best, then it will not; and
we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so."
It is this conviction that gives to Emerson's writings their serenity
and their tonic quality at the same time that it narrows the range of
his dealings with life. As the idealist declines to cross-examine
those facts which he regards as merely phenomenal, and looks upon this
outward face of things as upon a mask not worthy to dismay the fixed
soul, so the optimist turns away his eyes from the evil which he
disposes of as merely negative, as the shadow of the good. Hawthorne's
interest in the problem of sin finds little place in Emerson's
philosophy. Passion comes not nigh him, and _Faust_ disturbs him with
its disagreeableness. Pessimism is to him "the only skepticism."
The greatest literature is that which is most broadly human, or, in
other words, that which will square best with all philosophies. But
Emerson's genius was interpretative rather than constructive. The poet
dwells in the cheerful world of phenomena. He is most the poet who
realizes most intensely the good and the bad of human life. But
Idealism makes experience shadowy and subordinates action to
contemplation. To it the cities of men, with their "frivolous
populations,"
"are but sailing foam-bells
Along thought's causing stream."
Shakespeare does not forget that the world will one day vanish "like
the baseless fabric of a vision," and that we ourselves are "such stuff
as dreams are made on;" but this is not the mood in which he dwells.
Again: while it is for the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it
is the poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the
great creative poets, in Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe, how infinite
the swarm of persons, the multitude of forms! But with Emerson the
type is important, the common element. "In youth we are mad for
persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical
nature appearing through them all." "The same--the same!" he exclaims
in his essay on _Plato_. "Friend and foe are of one stuff; the
plowman, the plow, and the furrow are of one stuff." And this is the
thought in _Brahma_:
"They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly I am the wings:
I am the doubter find the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings."
It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this altitude toward
"persons" descending to the composition of a novel or a play. Emerson
showed, indeed, a fine power of character-analysis in his _English
Traits_ and _Representative Men_ and in his memoirs of Thoreau and
Margaret Fuller. There is even a sort of dramatic humor in his
portrait of Socrates. But upon the whole he stands midway between
constructive artists, whose instinct it is to tell a story or sing a
song, and philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a
system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir
Thomas Browne is the best English example. He set a high value upon
Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a
resemblance. Browne's saying, for example, "All things are artificial,
for nature is the art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship,
for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close. He
was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought of the
highest spirituality. "Hitch your wagon to a star" is a good instance
of his favorite manner.
Emerson's verse often seems careless in technique. Most of his pieces
are scrappy and have the air of runic rimes, or little oracular
"voicings"--as they say at Concord--in rhythmic shape, of single
thoughts on "Worship," "Character," "Heroism," "Art," "Politics,"
"Culture," etc. The content is the important thing, and the form is
too frequently awkward or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the
clear-obscure of Emerson's poetry the deep wisdom of the thought finds
its most natural expression in the imaginative simplicity of the
language. But though this artlessness in him became too frequently in
his imitators, like Thoreau and Ellery Channing, an obtruded
simplicity, among his own poems are many that leave nothing to be
desired in point of wording and of verse. His _Hymn Sung at the
Completion of the Concord Monument_, in 1836, is the perfect model of
an occasional poem. Its lines were on every one's lips at the time of
the centennial celebrations in 1876, and "the shot heard round the
world" has hardly echoed farther than the song which chronicled it.
Equally current is the stanza from _Voluntaries_:
"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'
The youth replies, 'I can.'"
So, too, the famous lines from the _Problem_:
"The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity.
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;
The conscious stone to beauty grew."
The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was Henry David Thoreau, "the
poet-naturalist." After his graduation from Harvard College, in 1837,
Thoreau engaged in school-teaching and in the manufacture of
lead-pencils, but soon gave up all regular business and devoted himself
to walking, reading, and the study of nature. He was at one time
private tutor in a family on Staten Island, and he supported himself
for a season by doing odd jobs in land-surveying for the farmers about
Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own hands, a small cabin on the
banks of Walden Pond, near Concord, and lived there in seclusion for
two years. His expenses during these years were nine cents a day, and
he gave an account of his experiment in his most characteristic book,
_Walden_, published in 1854. His _Week on the Concord and Merrimac
Rivers_ appeared in 1849. From time to time he went farther afield,
and his journeys were reported in _Cape Cod_, the _Maine Woods_,
_Excursions_, and _A Yankee in Canada_, all of which, as well as a
volume of _Letters_ and _Early Spring in Massachusetts_, have been
given to the public since his death, which happened in 1862. No one
has lived so close to nature, and written of it so intimately, as
Thoreau. His life was a lesson in economy and a sermon on Emerson's
text, "Lessen your denominator." He wished to reduce existence to the
simplest terms--to
"live all alone
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweet
Constantly eat."
He had a passion for the wild, and seems like an Anglo-Saxon reversion
to the type of the Red Indian. The most distinctive note in Thoreau is
his inhumanity. Emerson spoke of him as a "perfect piece of stoicism."
"Man," said Thoreau, "is only the point on which I stand." He strove
to realize the objective life of nature--nature in its aloofness from
man; to identify himself, with the moose and the mountain. He
listened, with his ear close to the ground, for the voice of the earth.
"What are the trees saying?" he exclaimed. Following upon the trail of
the lumberman, he asked the primeval wilderness for its secret, and
"saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
The slight linnaea hang its twin-born heads."
He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom the meaning
of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in their indifference to the
shipwrecked bodies that they rolled ashore. "After sitting in my
chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy
morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a
nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. None
of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the
woodland depths. I had seen the red election-birds brought from their
recesses on my comrade's string, and fancied that their plumage would
assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in
proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the
forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any
poet's string."
It was on the mystical side that Thoreau apprehended transcendentalism.
Mysticism has been defined as the soul's recognition of its identity
with nature. This thought lies plainly in Schelling's philosophy, and
he illustrated it by his famous figure of the magnet. Mind and nature
are one; they are the positive and negative poles of the magnet. In
man, the Absolute--that is, God--becomes conscious of himself; makes of
himself, as nature, an object to himself as mind. "The souls of men,"
said Schelling, "are but the innumerable individual eyes with which our
infinite World-Spirit beholds himself." This thought is also clearly
present in Emerson's view of nature, and has caused him to be accused
of pantheism. But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine that the
underlying principle of the universe is matter or force, none of the
transcendentalists was a pantheist. In their view nature was divine.
Their poetry is always haunted by the sense of a spiritual reality
which abides beyond the phenomena. Thus in Emerson's _Two Rivers_:
"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,[1]
Repeats the music of the rain,
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee as thou through Concord plain.
"Thou in thy narrow banks art pent;
The stream I love unbounded goes;
Through flood and sea and firmament,
Through light, through life, it forward flows.
"I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream,
Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
Through passion, thought, through power and dream."
This mood occurs frequently in Thoreau. The hard world of matter
becomes suddenly all fluent and spiritual, and he sees himself in
it--sees God. "This earth," he cries, "which is spread out like a map
around me, is but the lining of my inmost soul exposed." "In _me_ is
the sucker that I see;" and, of Walden Pond,
"I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o'er."
"Suddenly old Time winked at me--ah, you know me, you rogue--and news
had come that IT was well. That ancient universe is in such capital
health, I think, undoubtedly, it will never die. . . . I see, smell,
taste, hear, feel that ever-lasting something to which we are allied,
at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." It was
something ulterior that Thoreau sought in nature. "The other world,"
he wrote, "is all my art: my pencils will draw no other; my jack-knife
will cut nothing else." Thoreau did not scorn, however, like Emerson,
to "examine too microscopically the universal tablet." He was a close
observer and accurate reporter of the ways of birds and plants and the
minuter aspects of nature. He has had many followers, who have
produced much pleasant literature on out-door life. But in none of
them is there that unique combination of the poet, the naturalist, and
the mystic which gives his page its wild original flavor. He had the
woodcraft of a hunter and the eye of a botanist, but his imagination
did not stop short with the fact. The sound of a tree falling in the
Maine woods was to him "as though a door had shut somewhere in the damp
and shaggy wilderness." He saw small things in cosmic relations. His
trip down the tame Concord has for the reader the excitement of a
voyage of exploration into far and unknown regions. The river just
above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood "when the wind blows freshly
on a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober
billows," was like Lake Huron, "and you may run aground on Cranberry
Island," and "get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the
North-west coast." He said that most of the phenomena described in
Kane's voyages could be observed in Concord.
The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of the stars in
a winter night, keen and cold and high. It had the pale cast of
thought, and was almost too spiritual and remote to "hit the sense of
mortal sight." But it was at least indigenous. If not an American
literature--not national and not inclusive of all sides of American
life--it was, at all events, a genuine New England literature and true
to the spirit of its section. The tough Puritan stock had at last put
forth a blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of English
soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring compares
with the cowslips and daisies of old England.
In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), the greatest American romancer,
came to Concord. He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been
married, and with his bride he settled down in the "Old Manse" for
three paradisaical years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and
this sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose banks it
was passed, is given in the introductory chapter to his _Mosses from an
Old Manse_, 1846, and in the more personal and confidential records of
his _American Note Books_, posthumously published. Hawthorne was
thirty-eight when he took his place among the Concord literati. His
childhood and youth had been spent partly at his birthplace, the old
and already somewhat decayed sea-port town of Salem, and partly at his
grandfather's farm on Sebago Lake, in Maine, then on the edge of the
primitive forest. Maine did not become a State, indeed, until 1820,
the year before Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, whence he was
graduated in 1825, in the same class with Henry W. Longfellow and one
year behind Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States.
After leaving college Hawthorne buried himself for years in the
seclusion of his home at Salem. His mother, who was early widowed, had
withdrawn entirely from the world. For months at a time Hawthorne kept
his room, seeing no other society than that of his mother and sisters,
reading all sorts of books and writing wild tales, most of which he
destroyed as soon as he had written them. At twilight he would emerge
from the house for a solitary ramble through the streets of the town or
along the sea-side. Old Salem had much that was picturesque in its
associations. It had been the scene of the witch trials in the
seventeenth century, and it abounded in ancient mansions, the homes of
retired whalers and India merchants. Hawthorne's father had been a
ship captain, and many of his ancestors had followed the sea. One of
his forefathers, moreover, had been a certain Judge Hawthorne, who in
1691 had sentenced several of the witches to death. The thought of
this affected Hawthorne's imagination with a pleasing horror, and he
utilized it afterward in his _House of the Seven Gables_. Many of the
old Salem houses, too, had their family histories, with now and then
the hint of some obscure crime or dark misfortune which haunted
posterity with its curse till all the stock died out or fell into
poverty and evil ways, as in the Pyncheon family of Hawthorne's
romance. In the preface to the _Marble Faun_ Hawthorne wrote: "No
author without a trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a
romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no
mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but a
commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight." And yet it may
be doubted whether any environment could have been found more fitted to
his peculiar genius than this of his native town, or any preparation
better calculated to ripen the faculty that was in him than these long,
lonely years of waiting and brooding thought. From time to time he
contributed a story or a sketch to some periodical, such as S. G.
Goodrich's annual, the _Token_, or the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. Some
of these attracted the attention of the judicious; but they were
anonymous and signed by various _noms de plume_, and their author was
at this time--to use his own words--"the obscurest man of letters in
America." In 1828 he had issued anonymously and at his own expense a
short romance, entitled _Fanshawe_. It had little success, and copies
of the first edition are now exceedingly rare. In 1837 he published a
collection of his magazine pieces under the title, _Twice-Told Tales_.
The book was generously praised in the _North American Review_ by his
former classmate, Longfellow; and Edgar Poe showed his keen critical
perception by predicting that the writer would easily put himself at
the head of imaginative literature in America if he would discard
allegory, drop short stories, and compose a genuine romance. Poe
compared Hawthorne's work with that of the German romancer, Tieck, and
it is interesting to find confirmation of this dictum in passages of
the _American Note Books_, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over
Tieck with a German dictionary. The _Twice-Told Tales_ are the work of
a recluse, who makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his own heart,
acquired by a habit of introspection, but who has had little contact
with men. Many of them were shadowy, and others were morbid and
unwholesome. But their gloom was of an interior kind, never the
physically horrible of Poe. It arose from weird psychological
situations like that of _Ethan Brand_ in his search for the
unpardonable sin. Hawthorne was true to the inherited instinct of
Puritanism; he took the conscience for his theme, and in these early
tales he was already absorbed in the problem of evil, the subtle ways
in which sin works out its retribution, and the species of fate or
necessity that the wrong-doer makes for himself in the inevitable
sequences of his crime. Hawthorne was strongly drawn toward symbols
and types, and never quite followed Poe's advice to abandon allegory.
The _Scarlet Letter_ and his other romances are not, indeed, strictly
allegories, since the characters are men and women and not mere
personifications of abstract qualities. Still, they all have a certain
allegorical tinge. In the _Marble Faun_, for example, Hilda, Kenyon,
Miriam, and Donatello have been ingeniously explained as
personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, the
imagination, and the senses. Without going so far as this, it is
possible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other creations something
typical and representative. He uses his characters like algebraic
symbols to work out certain problems with; they are rather more and yet
rather less than flesh and blood individuals. The stories in
_Twice-Told Tales_ and in the second collection, _Mosses from an Old
Manse_, 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later work. Thus
the _Minister's Black Veil_ is a sort of anticipation of Arthur
Dimmesdale in the _Scarlet Letter_. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held
the position of surveyor of the Custom House of Salem. In the preface
to the _Scarlet Letter_ he sketched some of the government officials
with whom this office had brought him into contact in a way that gave
some offense to the friends of the victims and a great deal of
amusement to the public. Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, like
Irving's, but less genial and with a more satiric edge to it. The book
last named was written at Salem and published in 1850, just before its
author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland Newport, but then an
unfashionable resort among the Berkshire hills. Whatever obscurity may
have hung over Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dissolved by this
powerful tale, which was as vivid in coloring as the implication of its
title. Hawthorne chose for his background the somber life of the early
settlers of New England. Ho had always been drawn toward this part of
American history, and in _Twice-Told Tales_ had given some
illustrations of it in _Endicott's Red Cross_ and _Legends of the
Province House_. Against this dark foil moved in strong relief the
figures of Hester Prynne, the woman taken in adultery; her paramour,
the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale; her husband, old Roger Chillingworth; and
her illegitimate child. In tragic power, in its grasp of the
elementary passions of human nature and its deep and subtle insight
into the inmost secrets of the heart, this is Hawthorne's greatest
book. He never crowded his canvas with figures. In the _Blithedale
Romance_ and the _Marble Faun_ there is the same _parti carré_ or group
of four characters. In the _House of the Seven Gables_ there are five.
The last mentioned of these, published in 1852, was of a more subdued
intensity than the _Scarlet Letter_, but equally original, and, upon
the whole, perhaps equally good. The _Blithedale Romance_, published
in the same year, though not strikingly inferior to the others, adhered
more to conventional patterns in its plot and in the sensational nature
of its ending. The suicide of the heroine by drowning, and the
terrible scene of the recovery of her body, were suggested to the
author by an experience of his own on Concord River, the account of
which, in his own words, may be read in Julian Hawthorne's _Nathaniel
Hawthorne and His Wife_. In 1852 Hawthorne returned to Concord and
bought the "Wayside" property, which he retained until his death. But
in the following year his old college friend Pierce, now become
President, appointed him consul to Liverpool, and he went abroad for
seven years. The most valuable fruit of his foreign residence was the
romance of the _Marble Faun_, 1860, the longest of his fictions and the
richest in descriptive beauty. The theme of this was the development
of the soul through the experience of sin. There is a haunting mystery
thrown about the story, like a soft veil of mist, veiling the beginning
and the end. There is even a delicate teasing suggestion of the
preternatural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation as original as
Shakespeare's Caliban or Fouque's Undine, and yet quite on this side
the border-line of the human. _Our Old Home_, a book of charming
papers on England, was published in 1863. Manifold experience of life
and contact with men, affording scope for his always keen observation,
had added range, fullness, warmth to the imaginative subtlety which had
manifested itself even in his earliest tales. Two admirable books for
children, the _Wonder Book_ and _Tanglewood Tales_, in which the
classical mythologies were retold, should also be mentioned in the list
of Hawthorne's writings, as well as the _American_, _English_, and
_Italian Note Books_, the first of which contains the seed-thoughts of
some of his finished works, together with hundreds of hints for plots,
episodes, descriptions, etc., which he never found time to work out.
Hawthorne's style, in his first sketches and stories a little stilted
and "bookish," gradually acquired an exquisite perfection, and is as
well worth study as that of any prose classic in the English tongue.
Hawthorne was no transcendentalist. He dwelt much in a world of ideas,
and he sometimes doubted whether the tree on the bank or its image in
the stream were the more real. But this had little in common with the
philosophical idealism of his neighbors. He reverenced Emerson, and he
held kindly intercourse--albeit a silent man and easily bored--with
Thoreau and Ellery Channing, and even with Margaret Fuller. But his
sharp eyes saw whatever was whimsical or weak in the apostles of the
new faith. He had little enthusiasm for causes or reforms, and among
so many Abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and even wrote a campaign
life of his friend Pierce.
The village of Concord has perhaps done more for American literature
than the city of New York. Certainly there are few places where
associations, both patriotic and poetic, cluster so thickly. At one
side of the grounds of the Old Manse--which has the river at its
back--runs down a shaded lane to the Concord monument and the figure of
the Minute Man and the successor of "the rude bridge that arched the
flood." Scarce two miles away, among the woods, is little
Walden--"God's drop." The men who made Concord famous are asleep in
Sleepy Hollow, yet still their memory prevails to draw seekers after
truth to the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, which met annually, a
few years since, to reason high of "God, Freedom, and Immortality,"
next door to the "Wayside," and under the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne
wore a path as he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks.
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. _Nature_. _The American Scholar_. _Literary
Ethics_. _The Transcendentalism_. _The Over-soul_. _Address before
the Cambridge Divinity School_. _English Traits_. _Representative
Men_. _Poems_.
2. Henry David Thoreau. _Excursions_. _Walden_. _A Week on the
Concord and Merrimac Rivers_. _Cape Cod_. _The Maine Woods_.
3. Nathaniel Hawthorne. _Mosses from an Old Manse_. _The Scarlet
Letter_. _The House of the Seven Gables_. _The Blithedale Romance_.
_The Marble Faun_. _Our Old Home_.
4. _Transcendentalism in New England_. By O. B. Frothingham. New
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1875.
[1]The Indian name of Concord River.