THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
With the passing of Irving, Cooper, and Bryant the leadership in
American letters was lost to New York. Indeed, by 1850, while all
this trio were living, four men in eastern Massachusetts were in full
career,--Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier; and before the
death of Irving, in 1859, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Holmes came into
their full powers. The New Yorkers had done a very distinguished work.
The two prose writers in particular had shown talents of which their
countrymen could be proud and had introduced the New World to the Old.
Yet, though their fame was destined to live, their influence on other
authors was bound to die with them because they both were looking
backward. The roots of these men were struck deep in the eighteenth
century. Cooper's strength lay in his ability to write stories of
the romantic past. Even when he brought them up to date, as in "The
Pioneer" and "The Prairie," he presented the decline of a passing type
of American life. When he wrote of the present pointing to the future,
as in "Homeward Bound" and "Home as Found," he was filled with distress
and alarm. He was bred in the traditions of aristocracy; he believed
in the theories of democracy, but he was very much afraid that they
would not turn out well in practice. Irving was a gentleman of the old
school. He was loyal to the ideals of his country and confident of its
future, but he was fascinated by the traditions of England and Europe.
When he wrote of the weaknesses of his city and his fellow-citizens he
cast his gentle satires into the form made popular by two Englishmen
of a bygone day, and limited himself, as they had done, to commenting
on customs, manners, recreations--the external habits of daily life.
Of the three Bryant was the only modern man. His later life was finely
admirable; but, though his thinking was wise and just, he influenced
men less as a thinker than as a stalwart citizen. The New Yorkers, in a
word, all wrote as men who were educated in the world of action; they
were almost untouched by the deeper currents of human thought which in
the nineteenth century were to make great changes in the world.
In 1821, the year of the fifth edition of "The Sketch Book" and "The
Spy" and Bryant's first volume, there was growing up in the quieter
surroundings of Boston a generation of New England boys with a
different training. They all went to and through college, most of them
to Harvard, and after college they set to reading philosophy. Many of
them came from a long line of Puritan ancestry, as Bryant did. Unlike
Bryant several of them felt a distrust and dislike for the sternness
of the old creeds. Yet they had the strength of Puritan character in
them and the born habit of thinking deeply on "the things that are not
seen and eternal." What was new in them was that they were prepared to
think independently and to come to their own conclusions. The reading
of these boys was no longer chiefly in Pope, Addison, and Goldsmith.
It was in the great English writers who were just arriving at
fame--Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle--or in the French and German
philosophers.
In the Concord group--Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne--the contrast
with the New Yorkers is particularly striking. They were anything but
men of the world. When they began to write they stayed in the seclusion
of little villages and waited patiently. They matured slowly. Emerson
was past middle life before America heeded him; Hawthorne was forty-six
at the time of his first marked success; Thoreau's fame did not come
till after his death. They were not "team workers." Emerson was a
clergyman for a short while, but retired in the very year when Bryant
began his long service with the _Evening Post_; Hawthorne was a recluse
for fourteen years after college and then held positions reluctantly
for only half of his remaining life; Thoreau never put on the harness.
They were not swept into the current of city life,--"warped out of
their own orbits,"--but, instead, they made Concord, whose "chief
product" was literature, more famous than any center of shipping or
banking or manufacture.
"Concord is a little town," Emerson wrote in his Journal, "and yet has
its honors. We get our handful of every ton that comes to the city."
In his address at the two hundredth anniversary he dwelt on his pride
in its history and character. He traced the earliest settlement, the
partitioning of the land, the events leading up to the Revolution,
and, in the presence of some of the aged survivors, the firing by the
embattled farmers of "the shot heard round the world" in 1775. The
institution in Concord that most appealed to him was the town meeting,
where the whole body of voters met to transact the public business. The
meetings of those two hundred years had witnessed much that was petty,
but on the whole they had made for good.
It is the consequence of this institution that not a school-house, a
public pew, a bridge, a pound, a mill-dam hath been set up, or pulled
down, or altered, or bought, or sold, without the whole population
of this town having a voice in the affair. A general contentment is
the result. And the people truly feel that they are lords of the
soil. In every winding road, in every stone fence, in the smokes of
the poor-house chimney, in the clock on the church, they read their
own power, and consider at leisure the wisdom and error of their
judgments.
Emerson noted that the English government had recently given to certain
American libraries copies of a splendid edition of the "Domesday Book"
and other ancient public records of England. A suitable return gift, he
thought, would be the printed records of Concord, not simply because
Concord was Concord but because Concord was America. "Tell them the
Union has twenty-four states, and Massachusetts is one. Tell them that
Massachusetts has three-hundred towns, and Concord is one; that in
Concord are five hundred rateable polls [that is, taxable voters] and
every one has an equal vote." In closing his address Emerson gave his
reason for choosing when thirty-one years old to come back to "the
fields of his fathers" and spend his life there.
I believe this town to have been the dwelling place at all times
since its planting of pious and excellent persons, who walked meekly
through the paths of common life, who served God, and loved man,
and never let go the hope of immortality. The benediction of their
prayers, and of their principles lingers around us.
In the Journal he carries this general indorsement down to particulars
that would have been out of place in a public memorial address.
Perhaps in the village we have manners to paint which the city life
does not know. Here we have Mr. S., who is man enough to turn away
the butcher, who cheats in weight, and introduces another into
town. The other neighbors couldn't take such a step.... There is
the hero who will not subscribe to the flag-staff, or the engine,
though all say it is mean. There is the man who gives his dollar,
but refuses to give his name, though all other contributors are set
down. There is Mr. H., who never loses his spirits, though always in
the minority.... Here is Mr. C., who says "honor bright," and keeps
it so. Here is Mr. S., who warmly assents to whatever proposition
you please to make, and Mr. M., who roundly tells you he will have
nothing to do with the thing. Here, too, are not to be forgotten our
two companies, the Light Infantry and the Artillery, who brought up
one the Brigade Band and one the Brass Band from Boston, set the
musicians side by side under the great tree on the Common, and let
them play two tunes and jangle and drown each other, and presently
got the companies into active hustling and kicking.
Thus Concord was a little community with a noble and dignified past and
at the same time with the homely virtues, oddities, and weaknesses of a
New England village. In these respects it was a fit dwelling place for
the man who made it famous, for they were like the town in being both
finely idealistic and very human. The contrast with the New York of
these same years is vivid (see pp. 110, 113, 190 et al.).
Centering about Concord, but by no means located within it, was
a "Transcendental Movement" of which Emerson is considered the
chief exponent. When the proper nouns "Transcendentalist" and
"Transcendentalism" are used they are made to refer to this movement
in eastern Massachusetts. In any critical sense, however, the thing
that they stood for was only an expression of world thought and was
one of the many out-croppings of the movement toward independence of
spirit which had been developing for generations. The refusal of the
nineteenth-century mind to submit to a philosophy which limited man's
faith to the knowledge derived through the senses had already brought
about in Germany, France, and England a reaction which insisted on the
right of man to believe much which he could not prove. Thus developed
transcendentalism, a system of thought "based on the assumption of
certain fundamental truths not derived from experience, not susceptible
of proof, which transcend human life, and are perceived directly and
intuitively by the human mind."
This stood in complete contrast with the faith of the Puritans and yet
in strong resemblance to it. Like the Calvinists the Transcendentalists
proceeded from a set of assumptions rather than a set of facts, but
unlike the Calvinists the Transcendentalists drew these assumptions
from their own inner conviction instead of from a set of dogmas which
had been distorted out of the Scriptures. They believed in God, and
they found his clearest expression in the spirit of man and in the
natural surroundings in which God had placed him. They believed that
in each man was a spark of divinity. They were assailed because they
did not acknowledge an utter difference between Jesus Christ and the
average man, though their sin lay not in degrading Christ to the level
of man, but in exalting man potentially to the level of Christ. They
insisted that it was the duty of each individual to develop the best
that was in him on earth, thinking more of the life here than of the
life hereafter. They were inspired by the love of God rather than
threatened by his wrath, and so they "substituted for a dogmatic dread
an illimitable hope."
Fortunately for the influence of this group they inherited the sound
qualities of Puritan character. They therefore did not lay themselves
open to attack on account of any wild vagaries of conduct. Emerson
was a saint, Thoreau an ascetic, Bronson Alcott a pure philosopher,
Theodore Parker a great preacher and reformer, Margaret Fuller a
high-minded woman of letters, and the scores of their associates just
as devoted to a high religious ideal as any equal number of the early
Pilgrims.
Two undertakings chiefly focused the group activity of the
Transcendentalists. The first of these was the _Dial_, a quarterly
publication which ran for sixteen numbers, 1840-1844. The so-called
Transcendental Club, an informal group of kindred spirits, came
toward the end of the thirties to the point where they felt the need
of an "organ" of their own. After much discussion they undertook the
publication of this journal of one hundred and twenty-eight pages
to an issue. For the first two years it was under the editorship of
Margaret Fuller. When her strength failed under this extra voluntary
task, Emerson, with the help of Thoreau, took charge for the remaining
two years. Its paid circulation was very small, never reaching two
hundred and fifty, and finally, when in the hands of its third set of
publishers, it had to be discontinued, Emerson personally meeting the
final small deficit. It contained chiefly essays of a philosophical
nature, but included in every issue a rather rare body of verse.
The essays reflected and expounded German thought and literature
and oriental thought, and discussed problems of art, literature,
and philosophy. The section given to critical reviews is extremely
interesting for its quick response to the new writings which later
years have proved and accepted. Possibly the nearest analogy of to-day
to the old _Dial_ is the _Hibbert Journal_,--the first journal of its
kind to achieve an international circulation and self-support. _The
Dial_ is in a way the literary journal or diary of the Transcendental
Movement in America from 1840 to 1844.
The other undertaking associated with the Transcendentalists is less
formally their own venture. This was the Brook Farm Institute of
Agriculture and Education in West Roxbury, nine miles out from Boston.
It was financially the undertaking of a small group of stockholders of
whom the Reverend George Ripley was the chief and Nathaniel Hawthorne
the man of widest later fame. It was an attempt at the start to combine
"plain living and high thinking," the theory being that the group could
do their own work and pursue their own intellectual life. During the
first three years, from 1841 to 1844, it was carried on as a quiet
assembling of idealists who were withdrawing slightly from the hubbub
of the world. Agriculture was supplemented by several other simple
industries, a school was successfully maintained, and the people who
lived there were viewed and visited with interest by many who looked
on in sympathetic amusement. The number of actual residents never
exceeded one hundred and fifty. Of the leading Transcendentalists
Margaret Fuller was the only one to settle. Parker was occupied with
his multitudinous duties at Boston; Thoreau attempted his own solution
at Walden; Alcott was at his short-lived and ill-fated Fruitlands;
and Emerson stayed in Concord with the comment: "I do not wish to
remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger.... I have
not yet conquered my own house. It irks and repents me. Shall I raise
the siege of this hen coop, and march baffled away to a pretended
siege of Babylon?" In the latter half of its life Brook Farm was drawn
into the communistic movement which the French philosopher Charles
Fourier had elaborated, and was made the first "phalanx" in America.
With this movement its whole nature changed, as it became a part of
a great social project with a mission to transform the world. An
ambitious central building was erected in 1846, and by an irony of
fate the uninsured "phalanstery" was burned down at the very moment
when its completion was being celebrated. This last financial burden
broke the back of the enterprise, which was discontinued in 1847. It is
significant of Brook Farm that however unqualified a material failure
it was, it served as a gathering spot for a group of idealists who
never ceased to recall their life on the Farm as a happy and fruitful
experience.
BOOK LIST
=_General References_=
=Bibliography=
In GODDARD, H. C. Studies in New England Transcendentalism.
1908. See also Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol.
I, pp. 546-549.
=_History and Criticism_=
COOKE, G. W. Poets of Transcendentalism: an Anthology with
Introductory Essay. 1903.
EMERSON, R. W. The Transcendentalist, in _Nature, Addresses and
Lectures_.
FROTHINGHAM, O. B. Transcendentalism in New England, a History.
1876.
GODDARD, H. C. Studies in New England Transcendentalism. 1908.
PARKER, THEODORE. Transcendentalism: a Lecture. 1876.
=_Special Biographies_=
=Alcott, A. B.=
SANBORN, F. B. Bronson Alcott at Alcott House, England, and
Fruitlands, New England, 1842-1844. 1908.
SANBORN, F. B. and HARRIS, WM. T. A. Bronson Alcott: his Life
and Philosophy. 1893. 2 vols.
=Emerson, R. W.=
See Book List, chap. xiv.
=Fuller, Margaret=
EMERSON, R. W., CHANNING, W. H., and CLARKE, J. F. Memoirs of
Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 1852. 2 vols.
HIGGINSON, T. W. Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 1884.
HOWE, JULIA WARD. Margaret Fuller (Marchesa Ossoli). 1883.
=Parker, Theodore=
FROTHINGHAM, O. B. Theodore Parker: a Biography. 1874.
WEISS, JOHN. Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker. 1864. 2
vols.
=Ripley, George=
FROTHINGHAM, O. B. George Ripley. _(A.M.L. Ser_.) 1882.
=Thoreau, Henry David=
See Book List, chap. xiv.
=_The Dial_=
The standard work is by G. W. Cooke. An Historical and Biographical
Introduction to accompany _The Dial_ as reprinted in Numbers for
the Rowfant Club, Cleveland. 1902. 2 vols.
_The Dial_: a Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion,
Vols. I-IV. 1840-1844. Reprinted by the Rowfant Club of Cleveland,
1900-1903.
=_Brook Farm_=
The standard work is by Lindsay Swift. Brook Farm: its Members,
Scholars, and Visitors. 1900. (Contains bibliography.)
CODMAN, J. T. Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs. 1894.
COOKE, G. W. John Sullivan Dwight, Brook-Farmer, Editor, and Critic
of Music. 1898.
FROTHINGHAM, O. B. George Ripley. 1882. (_A. M. L. Ser._)
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL. The Blithedale Romance. 1852.
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL. Passages from the American Notebooks. 1868. 2
vols.