The young man just turned twenty-six who thus marked out the path

he was to follow for thirty-five years was an extraordinarily

single-minded and rugged character. His like has too rarely appeared in

America. Arrogant, dictatorial, intolerant, he might be, as his warmest

friends admitted; but it is a foolish judgment that will dismiss him

thus. Unyielding as granite, sheer Yankee will driven by a passionate

energy, he was born for hazardous leadership. He was a man utterly

unacquainted with fear. Lied about daily, threatened, bullied, charged

with every sin in the Decalogue and every crime on the statute-book, he

could not be coerced nor intimidated nor turned aside from his purpose.

An ascetic who cared nothing for ease or preferment; a pacifist who

fought only with the sword of the spirit; a stern moralist prophesying

wrath upon a nation of mockers, and pronouncing doom upon a people

that had forgotten God, he was an agitator fashioned after the ancient

Hebraic pattern. The stature of such a man cannot be measured by

conventional standards. Outwardly a somewhat prosaic Baptist, deeply

religious and in his younger days bigotedly orthodox, he was in reality

a spiritual child of the Old Testament, a modern Puritan on whom had

fallen the mantle of the Prophets. New England Calvinism never bred so

Puritan a soul. Hebraism was in his marrow--its noble austerity, its

consuming passion. He daily walked with righteousness and communed

with conscience. He carried God’s scales into the market place. He

would not accept his law of men. Constitutions and statutes were vain

and foolish pronouncements to him if he judged them to be contrary to

the divine enactments. He counted property in negroes and cotton as

nothing when weighed in the balance of justice. A human soul, whether

in black skin or white, was of far greater worth in his eyes than all

the warring kingdoms of this world. As fully as John Humphrey Noyes he

reëmbodied the root-and-branch righteousness of English Commonwealth

times. Others might lash the sins of his generation with whips; he

would scourge them with nettles and scorpions. He would raise such a

clamor about men’s ears that the drowsiest must awake. He would light

such a fire in the slave market of America that the evil thing should

be consumed as stubble in the white flame of righteousness.

Such primitive Hebraism, quite evidently, is calculated to make

troublesome citizens who are certain to get themselves heartily

disliked by those who approve of the world as it is. Any invasion of

the devil’s realms will create an uproar, for the devil is prompt

to defend his own. Righteousness may prophesy in the gates, but the

buying and selling of the poor goes on as usual. Amongst comfortable

folk conscience is rarely at home when justice knocks at the door;

it is gone a-visiting, or is busy, or is waiting upon Caesar, or is

gone forth to pray. Comfortable folk do not like clamor, even from

the prophets, and are content to leave justice to God with the hope

that He will not disturb business. If the tithes are duly paid, it is

a mean and censorious God that will ask how the money was got. Hence

comfortable folk, north as well as south, did not like Garrison; and

not liking him they were zealous to damn him. He was made out to be

a bogy man, busily engaged in stirring up Nat Turner insurrections,

inciting peaceful and contented slaves to discontent, flouting the

Constitution and seeking to disrupt the Union. His righteousness was so

great a stumbling-block that he was held to be an atheist by eminent

formalists who knew of righteousness only by hearsay, and learned

of God only from report. It was reckoned to him a major sin that he

forgot his manners, for must not the Lord’s work be carried on in

seemly fashion, and the money-changers be scourged from the temple

politely? “The first movement here at the North, was a rank onset

and explosion,” said the eminent Dr. Bushnell. “The first sin of this

organization was a sin of ill manners. They did not go to work like

Christian gentlemen.... The great convention which met at Philadelphia

drew up a declaration of their sentiments ... by which they willfully

and boorishly cast off the whole South from them” (Garrison, _William

Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, p. 132, Note). What could be done with

a fellow who insisted that the devil is rarely put in a quake by

courteous treatment, and who had never learned that the Hebrew prophets

bore themselves like Christian gentlemen? That he spoke with plebeian

directness was unquestionably true.

These are your men of “caution,” and “prudence,” and

“judiciousness” [he exclaimed in a speech at Philadelphia, May 14,

1838]. Sir, I have learned to hate those words. Whenever we attempt

to imitate our great Exemplar, and press the truth of God, in all

its plainness, upon the conscience, why, we are very imprudent;

because, forsooth, a great excitement will ensue. Sir, slavery will

not be overthrown without excitement, a most tremendous excitement.

(_Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 215. Note.)

If clerical gentlemen disliked Garrison, gentlemen of State Street

disliked him much more heartily, and being the responsible custodians

of law and order, they upheld existing institutions in their own way.

Your Tory is always a Fascist at heart, and the Boston Tories naturally

adopted the principle of direct action. Unpleasant things happened

to Garrison in consequence. He was denounced at a most respectable

meeting in Faneuil Hall, “at which Washington was cheered for being

a slave-holder.” He was mobbed in his print-shop by “gentlemen of

property and standing from all parts of the city,” and was thrown into

jail by a timid mayor to save his life. Not since the days of Tom Paine

had such unmeasured vituperation been poured out on the head of an

American. It would seem that it was a perilous business to defend the

downtrodden or to remind church-members of the injunction “to undo the

heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free.” When conscience throws

down the gauntlet to economics it is certain to get some hard knocks.

It is ill-trained for a rough and tumble contest; its scruples will

not permit it to hit below the belt. But the Tory suffers no handicap

of scruple and plants his blows where he can. On the occasion of an

Abolition convention announced to be held within the shadows of Wall

Street, Bennett’s _New York Herald_ exemplified the sweetness and

light of the commercial mind in such pronouncements as this:

What business have all the religious lunatics of the free states

to gather in this commercial city for purposes which, if carried

into effect, would ruin and destroy its prosperity?... Public

opinion should be regulated. These abolitionists should not be

allowed to misrepresent New York.... When free discussion does not

promote the public good, it has no more right to exist than a bad

government that is dangerous and oppressive to the common weal.

It should be overthrown. On the question of the usefulness to the

public of the packed, organized meetings of these abolitionists,

socialists, Sabbath-breakers, and anarchists, there can be but

one result arrived at by prudence and patriotism. They are

dangerous assemblies--calculated for mischief, and reasonable

in their character and purposes.... That half-a-dozen madmen

should manufacture opinion for the whole community, is not to be

tolerated. (_Ibid._, Vol. III, pp. 283-284.)

In consequence of which appeals to “prudence and patriotism” the

meeting was broken up, public opinion was judiciously regulated,

and the Bible and Constitution vindicated by a Bowery mob under the

leadership of a ward-heeler. It was from the impact of such ruthless

opposition that Garrison’s strategy took form; and it was direct and

uncompromising and outspoken--as sternly logical as Calhoun’s. There

were no shades in his thinking but only black and white, righteousness

and sin. Expediency was not in his vocabulary. He was as narrow as he

was intense. The catholic intellectual interests of the times touched

him but little. Transcendentalism lay quite outside his world of

thought. He was a religious soul rather than a speculative intellect,

and he measured all things by the principles of primitive Christianity.

As a young man he preferred the Calvinism of Lyman Beecher to the

Unitarianism of Channing, but later he came to perceive the intimate

relation between the major premises of Unitarianism and his social

ideals. It is idle to seek a political philosopher in a Hebrew

moralist. His somewhat naïve political conceptions were an amalgam of

French equalitarianism and Yankee perfectionism. The Declaration of

Independence was his one political textbook, in the light of which

he judged Congressional enactments and interpreted the Constitution.

With Channing he assumed an ethical sanction for natural rights, and

this assumption conducted straight to the doctrine of the higher law.

As early as 1830 his conscience was prepared to appeal from laws and

statutes to ethics, on the principle that “that which is not just is

not law.” By 1837 he had accepted the philosophy of spiritual anarchism

as set forth in the new gospel of perfectionism, and from this flowed

naturally the doctrines of Nullification and disunion.

With amazing frankness Garrison published his views to friends and

enemies, bringing all the hornets of conservatism about his ears. A

furious discussion arose within the Abolition ranks on the question of

loyalty to the political state, and the scandal of Garrison’s Fifth

Monarchy doctrine spread far. What that doctrine was he was at great

pains to make clear. Writing to Henry C. Wright on the Quaker doctrine

of non-resistance, he insisted on the sinfulness of all force whether

in a private or public capacity, and then asserted:

Human governments will remain in violent existence as long as men

are resolved not to bear the cross of Christ, and to be crucified

unto the world. But in the Kingdom of God’s dear Son, holiness and

love are the only magistracy. It has no swords, for they are beaten

into ploughshares--no spears, for they are changed into pruning

hooks--no military academy, for the saints cannot learn war any

more--no gibbet, for life is regarded as inviolate--no chains,

for all are free. And that kingdom is to be established upon the

earth, for the time is predicted when the kingdoms of this world

will become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. (Garrison,

_William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, p. 149.)

From such premises he deduced the conclusion that government is a cross

that God permits men to endure as punishment for their sins. When they

shall voluntarily quit their sins political government will cease.

Human governments “are the results of human disobedience to the

requirements of heaven; and they are better than anarchy just as a

hailstorm is preferable to an earthquake, or the small-pox to the

Asiatic cholera.” From the silence of the Bible as to the _form_ of

such governments, he inferred not that each might claim a divine

sanction, “but that the kingdom which Christ has established on

earth is ultimately to swallow up or radically to subvert all other

kingdoms.”... “Shall we, _as Christians_, applaud and do homage

to human government? or shall we not rather lay the axe at the

root of the tree, and attempt to destroy both cause and effect

together?” Foolish are the speculations about the best form of

human government: “What is government but the express image of the

moral character of a people?” (_Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 150-151.)

This is of course undiluted perfectionism, in which Garrison was

the most ardent of believers. Prosaic political theory had lost all

significance for him; he had got himself drunk on the new wine and was

in no mood to listen to the counsels of expediency. Like John Humphrey

Noyes he declared war upon the existing political state. He voluntarily

disfranchised himself. He raised the banner of “disloyalty” in the

_Liberator_, and summoned the Abolitionists to separate themselves

from the unclean government that protected the sin of slavery. That

the Constitution recognized the hateful system was sufficient proof to

Garrison that the Constitution itself was unclean. Let it be consumed

by its own iniquity. In 1843 he began an uncompromising attack upon

it by nailing to the masthead of the _Liberator_ his famous phrase,

“A Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell,” to which he soon

added the words, “No Union with Slaveholders.” He broke with many of

his oldest friends, with Whittier and Gerrit Smith and James Birney,

assailing them bitterly for meddling with third-party movements in

the hope of curing the evil by political action. There followed,

in consequence, a whirlwind and tempest of debate that brought a

disastrous schism upon the Abolition movement. Cries of disloyalty and

sedition filled all ears; but Garrison was indifferent to the storms

that gathered about his head. He would go forward though he went alone.

With every advance of the slave power his hatred of the Constitution,

under cover of which its advances were made, grew more bitter. He

outran southern fire eaters in advocacy of Nullification and secession.

It became his daily work to undo the labors of Webster and bring the

fundamental law into common contempt. The doctrine of no compromise

with sin made no account of the complexities of social problems--the

immediate, root-and-branch eradication of slavery or immediate

dissolution of the Union, were his alternatives. “We dissolved the

Union by a handsome vote, after a warm debate,” wrote Edmund Quincy

in 1843; “the question was ... wrapped up by Garrison in some of his

favorite Old Testament Hebraisms by way of vehicle, as the apothecaries

say” (_ibid._, Vol. III, p. 88).

It was at a Fourth of July meeting, following the Anthony Burns affair

of 1854, that Garrison made use of the striking appeal that attests his

extraordinary boldness and skill as an agitator. After contrasting the

principles of the Declaration of Independence and the present state of

the Republic, he went on:

He should now proceed to perform an action which would be the

testimony of his own soul, to all present, of the estimation in

which he held the pro-slavery laws and deeds of the nation.

Producing a copy of the _Fugitive Slave Law_, he set fire to it,

and burnt it to ashes. Using an old and well-known phrase, he said,

“And let all the people say, Amen”; and a unanimous cheer and shout

of “Amen” burst from the vast audience. In like manner Mr. Garrison

burned the decision of Edward G. Loring in the case of Anthony

Burns ... the multitude ratifying the fiery immolation with shouts

of applause. Then, holding up the U. S. Constitution, he branded it

as the source and parent of all the other atrocities,--“a covenant

with death and agreement with hell”--and consumed it to ashes on

the spot, exclaiming, “So perish all compromises with tyranny!

and let all the people say, Amen!” A tremendous shout of “Amen”

went up to heaven in ratification of the deed, mingled with a few

hisses and wrathful exclamations from some who were evidently in a

rowdyish state of mind, but who were at once cowed by the popular

feeling. (_Ibid._, Vol. III, p. 412.)

In such fashion did this disciple of the gospel of peace carry the

war into Macedonia. The law of conscience had come into collision

with the law of the land, and he followed conscience. For Garrison

majority votes held no mandate. He had come to regard the political

state as the mother of all mischiefs; for behind this thing of shreds

and patches he saw unscrupulous politicians whose profession was the

deceiving of simple minds, befogging moral issues with their myths and

cults--their appeals to patriotism and the Constitution--and bringing

the law of God into contempt. It was the spiritual bondage of the North

that held the negro in slavery, Garrison had come to believe, and to

free the conscience of the North was the great duty devolving upon the

Abolitionists. With his intense single-mindedness he saw no other duty,

and in doing that duty he would use no other weapon than the sword of

the spirit. It is fortunate, perhaps, that the prophet knows so little

of the resourcefulness of the market place on which he pronounces

judgment, or his zeal might suffer abatement. Slavery was not destroyed

by the conscience of Massachusetts, but by the economics of free

labor. The free-soilers were more dangerous to it for they fought with

material weapons; and old John Brown of Ossawatomie, more Hebraic even

than Garrison, was a sterner realist, who took care to load his Sharp’s

rifle while girding on the sword of the spirit. From the prophet to

the soldier is but a step, from the sword of the spirit to musket and

ball, from conscience to the Emancipation Proclamation. Single-minded

men--the Garrisons and John Browns--marshaling the discontent of

their generation, sometimes do succeed in removing mountains; but

unfortunately they leave a great scar, and the débris litters the

whole countryside. Other mountains may even arise from the waste of

the leveling. After the Emancipation Proclamation came the Fourteenth

Amendment, and out of that came the triumphant gospel of “due process

of law.” The devil understands the ways of the world too well to become

discouraged at a temporary set-back, for if righteousness succeed in

breaking the bonds that bind a generation, he knows that the market

place carries an ample stock of new cords to replace those that are

broken.

II • John G. Whittier • Puritan Quaker

If Garrison was the flintiest character amongst the militant

Abolitionists, Whittier was certainly the gentlest. Among many lovable

men he was perhaps the most lovable. Bred in a faith that had never

been dominant in New England, he escaped the induration that was the

price the New England conscience paid for its hard dogma. No thick

shell of Calvinism incrusted for him the soul of humanitarian religion.

In the Society of Friends righteousness was not daily twisted into

unloveliness, nor the beauty of holiness forgotten; and in consequence,

it was easier for him than for his Calvinist neighbors to fashion his

life upon the principles of the New Testament, and set Christ above the

Prophets.

Whittier’s family escaped many temptations by following quiet paths to

their own ends. Prosperity had never wooed the Massachusetts Quakers

away from the simple life, as it had done with so many Philadelphia

Friends, but a narrow domestic economy and social non-conformity

had nourished their religion of peace and good will. Long before

Channing discovered the religion of love in the teachings of French

humanitarianism, the early Quakers had found that primitive gospel in

the byways of Carolinian England, and had brought it to the new world.

There they had borne testimony in their daily lives to the excellence

of Christian fellowship, and there they had suffered the reproaches

and the blows of bigoted conformists. Their faith had been tried in

the fires of persecution, and the Society of Friends had justified

its use of that most excellent of sectarian names. In the sincerity

of their equalitarian fellowship the Quakers were the friends of

humanity, of the poor and the outcast of this world. Their religion

was of the week-day as well as the Sabbath. With its mystical doctrine

of the inner light--of the Holy Spirit that speaks directly to the

soul without the intermediation of priest or church--it unconsciously

spread the doctrine of democracy in an autocratic world. It interpreted

literally the principle that members of the Christian fellowship are

equals in the sight of God and in each other’s eyes--that on earth

there is neither high nor low but a common brotherhood in Christ.

It quietly set aside the pretentions of priestly hierarchies, and

substituted the principle that religion is a matter that lies with the

individual and God. Naturally a “hireling ministry” could not look

with favor on such doctrine, and the sharp hostility it aroused in

theocratic New England, sprang from the realization that the ideals

of the Quaker fellowship were dangerous to the ideals of a priestly

theocracy. The autocratic rulers of Massachusetts Bay could see little

good in the democracy of the Friends.

As became a Quietist, the master passion of Whittier’s life was

ethical. He was neither a transcendental nor a Utopian visionary, but a

primitive Christian, an apostle of good will and a friend of justice.

Sprung from a long line of New England yeomen, wholly of the soil,

simple in wants, quietly independent, he was the last lineal expression

in our literature of the primitive faith, the last authentic echo of

the spiritual democracy of the seventeenth century. A thorough Yankee

in character, the Yankee never dominated him. As a young man, to be

sure, he temporized with his Quakerism and dreamed fond dreams of

worldly ambition. The stirrings of youthful romance awakened the desire

to be a Byronic poet, and a Yankee knack with politics led him to

meddle with the hope of representing his district in Congress. He was

hand-in-glove with the time-serving Caleb Cushing, and the temptations

of political intrigue almost led to his backsliding; but he soon put

the devil behind him and gave security for his better behavior by

coming out for the cause of Abolitionism. That was the end of his hopes

of political preferment, and the more surely to burn his bridges he

published in 1833, at his own cost, a little Abolition tract entitled

_Justice and Expediency_, which was reissued by Lewis Tappan in a great

edition and scattered broadcast. The same year he attended as delegate

the National Anti-Slavery Convention at Philadelphia, and subscribed

his name to its pronouncement. Thenceforth for over thirty years he

gave his best strength to the cause, writing abundantly in prose and

verse, serving as editor of Abolition publications, and suffering the

unpleasant experiences common to the group, at one time being hunted by

a mob and stoned.

This deliberate alignment with an unpopular cause, this calm response

to the summons of conscience, was the fruit of his Quaker training.

It was no new experience for the Quaker to dissent. The Whittier

family had been Come-outers for generations, sacrificing material

well-being for their faith, and he had grown up in dissent. The long

struggle for democratic freedom in Massachusetts was a familiar story

to him. The record had come down by word of mouth and stories of

early persecutions were fireside tales in the Whittier household. His

ancestors had lived in the hard old Puritan theocracy, and yet detached

from it; and this detachment had rendered them shrewdly critical and

sensitive to injustice. With their quiet dissent from what the Quaker

conscience regarded as unrighteous, and their practical nullification

of unjust authority, Whittier was in full sympathy. His intimate

knowledge of early Massachusetts history had taught him certain things

which official historians had overlooked, the chief of which was that

dissent had been the ally and friend of freedom in New England. From

his youth up he had been a loving student of the old annals, of those

intimate narratives that preserve the voice and manner of the past;

and as he discovered how often persecution had left its stain on the

record, he was drawn to consider the superstitious aberrations of a

people supposedly devout. In middle life he gathered up in _Leaves from

Margaret Smith’s Journal of Massachusetts Bay, 1678-79_, materials that

he had long been collecting, and which, interpreted by a sympathetic

imagination, provides a surprisingly vivid account of life in New

England in the second generation.

All in all, it is Whittier’s most notable achievement in prose. Pieced

together out of old records, it is authentic as the yellow documents

from which it was drawn. The soft light of romance lies upon its

pages, sobered by historical fact and tempered by creative sympathy.

Loving yet critical, quite devastating at times in its implications,

it is an amazingly intimate narrative. The mind of Puritan New England

is uncovered in these unpretentious pages, and it does not show to

advantage. There was many a knot and seam in the old Puritan life,

much that was mean and ugly woven into the honest web. The Puritan

proneness to Quaker-baiting--aggravated to be sure by the ill manners

of the Ranters; their vulgar credulity that encouraged witch-hunting;

their callous treatment of the Indian and negro; their hardness of

nature that made them grasping and censorious: such knots and seams

in the Puritan character did not escape Whittier’s eye, but they

appear in the sketches of avaricious deacons, sour women, intolerant

magistrates--the Deacon Doles and Goody Lakes and Roger Endicotts,

whose bigotry tyrannized over the better natures of the community.

Whittier sifted his materials carefully to gather up what good wheat

there might be, yet the showing it must be confessed is but paltry.

Honest Robert Pine who will have none unjustly treated, good Mr.

Russ who counsels moderation in dealing with the unhappy victims of

mob suspicion. Captain Samuel Sewall who speaks up bravely for the

outcast--these are the remnant in Israel, the generous minority that

cannot leaven the dour and credulous mass. Yet even they are not heroic

figures to Whittier. His heroes are the Come-outers, and in particular

Peggy Brewster--reminiscent evidently of his great-grandmother, the

Quakeress Mary Peaslee, who married Robert Whittier in 1694--who is the

good Samaritan of the Puritan neighborhood, and whose loving-kindness

wins a reluctant good will that stops short of toleration of her

non-conformity.

Such intimate studies in the psychology of persecution were a liberal

education, and Whittier would have been no Quaker had he not learned

his lesson. He was justified in not thinking well of the social

conscience of respectable New England. Religious conformity, he

had come to understand, had not kept alive the torch of freedom in

Massachusetts, nor had Puritan righteousness befriended justice. Not

the great of earth but the simple may be counted on to do God’s work.

So taking his lesson to heart he quietly put aside ambition, and like

Peggy Brewster numbered himself among the remnant. Like her he would

be a Come-outer and bear his testimony against the uncleanness of the

American people in this matter of negro slavery. Not with musket and

ball would he fight, like old John Brown; but with the sword of the

spirit. The solution must lie with the conscience of the American

people. As a Friend, a man of peace, he would not deal harshly with

the supporters of slavery; he would not counsel violence. But as

a Yankee with a gift for politics, he would use political means to

jog a slothful conscience and marshal its forces. And so Whittier

became the politician amongst the Abolitionists. He proved himself a

skillful lobbyist. He was active in getting up petitions to Congress.

He supported John Quincy Adams and put pressure on the slippery Caleb

Cushing. He advocated the policy of boring from within the old parties,

but when such methods proved futile he became an active leader in

the third party movement. He was an early supporter of the Liberal

party--that in 1844 drew enough votes from Clay in New York to defeat

him for the Presidency--of the Free-Soil party, and later of the

Republican party.

It was this insistence upon the use of political methods that brought

about the unhappy break with Garrison. Immediately it was no more

than a difference over tactics, but it was embittered by a wide

cleavage of political theory. With Garrison’s conversion to spiritual

anarchism the Abolition movement was sundered by a division between

the perfectionists and the political actionists. The principle of

non-voting and of refusing allegiance to the Constitution aroused

strong opposition, and Whittier went with Birney and Gerrit Smith,

with Jonathan Sewall, John Pierpont and the Tappans in rejecting the

perfectionist policy. His political common sense turned naturally to

political agencies to accomplish his ends. “Moral action apart from

political” seemed to him an “absurdity.” But when he applied the Quaker

principle of Come-outism, and advocated separate party alignment.

Garrison attacked him with his habitual intolerance. The latter feared

a third party movement as certain to provide a rallying cry for the

commercial interest to muster the mob to its support, and overwhelm

the minority with the unthinking and selfish mass. “All political

minorities,” he argued, “are more or less liberal,” and by throwing

the Abolition strength to such organized minorities, the movement

would be “feared and respected by all political parties” (Garrison,

_William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, pp. 310-311). The wisest strategy,

he believed, was to seek to hold the balance of power between the old

parties--rewarding friends and punishing enemies--while laboring to

arouse the conscience of America, for ballots without conscience were

the enemies of justice.

Whittier was no such root-and-branch spirit as Garrison, and in

the political field he was a practical, somewhat prosaic Yankee,

little given to abstract speculation, skillful in minor strategical

skirmishes, inclined to opportunism. He belonged to no school of

political thought. His equalitarianism came as a heritage from his

Quaker religion rather than from political theory. To prepare himself

for his work he read Milton and Burke. The pamphlets of the great

Puritan appealed to him as the voice of the moral fervor of a heroic

age, but Milton’s aristocratic republicanism he seems to have examined

no more critically than Burke’s Whiggish legalism. Neither held

anything in common with Quaker equalitarianism. Rousseau and Tom Paine

and Jefferson, with whom he certainly would have sympathized, he seems

not to have been acquainted with. In Whittier’s New England they were

in ill repute, and the young Whittier was as naïvely provincial in

his political partisanship as was Garrison. Economics had no part in

his thought, and the economic interests that divided Federalism and

Anti-Federalism he seems never to have understood. Though sprung from

six generations of farmers who tilled the same acres, he reveals no

sympathy with agrarianism. He swallowed Clay and the American System

without a qualm, and as a young editor he wrote with pride of the

developing industrialism of Massachusetts. Neither in politics nor

in economics was he a rebellious soul. He was conscience rather than

intellect. He felt rather than thought. Only a moral issue could draw

him into strife, and even in such contests he was ill equipped to lead

the prosaic debates. His moral indignation found its natural expression

in verse, and he early took his place as the poet of the Abolition

movement, distilling into ready lyrics the emotion of the moment.

A great, even a noteworthy poet, Whittier certainly was not. Compared

with Whitman he is only a minor figure. Among the better known American

poets Bryant alone is so narrow in range and barren in suggestion. His

austere and meager life bred too little sensuousness of nature and

too few intellectual passions. An over-frugal watering of the wine of

paganism had left the New England character thin. The sap of humor that

ran so boisterously through the veins of the West, exuding a rough wit

from Davy Crockett to Mark Twain, was quite gone out of the Yankee

blood. His homely imagination was unquickened by a hearty village life

as was the case with the English Bunyan and the Scotch Burns. He had

become a bundle of Yankee nerves, responding only to moral stimuli.

The comment of Whitman sums up the Quaker poet adequately:

Whittier’s poetry stands for morality ... as filtered through the

positive Puritanical and Quaker filters; is very valuable as a

genuine utterance.... Whittier is rather a grand figure--pretty

lean and ascetic--no Greek--also not composite and universal enough

(doesn’t wish to be, doesn’t try to be) for ideal Americanism.

(Carpenter, _Life of Whitman_, p. 293.)

Never a great artist, rarely a competent craftsman, he wrote for the

most part impassioned commonplace, with occasional flashes that are not

commonplace.

The high-water mark of lyric indignation was reached in the lines to

Webster. Written at white heat, they have the passionate directness

of Thoreau’s prose. Like other Abolitionists, Whittier had clung

to his hopes of Webster in spite of frequent signs of the latter’s

backsliding. He did not sufficiently appreciate the economic

alliances that tied Webster to State Street, and he underrated his

presidential ambitions. But when the blow came with the Seventh of

March Speech, it staggered him--not alone the defection of Webster,

but the demonstrative approval of his wealthy constituents. For having

“convinced the understanding and touched the conscience of a nation,”

Webster was formally thanked by some seven hundred addressers from

the most respectable circles of Massachusetts--great men like Rufus

Choate, George Ticknor, W. H. Prescott, President Jared Sparks and

Professor Felton of Harvard, Moses Stuart and Leonard Woods of Andover

Theological Seminary. It was an hour of profound discouragement that

laid bare what colossal difficulties stood in the way of Abolitionism.

“The scandalous treachery of Webster and the _backing_ he has received

from Andover and Harvard,” wrote Whittier to Garrison, “show that we

have nothing to hope for from the great political parties and religious

sects” (William Sloane Kennedy, _John G. Whittier_, p. 113).

The scathing lines of _Ichabod_ were read throughout the North, and

they must have rankled in Webster’s heart. Even Whittier was troubled

by their severity and thirty years later he wrote a second Webster

poem which he set beside _Ichabod_ in his collected works. _The Lost

Occasion_ is a testimony to the kindliness of Whittier’s Quaker heart

that did not love to offend; but no kindliness of memory could change

or soften the just verdict of the lines:

Of all we loved and honored, naught

Save power remains;

A fallen angel’s pride of thought,

Still strong in chains.

All else is gone; from those great eyes

The soul is fled:

When faith is lost, when honor dies,

The man is dead!

Then, pay the reverence of old days

To his dead fame;

Walk backward, with averted gaze,

And hide the shame!

If Whittier was ill acquainted with the Boston of State Street

and the Back Bay, and the Cambridge of Harvard culture, he knew

intimately the Massachusetts of the village and the farm, and the

overwhelming repudiation of Webster and the Whig party, following

the Seventh of March Speech, would seem to have justified his lyric

confidence expressed in the vigorous heptameters of _Massachusetts to

Virginia_. For those who lived in the social world of Commissioner

Loring--professor of law at Harvard--and Rufus Choate, it was hard

not to think that Massachusetts had come to degenerate days. The fine

old-school Federalist, Josiah Quincy, commenting on the Boston that

watched Sims returned to slavery, wrote:

When the [Fugitive Slave] law passed, I did think the moral sense

of the community would not enforce it; I said that it never

would be. But now I find that my fellow-citizens are not only

_submissive_ to, but that they are earnestly active for, its

enforcement. The Boston of 1851 is not the Boston of 1775. Boston

has now become a mere shop--a place for buying and selling goods;

and I suppose, also, of _buying and selling men_. (Garrison,

_William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. III, p. 328.)

And Lowell, living in the same mean atmosphere, wrote:

Massachusetts, God forgive her,

She’s akneelin’ with the rest,

She, thet ough’ to ha’ clung ferever

In her grand old eagle-nest.

(_Biglow Papers_, Part I, 1.)

But Whittier professed to think better of the conscience of New

England. A strong pride of the commonwealth runs through the lines

that name over the towns of Massachusetts, from “free, broad

Middlesex,” westward and northward to the hills of Hampshire:

And sandy Barnstable rose up, wet with the salt sea spray;

And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narragansett Bay!

Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill,

And the cheer of Hampshire’s woodmen swept down from Holyoke Hill.

The voice of Massachusetts! Of her free sons and daughters,

Deep calling unto deep aloud, the sound of many waters!

Against the burden of that voice what tyrant power shall stand?

No fetters in the Bay State! No slave upon her land!

When at last the long controversy was over and release from the

struggle came to Whittier, his poetry grew richer and mellower. He was

not made to be a fighter, and it was with a sigh of relief that he

turned to the Elysian fields he had dreamed of, while he was turning

with his plow the rough stubble of a cause. Looking back upon those

arduous days, he sketched half whimsically his own portrait in _The

Tent on the Beach_.

And one there was, a dreamer born,

Who, with a mission to fulfill,

Had left the Muses’ haunts to turn

The crank of an opinion-mill,

Making his rustic reed of song

A weapon in the war with wrong,

Yoking his fancy to the breaking-plough

That beam-deep turned the soil for truth to spring and grow.

Too quiet seemed the man to ride

The wingéd Hippogriff Reform;

Was his a voice from side to side

To pierce the tumult of the storm?

A silent, shy, peace-loving man,

He seemed no fiery partisan

To hold his way against the public frown,

The ban of Church and State, the fierce Mob’s hounding down.

For while he wrought with strenuous will

The work his hands had found to do,

He heard the fitful music still

Of winds that out of dream-land blew.

The din about him could not drown

What the strange voices whispered down;

Along his task-field weird processions swept,

The visionary pomp of stately phantoms stepped.

The common air was thick with dreams,--

He told them to the toiling crowd;

Such music as the woods and streams

Sang in his ear he sang aloud;

In still, shut bays, on windy capes,

He heard the call of beckoning shapes,

And, as the gray old shadows prompted him,

To homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their legends grim.

Many excellent things he did in those quiet later years; old time

pictures like _Snowbound_, with its homely fireside economy long since

buried under the snows of forgotten winters; vigorous tales like

_Abraham Davenport_; ballads like _Skipper Ireson’s Ride_, that have

something of the spirit of the primitive. He had given thirty years of

his life to the cause of social justice, and surely none would grudge

him in old age his rambles in pleasanter fields. It was well that he

could turn to the past, for the America of the new exploitative age,

the New England of Lowell and Lawrence, he never understood. Black

slavery he understood, but wage slavery he comprehended no more than

did Garrison. To the end he remained a primitive soul, ill equipped to

understand a materialistic philosophy of society. There is something

pathetic in his _Songs of Labor_. His economics, like his democracy,

was of a bygone time, having no kinship with a scrambling free-soilism

or a rapacious capitalism. There is scant room in this world for the

Friend with his unmilitant dream of the fellowship. With his passion

for freedom, established in the gospel of righteousness, the Quaker

Whittier was fast becoming an anachronism in industrial New England

that was concerned about very different things. How old-fashioned he

had become is suggested by certain lines that phrase his greetings

to later times. Spare, somewhat halting in rhythm, yet transparently

sincere, they constitute an apologia that New England need feel no

shame for.

Yet here at least an earnest sense

Of human right and weal is shown;

A hate of tyranny intense,

And hearty in its vehemence,

As if my brother’s pain and sorrow were my own.

O Freedom! if to me belong

Nor mighty Milton’s gift divine,

Nor Marvell’s wit and graceful song,

Still with a love as deep and strong

As theirs, I lay, like them, my best gifts on thy shrine!

III • Harriet Beecher Stowe • A Daughter of Puritanism

No more Puritan mind than Mrs. Stowe’s ever contributed to the

literature of New England. Her remarkable native gifts were

unconsciously given specific shape by a rigid environment. For years

the artist in her struggled to subdue the moralist, and never quite

succeeded. Before she dipped her pen in ink her mind had taken its

set. She could not hope to escape being a preacher. Daughter of a

minister and wife of a minister, with brothers and sons ministers,

she lived all her life in an atmosphere of religion. She was baptized

in creeds and prattled the language of sermons as the vernacular of

childhood. Born at a critical time for the old New England faith, her

youth was passed amid the storm clouds of the Unitarian controversy,

in an atmosphere charged with electricity. Connecticut was the very

citadel of the Edwardean orthodoxy, and Litchfield was as rugged in

its faith as the hills it nestled among; and when the old-school

Calvinism of Boston was in danger of utter rout, it naturally turned

to a Connecticut Daniel to save the venerable cause. Stout old Lyman

Beecher was a host in himself. Son of a Connecticut blacksmith and

himself brought up at the forge before he quitted it to seek learning

at Yale College under Timothy Dwight, able, kindly, practical, with

pronounced literary tastes and a capable pen, he was a stalwart

Edwardean, militantly conservative, who damned our perverse human

nature with incontrovertible logic. Harriet was eight years old

when Channing preached his Baltimore sermon, and fourteen when her

father was summoned to Hanover Street Church, Boston. Her childish

heart had already been given to Baxter’s _Saint’s Rest_, and her

imagination awakened by Cotton Mather’s _Magnalia Christi Americana_.

Theocratic New England lay enveloped for her in a haze of romance, more

fascinating than any Sir Walter had woven about the Scottish Highlands;

she had discovered there noble figures and heroic deeds to kindle

an ardent hero worship. At fourteen she was converted--too easily

it seems, for she could not demonstrate to the satisfaction of her

spiritual counselors that she had been sufficiently under conviction

of sin. Thereafter to the end of her life the greatest of all dramas

for her was the drama of the soul concerned with the great business of

salvation.

The surest clue to Mrs. Stowe’s literary secret is to be found in

her sympathetic understanding of the spiritual life of Puritan New

England. She was a lifelong student of New England psychology, with

its “profound, unutterable, and therefore unuttered melancholy” that

resulted from open-eyed contemplation of grim fact. The past that

lay bleak and stern behind the sober present she understood as few

others did. Before her sympathetic eyes it fell into just proportions,

and quite naturally she became the historian of her people. The

autobiographical material that fills her later work--her husband’s

recollections in _Old-Town Folks_, and her own in _Poganuc People_--is

much more than autobiography; it is intimate history of New England,

written by one who in distilling her own experience was writing

the chronicle of a race. In a brilliant chapter of the former work

she gives a remarkable analysis of the intellectual development of

Puritan New England, and provides the setting against which her own

intellectual life should be placed. To overlook it is to miss the most

suggestive commentary on her work that has ever been written.

This daughter of Puritanism traces her intellectual antecedents

back to the long struggle of Puritan rationalism with feudal custom

and medieval ideas. The old English Puritans, “by nature the most

reverential and most loyal portion of the community,” in destroying the

divine-right sovereignty of King Charles, were impelled to transfer

that sovereignty to a higher King. In pulling down the temporal, they

erected a divine sovereignty; and their passionate attachment to the

new Sovereign was the natural response to “the pleading and yearning

within them of a faculty robbed of its appropriate object, and longing

for support and expression.” But the theologies to which they yielded

intellectual allegiance were a “legacy from past monarchical and

medieval ages.” To free themselves from this unhappy legacy, and create

a democratic theology, was an arduous work that needed two hundred

years to accomplish; and not until the Revolution spread a new social

philosophy through America, did the work go forward rapidly. Wanting

such a democratic philosophy Puritan New England wandered in the old

theological fogs. It was Jonathan Edwards who first turned the New

England mind to rationalism, and began that long “controversy” that

was to unsettle so much. But unhappily the rationalism of Edwards

was turned aside to reactionary ends, and his _Treatise on True

Virtue_ was “one of the strongest attempts to back up by reasoning

the old monarchical and aristocratic ideas of the supreme right of

the king and upper classes.” Nevertheless he set all New England to

rationalizing, and it was this severe discipline that carried her

people soberly through the Revolutionary War, and preserved them from

the excesses which followed the Revolution in France. And it was this

same discipline that prepared them for the eventual re-discovery of

the humanity of Jesus and the democracy of his religion. New England

had been struggling towards democracy through the bog of its feudal

theology; it became consciously democratic with the appearance of the

new theology (_Old-Town Folks_, Chapter XXIX).

This rationalistic bias of eighteenth-century New England suffices to

explain for Mrs. Stowe the stern temper and angular individuality of

the old Puritan Yankee. Her particular hero and saint was Jonathan

Edwards, and her lesser hero and saint was Samuel Hopkins; and in both

it was the courageous rationalism that appealed to her. In them, and

more particularly in the former, she discovered the creative force that

quickened a religion that was falling into dead formalism, that gave

it fresh vitality and made it the central fact of everyday New England

life. Across the world of her youth lay the shadow--or the light--of

the great Edwards, and the great Hopkins was his intellectual heir.

In another chapter of _Old-Town Folks_ she sketches the Edwardean

influence in bold outline.

The ministers of the early colonial days of New England, though

well-read, scholarly men, were more statesmen than theologians.

Their minds ran upon the actual arrangements of society, which were

in great measure left in their hands, rather than on doctrinal and

metaphysical subtleties. They took their confession of faith just

as the great body of Protestant reformers left it, and acted upon

it as a practical foundation, without much further discussion,

until the time of President Edwards. He was the first man who began

the disintegrating process of applying rationalistic methods to the

accepted doctrines of religion, and he rationalized far more boldly

and widely than any publishers of his biography have ever dared to

let the world know. He sawed the great dam and let out the whole

waters of discussion over all New England, and that free discussion

led to all the shades of opinion of our modern days. Little as he

thought it, Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker were the last results

of the current set in motion by Jonathan Edwards. (Chapter XIX.)

In this flood let loose by the metaphysical saw of Jonathan Edwards,

Mrs. Stowe found the material for her New England tales. In no other

pages does one realize so fully the tremendous, vital significance

of religion to the children of Puritanism, nor appreciate how narrow

a course their lives ran between the farm and the meeting-house. A

domestic economy and a parochial theology absorbed their energies,

and they took on sharp and angular imprints from a severe routine.

It was a school of discipline that created individual character,

and Mrs. Stowe possessed a loving eye for the odd and original. She

delighted in emphasizing the theological differences that ran through

Yankee families, giving little twists to character, and rising to the

tongue in scraps of confirmatory Scripture. Large-hearted, motherly

Grandmother Badger, in _Old-Town Folks_, was a stern Calvinist who

daily threw predestination in the face of her easy-going Arminian

husband, and exchanged syllogisms in a Sabbath-day “battle of the

Infinities” with her son from Yale. Theology provided the staple of

talk in the farmer’s kitchen; it was the axis on which turned the

simple country life. _Old-Town Folks_ and _Poganuc People_ are cross

sections of old New England, with its lingering prejudices in favor of

rank,[454] its Arminian Parson Lothrop in wig and gold cane, and its

Calvinist Dr. Cushing hostile to all democratic Jacobinism, its country

yokels, its stubborn yeomen who parade their independence by voting the

democratic ticket openly in the face of gentlemanly Federalists, its

sharp contrasts of a stately old order and a somewhat bumptious new,

yet with the hard New England granite snugly laid up and bonded with

the mortar of religion--a strange dead world that emerges distinctly

through the haze of Victorian sentiment. For Mrs. Stowe was a child

of her own romantic generation as well as a daughter of Puritanism,

and it was easy for her to discover suggestions of Utopia in a world

where minister and people mingled theology with their corn-huskings and

apple-bees.

Between these sketches and the Abolition novels stands _The

Minister’s Wooing_, with its Puritan heroine bleached into pure

holiness under the cold sunshine of Hopkinsian theology, and its

unworldly minister who demonstrated the sincerity of his creed of

disinterested benevolence--of willing to be damned for the glory of

God--by voluntarily yielding his betrothed to an earlier lover. It

is a love story without sex, as befits the wooing of a Puritan nun

by her spiritual father, set against a Yankee background of capable

housekeeping and dignified tea-drinking, subdued to proper decorum by

religion, and touched with tragedy by the shadow of damnation that

falls on the unregenerate--a world in which the beauty of holiness is

somewhat pale and austere, and where disinterested benevolence finds a

thin and obdurate soil to strike root in. Mrs. Stowe was drawn to the

theme, very evidently, by the impulse of her two Utopian enthusiasms,

her interest in Abolition and her affection for the ways of old New

England. Such romance as blossomed under those bleak skies she loved

to gather into a Yankee nosegay, and in her sympathetic hands the old

slave-running Newport becomes almost lovable and human. She might

find the theology hard, but she forgave the sermon out of love for

the preacher. As the historian of the human side of Calvinism she

tempered dogma with affection. In unsympathetic print those old sermons

were almost unbelievably harsh and ungainly; as theologians those

bewigged preachers were dry as the chips of last year’s woodpile; but

as husbands and fathers and neighbors, they were usually kind and

unselfish and helpful. Her father Lyman Beecher was an arid dogmatist

on the Lord’s Day, but on week-days he fished and hunted rabbits and

went nutting with his sons, made garden or smoked hams, or helped a

neighbor with plowing or haying, and was an unusually capable and

cheery member of a busy little world. In the light of such domestic

exegesis the bleakness of his theology was softened, and the dogmatic

theologian became a very human person.

Thus instructed Mrs. Stowe found no difficulty in discovering the human

side of Dr. Samuel Hopkins, or understanding how the hard doctrine

might cover the gentlest of souls--that the very intensity of devotion

to the logic of a stern creed betokened a depth of religious sincerity

that would find issue in generous deeds. A thinker who can dig from

the harsh soil of Calvinism the doctrine of disinterested benevolence

will discover a tender conscience in his own bosom. One might hazard

a guess, indeed, that the story of Samuel Hopkins was an unconscious

defense of the New England ministers against the sharp charges of

the Abolitionists that the clergy were half-hearted in the cause or

openly hostile. With her conviction of the unselfish nobility of their

lives, Mrs. Stowe must have taken a secret pleasure in revealing the

good Doctor as a forerunner of the Abolitionists, and in pointing

out that the crabbed logician of the Edwardean school, the theologian

immersed in the abstractions of a grotesque system, was nevertheless

a light set upon a hill, a primitive Christian with heart overflowing

with loving-kindness, who understood the iniquity of slavery and

turned shepherd to the outcast to his own hurt. The figure of the

unworldly minister is drawn with loving hand and his angularities made

less rugged. His noble spirituality shrivels and consumes the mean

excuses of his slave-running parishioner; it spreads quietly over

the countryside, and his daily life is a sermon that quickens hearts

that his theology leaves cold. There is preaching aplenty in the

book--quite too much for later stomachs; but it scarcely detracts from

the significance of the story as a document of Puritan New England,

revealing how a tender conscience was stirring beneath the crabbed

exterior of the old Calvinism.

In the light of such antecedents and such training Mrs. Stowe’s

passionate concern over slavery becomes easily comprehensible. Her

Puritan conscience was quickened by her warm human sympathies. She had

come close to the hateful thing during the years spent at Cincinnati,

where the Abolition sentiment of the Lane Seminary students aroused

such bitter opposition that President Lyman Beecher was forced to

approve the decision of the trustees to forbid any discussion of

slavery, with the result that so great a hegira of students took

place from Lane to Oberlin that the seminary was forced to close.

Only the fact that two miles of Ohio mud provided defensive outworks

saved the building and the houses of the teachers from the hands of

the Cincinnati mob. She had visited in Kentucky; she had been to the

slave markets; she had seen her father and brother aid runaway slaves

by means of the underground railway. A profound sense of the iniquity

of the system oppressed her, and when the Fugitive Slave Bill came

to fill up the measure of her wrath, she poured out her heart in

_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. Despite its obvious blemishes of structure and

sentimentalism it is a great human document that stripped away the

protective atmosphere from the sacred institution, and laid bare its

elementary injustice. It brought the system home to the common feeling

and conscience. The strong religious coloring emphasized the Abolition

argument that slavery trafficked in Christian souls, and rendered it

hateful to every humanitarian instinct. It was noble propaganda, and

the humor and pathos, the passion for social righteousness, still

linger in its pages to make a later generation wonder that our fathers

should so long have tolerated this evil thing.

Five years later she published _Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal

Swamp_, a thoughtfully elaborated statement of the complex problem,

with a suggested solution that only thrust into relief the fact that it

had indeed become an irrepressible conflict--the same solution that had

been hinted at thirty years before in Kennedy’s _Swallow Barn_, namely,

a system of paternalistic emancipation, based on the historical analogy

of the extinction of English villeinage, the slaves to be treated as

wards by the masters and educated for gradual emancipation. It was a

feudal solution of a feudal problem, but it took higher humanitarian

ground than human nature can, and Mrs. Stowe recognized the complex of

passion and interests in which the problem was involved, by removing

her southern emancipationist to Canada to try his experiment. More

striking, perhaps, is the shift from the Christian pacifism of _Uncle

Tom’s Cabin_ to the economics of _Dred_. The former had made appeal

to the humanitarianism of the North; the latter proposed to appeal to

the self-interest of the South. The slave states, Mrs. Stowe’s heroine

argued, were being ruined by slavery, and if they were to expect a sane

economic future, they must destroy the wasteful system. The contrast

between Yankee thrift under free labor and plantation shiftlessness

under slave labor had been pointed out by Whittier in his _Justice and

Expediency_ as early as 1833 and by Caruthers in his _Kentuckian in

New York_ in 1834--statements that perhaps drew Mrs. Stowe’s attention

to the economic phases involved; nevertheless the recognition of the

complexity of the problem, and the attempt to deal with it adequately,

lessened the popular appeal of _Dred_. The book is more skillfully

done than _Uncle Tom_, it is far richer in background material--in

vivid sketches of poor whites, of revivalist preachers, of plantation

life--it provides in Old Tiff a delightful study of the negro servant

and it suggests the perennial fear of a negro uprising; but it lacks

the singleness of appeal that makes for telling propaganda. It was not

its melodrama that hindered its success. The public had swallowed that

in _Uncle Tom_ with a hearty appetite. It was rather the dissipation

of dramatic interest, the want of a striking figure to capture the

imagination and sympathy. It is a better sociological study but a

weaker story.

It was hard for the New England conscience to quit the pulpit and turn

artist; and it was particularly hard for Mrs. Stowe with her ardent

nature and multiplying domestic cares. She could bring her soul under

discipline but not her art. She never trained herself in craftsmanship,

never learned restraint, but suffered her pen to range freely as her

emotions directed. The creative instinct was strong in her but the

critical was wholly lacking. Richly endowed though she was her work

has suffered the fate that pursues those who forget that beauty alone

survives after emotion subsides.

Footnotes

[454] “It’s a hard struggle for our human nature to give up titles and

ranks, though,” said Miss Mehitable. “For my part, I have a ridiculous

kindness for them yet. I know it’s all nonsense; but I can’t help

looking back to the court we used to have at the Government House in

Boston.” (_Old-Town Folks_, Chapter VI.)

Part Three: The Transcendental Mind

Chapter I • The Genesis of Transcendentalism

From the doctrine of the open mind that was the core of Unitarianism,

came the transcendental movement that marked the full flowering of

the New England renaissance. It was the native response of the mind

of New England to the summons of revolutionary romanticism, and its

ardor was the greater for being so long delayed. Creatively influenced

though it was by French Utopianism and German mysticism, its manners

and mode of thought received a particular impress from an environment

long preparing and that was natively congenial. “Practically,” says

its most penetrating historian, transcendentalism “was an assertion of

the inalienable worth of man; theoretically it was an assertion of the

immanence of divinity in instinct, the transference of supernatural

attributes to the natural constitution of mankind.”[455] It was the

glowing expression of philosophic Utopianism, the flaring up of old

fires of idealism, before the scientific and materialistic reactions

destroyed its romantic dreams. It accepted kinship with the social

idealism of the Declaration of Independence; it accepted the dynamic

principle of equalitarianism; but it sought to go farther and provide a

sure defense and justification of an idealism that it professed to find

established in human nature, by establishing it in metaphysics.

The explanation of this curious throwback to earlier times in the mind

of transcendental New England is clear enough to anyone acquainted with

the history of Puritan thought struggling with the mystical element of

Christian experience. Since the far-off days of Roger Williams--the

seeker and mystic who was so great a puzzle to his realistic

brethren--idealism had been starved in New England. Its mystical

aspirations had been repressed by dogma, and its elusive dreams brought

to nothing. Jonathan Edwards struggled life-long to hold his idealism

in subjection to theology, and ended in abortive reaction; a potential

Emerson, another Berkeley, he re-welded the bonds of dogma on the mind

of New England, putting off for two generations the day of its release.

Even in the freer minds idealism suffered from the repressions of the

common rationalism; with Locke and Hume in the ascendancy the mystic

found the times uncongenial to his needs. The dawn of a new day seemed

to be breaking with the shift of interest from theology to politics,

during the stirring days of the Revolution. The submerged idealism of

New England came to expression in the dreams of homespun democrats

like Sam Adams, and expanded in the sunshine of French Utopianism; but

unfortunately Boston Federalism reasserted the old dogmatisms and put

a speedy end to the movement. It shut the door upon all democratic

aspiration and bade it go about its business. It was from such a

narrow environment that the rising movement of Unitarianism received

its impress. From a sterile rationalism, a respectable close-fisted

conservatism, it could not escape; and in consequence the new movement

of liberalism was taken over by Federalism and became a new orthodoxy.

“The pale negations of Boston Unitarianism”--to use Emerson’s

well-known phrase--provided little nourishment for transcendental hopes.

Nevertheless Unitarianism carried within it the seeds of the new

faith--in its intellectual attitude, if not in its philosophy. “The

Unitarians as a class,” remarks Frothingham, “belonged to the school

of Locke, which discarded the doctrine of innate ideas, and its

kindred beliefs.... Unitarianism ... has rarely, if ever, been taught

or held by any man of eminence in the church who was a Platonist”

(_Transcendentalism in New England_, Chapter VI). But in spite of

its eighteenth-century nurture--because of it, indeed--Unitarianism

was a profoundly liberalizing movement. It was a narrow and local

phase of a world-wide revolution; the special contribution of Boston

to the great work of disintegrating the past to make ready for the

future. It loosened the grip of dogma on the Puritan mind and widened

the field of reading and thinking. But it did very much more--it

recovered the original principle of Protestantism, the principle of

individual responsibility, that had been tacitly denied by Calvinistic

orthodoxy. It asserted the essential decency of human nature--men may

not be the children of God but they are assuredly not children of the

devil; and it summoned this decent human nature to live decently in

accordance with its nature. It would not coop up the mind in dogma; it

would not close all roads to heaven but one. The Unitarians might be

instinctively conservative, as was natural to prosperous persons, but

they at least acknowledged “themselves to be friends of free thought

in religion.” Their doctrine was not a creed but an attitude of mind.

If they themselves were not Seekers, they professed a willingness

for others to become Seekers. Very likely few of them measured up to

the full stature of such liberalism; nevertheless they “honestly but

incautiously professed a principle broader than they were able to

stand by, and avowed the absolute freedom of the human mind as their

characteristic faith” (_ibid._, Chapter VI).

All this was excellent, but it was not enough. It remained to see

what the free mind should discover in its venturesome quest into the

unknown. Intellectually emancipated, with the bleak dogmas of election

and reprobation put away, with the God of wrath dethroned and the

God of love lifted up, and with the dynamic principle of freedom of

inquiry in their possession, the younger generation of New England

intellectuals naturally opened their eyes to discover what winds of

new doctrine were blowing in the world. They were pretty much all

Unitarians--the young transcendentalists--and largely clergymen; their

primary interest was metaphysical and they had already abandoned Locke

for Plato. The rationalistic eighteenth century was dead to them and

they set forth to discover another age. Hints and suggestions of

that better age had come to them from overseas--from Wordsworth and

Shelley, from Cousin and Madame de Staël, from Coleridge and Carlyle;

and the fresh beauty of that new poetry, the enormous stimulus of that

new metaphysic, fired them with a desire to seek this inspiration at

its source and drink from the living waters. And so they discovered

romantic Germany where the new idealism had quite routed the philosophy

of sensationalism, and a great school of transcendental thinkers was

in triumphant possession of the field. It was a profoundly stimulating

discovery, and from it dated the rise of New England transcendentalism.

The immediate creative influence of the new contact with Germany was to

strengthen the incipient Platonism of the rebellious intellectuals, and

provide it with an added sanction. Transcendentalism, it must always

be remembered, was a faith rather than a philosophy; it was oracular

rather than speculative, affirmative rather than questioning; and it

went to Germany to find confirmation of its faith, not to reëxamine

its foundations. Faith preceded metaphysics, and if the metaphysics

had been lacking intuition would have supplied its place, poetic

inspiration would have sufficed the needs of transcendental minds. They

had found God for themselves before the philosophers justified them;

they took to Germany what they sought there. Nevertheless it was a

tremendous experience to come upon their own philosophy there, erected

into a system, supported by a complete metaphysic; a philosophy that

had put to rout the fashionable skepticism of Voltaire and Condillac,

established on the sensationalism of Locke, and offering justification

for faith in God and man--faith in a divinity indwelling in nature

and the individual soul--by a masterly dialectics. That experience

determined the development of New England transcendentalism. The

metaphysic of Kant, the mysticism of Jacobi, the idealistic egoism of

Fichte, the transcendentalism of Schleiermacher--the new gospel of

the renascent German spirit--these were the living waters of truth to

the thirsty minds of the New England intellectuals, from which they

drank eagerly, never doubting their sufficiency. They were poets and

prophets; they were young and strong in faith; others might concern

themselves with the dialectics of idealism, they would apply it in

their daily lives.

In essence this new transcendental faith was a glorification of

consciousness and will. It rested on the rediscovery of the soul that

had been dethroned by the old rationalism; and it eventuated in the

creation of a mystical egocentric universe wherein the children of God

might luxuriate in their divinity. The Unitarians had pronounced human

nature to be excellent; the transcendentalists pronounced it divine.

They endowed it with great potentialities; made of it a dwelling place

of the Most High; discovered the secret voice of God in the buried life

that men call instinct; refused to heed any other command save this

inner voice of God. With ebbing faith men may deny their own divine

nature, but the divinity is not destroyed; the music of the indwelling

Godhood murmurs in the shell till the tide returns to flood it again.

The one great miracle is the daily rebirth of God in the individual

soul; every day is a new day; every act is a fresh wonder; faith, hope,

trust, accompany man in his adventurous journeyings. Why, therefore,

demanded the transcendentalist, should he not trust himself? Why should

he not walk confident in his own high purpose? Why should he doubt and

question the buried compulsions that urge him forward? If he is indeed

a child of God, let him live as unto God; and if it should turn out

that there has been some mistake in the premises and he proves to be a

child of the devil, then let him live as unto the devil. Better so than

not to trust himself.

Quite obviously they were arch-romantics--these young poets of the new

faith; children of an age given over to new hopes and disintegrating

revolutions; inexperienced prophets of a world in flux, before the

scientific spirit had stripped them of their wings. The fascinating

book of nature and of man had been newly opened to them, and like

Miranda they were ready to exclaim,

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in ’t!

They could see only God because in their thinking God had filled

their minds. No evil lurked in the secret places of their hearts to

whisper doubts concerning the goodness of life; no ominous clouds

veiled the divine light that wrapped their universe about. After

two hundred years of discipline in righteousness the old dogmatic

pessimism was dissipated, leaving not a rack behind. The evil was gone

and God remained; and in this new world the sons of God were to be

henceforth heirs of the kingdom, free to fulfill that good which is

the final reality. Arch-romantics, they were dreaming a transcendental

dream, as other arch-romantics were dreaming their Jacksonian dream,

their imperialistic dream, their Utopian dream. Romanticism comes to

different issues in different men and different times: Emerson and

Jefferson were unlike enough, as their worlds were unlike; but they

were both romantics and their idealism was only a different expression

of a common spirit.

Years after the transcendental ferment had subsided, one of the lesser

prophets of the movement offered a statement of the faith that deserves

to be recalled:

Transcendentalism [he said] relies on those ideas in the mind

which are laws in the life. Pantheism is said to sink man and

nature in God; Materialism to sink God and man in nature;

and Transcendentalism to sink God and nature in man. But the

Transcendentalist at least is belied and put in jail by the

definition which is so neat at the expense of truth. He made

consciousness, not sense, the ground of truth.... Is the soul

reared on the primitive rock? or is no rock primitive, but the

deposit of spirit--therefore in its lowest form alive, and ever

rising into organism to reach the top of the eternal circle again,

as in the well one bucket goes down empty and the other rises

full? The mistake is to make the everlasting things subjects of

argument instead of sight.... Our soul is older than our organism.

It precedes its clothing. It is the cause, not the consequence,

of its material elements; else, as materialists understand, it

does not exist.... What is it that accepts misery from the Most

High, defends the Providence that inflicts its woes, espouses its

chastiser’s cause, purges itself in the pit of its misery of all

contempt of His commands, and makes its agonies the beams and

rafters of the triumph it builds? It is the immortal principle.

It is an indestructible essence. It is part and parcel of the

Divinity it adores. It can no more die than he can. It needs no

more insurance of life than its author does. Prove its title? It

is proof of all things else. It is substantive, and everything

adjective beside. It is the kingdom all things will be added to.

(C. A. Bartol, quoted by Frothingham in _Transcendentalism in New

England_, Chapter XIV.)

This is sheer mysticism, and mystics in greater or less degree all

the transcendentalists were--isolated and lonely in the midst of men,

seeking always a larger fellowship, awaiting those fleeting moments

of illumination that should light up the meaning of life. “Mine is

a certain brief experience,” says Emerson, “which surprised me in

the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time,--whether

in the body or out of the body, God knoweth,--and made me aware

that I had played the fool with fools all this time, but that law

existed for me and for all; that to me belong trust, a child’s trust

and obedience, and the worship of ideas, and I should never be fool

more” (_The Transcendentalist_). Fleeting and incommunicable are such

illuminations, yet like the clear sunlight to eyes that are open. “If

you do not need to hear my thought, because you can read it in my

face and behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset. If

you cannot divine it, you would not understand what I say” (_ibid._).

And because the realist found himself quite incapable of such

understanding, the transcendentalist turned away from him to live by

himself. “They feel that they are never so fit for friendship, as when

they have quitted mankind, and taken themselves to friend.”

Such an attitude of mind may easily become the father of criticism.

Communing with the ideal rarely begets complacency; the actual

seems poor and mean in comparison with the potential. Hence the

transcendentalists, willingly or not, were searching critics of their

generation. They were impatient of any falling short of the ideal, and

their lives in consequence Became an open indictment of a Yankee world

given over to materialism. “By their unconcealed dissatisfaction,” said

Emerson, “they expose our poverty, and the insignificance of man to

man.” “Their quarrel with every man they meet, is not with his kind,

but with his degree. There is not enough of him,--that is the only

fault.... They make us feel the strange disappointment which overcasts

every human youth. So many promising youths, and never a finished man!”

(_The Transcendentalist._)

As to the general course of living, and the daily employments of

men, they cannot see much virtue in these, since they are parts of

this vicious circle; and as no great ends are answered by the men,

there is nothing noble in the arts by which they are maintained.

Nay, they have made the experiment, and found that, from the

liberal professions to the coarsest manual labor, and from the

courtesies of the academy and the college to the conventions of the

cotillion-room and the morning call, there is a spirit of cowardly

compromise and seeming, which indicates a frightful skepticism, a

life without love, and an activity without aim. (_Ibid._)

Idealists though they were, they could not escape meddling with the

real which encompassed them on all sides--with institutions, laws,

society, with the state itself. They were far more interested in God

than in Caesar, and they found it impossible to divide loyalties

that too often clashed. When Caesar essayed to impose his will upon

theirs, when he put their ideals in jeopardy by demanding allegiance

to laws they did not approve, they quietly denied him sovereignty and

followed their own paths. With such men nothing could be done; their

very lives were a criticism and a judgment on New England and America.

Transcendentalism may have run into its follies, but foolish in its

critical judgment--blind to the gap between profession and reality--it

was not. It might be severe, but it was honest and intelligent, and

honest intelligent criticism America stood greatly in need of.

Footnotes

[455] See Frothingham, _Transcendentalism in New England_. Chapter VI.

Chapter II • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Transcendental Critic

At the age of thirty-six the man who was to become the most searching

critic of contemporary America expressed his conception of his mission

in the following passage:

What shall be the substance of my shrift? Adam in the garden, I am

to new-name all the beasts of the field and all the gods in the

sky. I am to invite men drenched in Time to recover themselves

and come out of time, and taste their native immortal air. I

am to fire with what skill I can the artillery of sympathy and

emotion. I am to indicate constantly, though all unworthy, the

Ideal and Holy Life, the life within life, the Forgotten Good, the

Unknown Cause in which we sprawl and sin. I am to try the magic of

sincerity, that luxury permitted only to kings and poets. I am to

celebrate the spiritual powers in their infinite contrast to the

mechanical powers and the mechanical philosophy of this time. I am

to console the brave sufferers under evils whose end they cannot

see, by appeals to the great optimism, self-affirmed in all bosoms.

(_Journals_, Vol. V, p. 288.)

Seven days before Emerson set down this transcendental pronouncement,

he had written in his journal a different comment:

A question which well deserves examination now is the Dangers of

Commerce. This invasion of Nature by Trade with its Money, its

Credit, its Steam, its Railroad, threatens to upset the balance of

man, and establish a new, universal Monarchy more tyrannical than

Babylon or Rome. Very faint and few are the poets or men of God.

Those who remain are so antagonistic to this tyranny that they

appear mad or morbid, and are treated as such. Sensible of this

extreme unfitness they suspect themselves. And all of us apologize

when we ought not, and congratulate ourselves when we ought not.

(_Ibid._, Vol. V, pp. 285-6.)

In such comments and others scattered plentifully through his Journals,

Emerson essayed to make clear to himself the function of transcendental

criticism as he felt himself called to practice it. It was to be

no trivial or easy duty. In the midst of a boastful materialism,

shot through with cant and hypocrisy and every insincerity, fat and

slothful in all higher things, the critic proposed to try the magic

of sincerity, to apply the test of spiritual values to the material

forces and mechanical philosophies of the times. His very life must

embody criticism; his every act and word must pronounce judgment on

the barren and flatulent gods served by his countrymen. He must be a

thinker and as such he must summon to the bar of a nobler philosophy

the current standards of value and conduct. Men of the greatest

reputation must not be spared; he must “issue a _quo warranto_ and

revoke the characters of fame,” overruling the verdict of newspaper

editors and the acclaim of the electorate. Here was a revolutionary

business indeed, that the critic was proposing to himself; and the

calm serenity with which he set about it was disconcerting. A thinker

loose in the America of Daniel Webster, a thinker who proposed to

test men and measures by the magic of sincerity, was likely to prove

an unpleasantly disturbant factor in a world of pretense. Measured by

such standards the current philosophies must bate and dwindle, and the

common ideals shrink to the mean and paltry. The life of an honest

thinker laid on the America of 1840 would reveal how far short it came

from the stature of intellectual manhood.

Emerson the critic has been too much obscured to common view by Emerson

the brilliant dispenser of transcendental aphorisms. The oracular

_Essays_ with their confident wisdom--the sententious expression of

the middle period of a life that came to late maturity--interpose

themselves between the young priest whose intellectual interests

quietly detached themselves from Unitarian orthodoxy, and the mature

critic whose loyalties quietly detached themselves from the gods of his

generation. The very brilliancy of the _Essays_ conceals the laborious

processes by which their abundant wisdom was distilled. One must go

to the _Journals_ for that--to those intimate records that reveal how

patiently he sought for truth and how honestly he followed it. Wisdom

did not come to him of its own accord; it was painfully groped for.

As an introspective Puritan youth he began early to keep a diary of

his intellectual life, gathering into successive journals the savings

from his discursive readings. For years as a quiet student he lived

in a world of moral aphorisms, a cold, thin atmosphere where gnomic

phrases bloomed and ancient oracles uttered judgment. This was the

seedtime of his mind. He was making acquaintance with the noble dead,

gathering their utterances to make for himself a new testament. “No

man could be better occupied,” he said later, “than in making his own

bible by harkening to all those sentences which now here, now there,

now in nursery rhymes, now in Hebrew, now in English bards, thrill

him like the sound of a trumpet.” As a young man he made this his

chief concern. His early journals are an ample nursery where cuttings

from all philosophies are set out, there to grow into such plants as

circumstance should permit. The ancestral cult of the book was in his

blood, and living as he did under the threat of ill health, none too

confident that the years would lengthen out before him, he forced

himself to a severe intellectual regimen. To invest his days wisely

was his single purpose. He wanted only the best securities for his

investments, and what he got he carefully deposited, together with

the increments of his own thought, to draw upon at later need. There

were no wastrel forays in his intellectual life, no unpruned riot of

growth, but the very odds and ends of his meditation were carefully

treasured to be used when other materials were lacking. Fortunately

the stuff was of good quality that outlasted many makings-over, till

finally he got the cut to his liking. From this discipline of years

came his superlative mastery of the sententious sentence; his brilliant

utterances are rich with the thought he has crammed into them.

The cheerful serenity that never deserted him was a triumph of will

over circumstance. It was a singularly cheerless world that bred him,

subsisting by sheer will power, eating its heart out with heroic

ambitions, too grimly earnest to enjoy what it got so laboriously--the

lean aftermath of two centuries of asceticism. The business of plain

living and high thinking was a joyless manner of life, and the young

Emerson got little pleasure from it. A nature less insulated must have

broken under the strain. It was a world stricken with tuberculosis.

Of the five brothers one was mentally defective, another burnt up his

vitality and went to the West Indies to die, a third of brilliant

powers succumbed to consumption, his first wife died of the same

scourge, his second wife and Emerson himself were long affected with

incipient tuberculosis. To ease such anxious lives there was need of a

great solace, and that solace was sought in religion. The ascetic youth

ran as naturally to religious meditation as a normal child to play.

No call to conversion ever came to him; the natural man postulated

in Calvinistic dogma was washed out of him before he was born. The

earlier jottings in the journals, before philosophy came to soften the

inherited asceticism, and a transcendental revulsion from the common

pessimism had turned him into a serene optimist, often are as bleak and

austerely introspective as those morbid human documents that fill the

old libraries of Puritanism. Such meditations are thin gruel for the

nourishment of a vigorous life, and Emerson must have suffered from

innutrition if he had not come upon more substantial food.

Fortunately the old Puritan anchors were already dragging, and

Emerson was pretty well adrift when the romantic surge caught him

and sent him far along new courses. The Puritan moralizer became

the transcendental seeker; the curious-minded loiterer in the gates

of the temple, who had studied the moral winds by watching the tiny

straws of circumstance--erecting unconsidered trifles into ethical

signposts--calmly quitted the church and set forth on his intellectual

quest. The ties had long been loosening, but it was his year abroad

where he discovered ways of thinking unknown to Concord and Boston,

that effectively liberalized his mind and released him from the

narrow Yankee provincialisms. On that momentous trip Goethe, Landor,

Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle, set him speculating on new themes,

stimulating afresh the love of Plato, in whom he had long found

inspiration. Continental idealism with its transcendental metaphysics

refashioned Emerson and put him upon his life-work.

Speaking of the intellectual revival of New England later in life, he

remarked that “Goethe was the cow from whom their milk was drawn”; but

it would seem that the influence of Wordsworth proved more immediately

stimulating, for on his return home Emerson set about the systematic

contemplation of nature which left so considerable a deposit in his

mind. Before this he had been too intent on his soul to consider the

sunshine on the fields, but thereafter he made his pilgrimages into the

country with the seriousness of one conducting a novel experiment. In

this new concern for nature there was a deliberate self-consciousness.

In temperament he was a bookish recluse, in love with the printed

page. He was not a Thoreau to love his Walden Pond for its own sake,

and it needed an effort of the will to send him as far as Auburn

wood, to lie on his back and translate nature into metaphysic. But

he had come to the point where his developing philosophy must send

him into the fields. He had looked within himself and discovered the

divinity of the individual soul; but he had not probed the non-self,

the great encompassing universe of matter by which the individual

is circumscribed and of which he is a part. To discover there the

diffused presence of God, to feel his kinship with man, to understand

that the soul is a microcosm, were necessary preliminaries to the

unfolding of his transcendental philosophy, and he went about the work

with painstaking thoroughness. From this creative contact with nature

emerged the Emerson we know, radiant with idealism, glad of life; and

this radiant gladness he put into his maiden essay, _Nature_.

This was in 1836 when Emerson was thirty-three years of age. In the

next two years he published _The American Scholar_, quintessence of

transcendental individualism, and the _Divinity School Address_, the

bible of transcendental religion. With the appearance of the second

series of _Essays_, six years later, the major ideas of his philosophy

were fully elaborated. Stripped of its idealistic phraseology, of its

beauty and fervor, the master idea of the Emersonian philosophy is the

divine sufficiency of the individual. In accepting himself he accepted

his fellows, and he accepted God. The universe he conceived of as a

divine whole, whereof each man is his own center from whom flows the

life that has flowed in upon him, perennially fresh, perennially a new

creation. The law for things is not the law for mind; man is unkinged

in acknowledging any lesser sovereignty than the sovereignty of self.

Statutes, constitutions, governments, schools, churches, banks,

trade--the coercing sum of institutions and customs--these things do

not signify; they are only idols with clay feet that blind men worship.

The true divinity dwells elsewhere, in the soul of man; and that

divinity must rule the world and not be ruled by it. The apotheosis

of individualism--such in briefest terms was the gospel of Emerson;

new only in its radiant dress and idealistic sanctions, the final

transcendental form of a doctrine spread widely by the French romantic

school. It was the same revolutionary conception that Channing had come

upon, that Jefferson had come upon, that Rousseau had come upon--the

idea which in the guise of political romanticism had disintegrated

the _ancien régime_, and in the form of philosophical romanticism

had disintegrated eighteenth-century rationalism--the idea that was

providing Utopian dreams for an ebullient democratic faith.

Thus equipped with a philosophy Emerson was prepared to begin his work

as a critic. The ideal he had drunk of was a perennial condemnation of

the material. The mean and ignoble ends pursued by a mean and ignoble

society were a challenge to the serenity of his faith, and he must set

himself to analyze the causes of the low estate to which the potential

sons of God had fallen. Lesser revolutions in thought were implicit in

this greater one, revolutions which Emerson was bound to go through

with. Despite the jaunty optimism of which he was often accused, his

eyes were never blind to reality; to see, and measure, and judge,

was to become his life business. He did not shrink from the ugliest

fact, and the unhappy condition he discovered men to be in would have

discouraged a less robust faith. At times even he doubted. At times he

seems half persuaded, with Cotton Mather, that the potential children

of light are “strangely and fiercely possessed of the devil.” “Human

nature is as bad as it dares to be,” he commented in his journal; and

at another time, “If it were possible to repair the rottenness of human

nature ... it were well” (_Journals_, Vol. VIII, p. 259).

In seeking an explanation of the tragic gap between the real and the

ideal, he came to attribute a large measure of the cause, like the

eighteenth-century romantics, to pernicious social institutions which

stifle the nobler impulses and encourage the baser; and he became

convinced likewise that the work to which the critic was called was

the work of liberation, setting the mind free from false and ignoble

loyalties that it might serve the true. He prepared therefore to lay

his transcendental yardstick on the little world of Yankee reality and

judge how far short it came of its potential divinity. New England had

never been scrutinized so searchingly, measured so justly. Serene,

imperturbable, he set the ideal in one pan of the scales, and all the

New England realities in the other, and bade his neighbors see how the

balance tipped. For a generation he was the conscience of America, a

pricker of inflated balloons, a gauger of the national brag and cant

and humbug. With keen insight he put his finger on the mean and selfish

and the great and generous. He surveyed his world with the detachment

of posterity and anticipated the slower judgment of time. His

penetration was uncanny and few of his judgments on men and measures

have suffered reversal in the court of final jurisdiction.

So shrewd a critic must concern himself greatly with the Jacksonian

revolution that was hurrying America towards the acceptance of

political equalitarianism. By every compulsion of his transcendental

philosophy Emerson was driven to accept the abstract principle

of democracy. He understood well what hopes for human betterment

were awakened by the principle of majority rule, and as he followed

the noise and tumult of the political campaigns he was driven to

definition. In 1834 he commented in his journal:

The root and seed of democracy is the doctrine, Judge for yourself.

Reverence thyself. It is the inevitable effect of the doctrine,

where it has any effect (which is rare), to insulate the partisan,

to make each man a state. At the same time it replaces the dead

with a living check in a true, delicate reverence for superior,

congenial minds. “How is the King greater than I, if he is not more

just?” (_Journals_, Vol. III, p. 369.)

Somewhat later in the same year he suggested:

Democracy, Freedom, has its root in the sacred truth that every man

hath in him the divine Reason, or that, though few men since the

creation of the world live according to the dictates of Reason, yet

all men are created capable of so doing. That is the equality and

the only equality of all men. To this truth we look when we say,

Reverence thyself; Be true to thyself. (_Ibid._, Vol. III, p. 390.)

When I ... speak of the democratic element, I do not mean that ill

thing, vain and loud, which writes lying newspapers, spouts at

caucuses, and sells its lies for gold; but that spirit of love for

the general good whose name this assumes. There is nothing of the

true democratic element in what is called Democracy; it must fall,

being wholly commercial. I beg I may not be understood to praise

anything which the soul in you does not honor, however grateful may

be names to your ear and your pocket. (_Ibid._, Vol. IV, p. 95.)

His deepening concern over the state of politics in America--the

property-mindedness of the Whigs and the mob-mindedness of the

Democrats--drew him into an analysis of political parties and the

nature of the political state. He was little read in the political

classics, and although he professed a mild approval of Montesquieu

and was never tired of praising Burke, he was little influenced by

either. The latter’s political theory, indeed, was so fundamentally

hostile to Emerson’s major convictions--so legalistic in its

reverence for government from the grave, so explicit in denial of

new-born rights--that it is a fair assumption that Emerson never

took the trouble to understand him but was content to enjoy his

glowing rhetoric. Later commentators are too much given to glossing

over Emerson’s political theory, not approving its implications; or

explaining it away by appeal to certain comments jotted down when

his nerves were tried by enthusiasts;[456] but there is no explaining

away a theory that was the logical expression of his transcendental

philosophy, unless his whole philosophy be explained away. Emerson

knew very well where his political theory led, and he had no timid

compunction about following it through.

In his speculations on the nature and functions of the ideal

republic--a theme that was much in his mind--he elaborated what we

may call the transcendental theory of politics, a theory closely akin

to philosophical anarchism. All the elaborate machinery devised by

political thinkers like Montesquieu and John Adams, with their schemes

of checks and balances to preserve the _status quo_, he calmly throws

overboard; constitutions he is not interested in, nor the complicated

props of coercive sovereignty. The single, vital, principle on which

the true republic must found itself, he insists, is the principle of

good-will. Since “governments have their origin in the moral identity

of men,” the recognition of a common human nature with common interests

must induce rational men to enter a common political brotherhood; and

until men become wise enough voluntarily to coöperate to the common

well-being, no good government is possible. The history of governments

hitherto is a history of the tragic failure of men to achieve a

rational political state. “The idea, after which each community

is aiming to make and mend its law,” he suggests in the _Essay on

Politics_, following Carlyle, “is the will of the wise man. The wise

man, it cannot find in nature, and it makes awkward but earnest efforts

to secure government by contrivance.” But he does not push his “wise

man” theory to the patriarchal absolutism of Carlyle; with Channing he

postulates an ethical sovereignty above the instrument. “Absolute right

is the first governor; or, every government is an impure theocracy.”

The doctrine of good-will establishes government in “moral identity”;

it “separates the individual from all party, and unites him at the

same time to the race”; and in so doing it accepts the sovereignty of

the ethical absolute. This major conception of Channing’s Emerson took

over and made his own. He is explicit in his assertion of the need of a

moral interpretation of the doctrine of natural rights. The doctrine of

an ethical sovereignty, he asserts,

... promises a recognition of higher rights than those of personal

freedom, or the security of property. A man has a right to be

employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of

love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.... There will

always be a government of force where men are selfish; and when

they are pure enough to abjure the code of force they will be wise

enough to see how these public ends of the post-office, of the

highway, of commerce and the exchange of property, of museums and

libraries, of institutions of art and science can be answered.

Every man’s nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the

character of his fellows. My right and my wrong is their right

and their wrong. Whilst I do what is fit for men, and abstain

from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our

means, and work together for a time to one end. But whenever I

find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and undertake

the direction of him also, I overstep the truth, and come into

false relations to him. I may have so much more skill or strength

than he that he cannot express adequately his sense of wrong,

but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and

nature cannot maintain the assumption; it must be executed by a

practical lie, namely by force. This undertaking for another is the

blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of

the world.... For any laws but those which men make for themselves

are laughable.... This is the history of government,--one man does

something which is to bind another.... Hence the less government

we have the better,--the fewer laws, and the less confided power.

The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of

private character, the growth of the individual ... the appearance

of the wise man; of whom the existing government, is, it must be

owned, but a shabby imitation.... To educate the wise man the State

exists, and with the appearance of the wise man the State expires.

The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise

man is the State. (_Essay on Politics._)

Thus in transcendental fashion does Emerson range himself on the side

of Jefferson, in opposition to a coercive sovereignty. A strong and

energetic government he feared as an efficient instrument of tyranny;

and of the several contrivancies by which it enforced its will, he

considered the police power the stupidest. As a sensible man he bore

with the state; he would pay his taxes; he would not strain at gnats;

but as a free man he would not suffer the state to coerce him; he would

destroy it first. There is a passage in his journal, written at the

time of the declaration of war against Mexico--when Alcott and Thoreau

refused to pay their taxes--that states his position with whimsical

directness:

The State is a poor, good beast who means the best: it means

friendly. A poor cow who does well by you,--do not grudge it its

hay. It cannot eat bread, as you can; let it have without grudge

a little grass for its four stomachs. It will not stint to yield

you milk from its teat. You, who are a man walking cleanly on two

feet, will not pick a quarrel with a poor cow. Take this handful

of clover and welcome. But if you go to hook me when I walk in the

fields, then, poor cow, I will cut your throat. (_Journals_, Vol.

VII, p. 220.)

With equal emphasis he rejected the economic interpretation of

politics. As a child of the romantic revolution he understood quite

clearly how the waves of humanitarian aspiration broke on the reefs

of property rights, how economic forces were in league against the

ideal republic. There could be no true democracy till this matter of

economics was put in subordination to higher values. Both the political

parties, the respectable Whigs and the voluble Democrats, he was

convinced, were debauched by it; the one served property openly, the

other secretly. “From neither party, when in power, has the world any

benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate

with the resources of the nation.” Emerson did not deny the fact of

the universal appeal of economics. He could not, of course, accept the

theory of economic determinism; but he was convinced that the whole

matter must be probed deeply:

The philosophy of property, if explored in its foundations, would

open new mines of practical wisdom, which would in the event

change the face of the world; would destroy the whole magazine

of dissimulation, for so many ages reckoned the Capital art of

Government. It would purge that rottenness which has defamed the

whole Science until _politic_ has come to mean cunning.... It would

go deep into ethics and touch all the relations of men. (_The

Present Age._)

Pending such exploration it was clear to Emerson that the

Federalist-Whig theory of a stake-in-society, or rulership by persons

of principle and property, was wholly vicious:

The theory of politics which has possessed the minds of men, and

which they have expressed the best they could in their laws and

in their revolutions, considers persons and property as the two

objects for whose protection government exists. Of persons, all

have equal rights, in virtue of being identical in nature. This

interest of course with its whole power demands a democracy. Whilst

the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access

to reason, their rights in property are very unequal.... Personal

rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the

ratio of the census; property demands a government framed on the

ratio of owners and owning.... That principle no longer looks

so self-evident as it appeared in former times, partly because

doubts have arisen whether too much weight had not been allowed

in laws to property, and such a structure given to our usages as

allowed the rich to encroach upon the poor, and keep them poor;

but mainly because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure

and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, on

its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons

deteriorating and degrading; that property will always follow

persons; that the highest end of government is the culture of men.

(_Essay on Politics._)

In such suggestions as he offered touching the form of the ideal

republic, where “every child that is born must have a just chance

for his bread,” Emerson reveals a pronounced bias in favor of

the Physiocratic theory of society. He was at one with Jefferson

in preferring an agrarian to an industrial order. Manchester

economics--the doctrine of the economic man, of the iron law of wages,

and other obscenities of the school--he quite frankly loathed. He did

not, he said, “look with sour aspect at the industrious manufacturing

village, or mart of commerce”; but he would not glorify the machine,

nor reduce man to a factory hand. He questioned the sufficiency or

finality of the division of labor. There is more than a suggestion of

William Morris in the doctrine elaborated in _Man the Reformer_; that

the industrial revolution with its factory system, must be judged in

the light of its effect upon the workingman, that the true function of

work must be explored and every man ply his tool to his own good. The

suggestion that “a man should have a farm or mechanical craft for his

culture,” was an implicit denial of industrialism in the days of its

first triumphs--a denial that Morris would have indorsed.

We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate

entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.

We must have an antagonism in the tough world for all the variety

of our spiritual faculties, or they will not be born. Manual labor

is the study of the external world. The advantages of riches

remains with him who produces them, not with the heir.

I should not be pained at a change which threatened a loss of

some of the luxuries or conveniences of society, if it proceeded

from a preference of the agricultural life out of the belief,

that our primary duties as men could be better discharged in that

calling.... But the doctrine of the Farm is merely this, that

every man ought to stand in primary relations with the work of the

world, ought to do it himself, and not to suffer the accident of

his having a purse in his pocket, or his having been bred to some

dishonorable and injurious craft, to sever him from those duties;

and for this reason, that labor is God’s education; that he only

is a sincere learner, he only can become a master, who learns the

secret of labor, and who by real cunning extorts from nature its

sceptre. (_Man the Reformer_.)

In all this--in the doctrine of the minimized state, of the sacred

rights of the individual, of the wholesomeness of an agricultural life;

in his concern for social justice and his tenderness for the poor and

exploited among men--Emerson proved himself a child of the romantic

eighteenth century, who by his own transcendental path had come upon

the Utopia that an earlier generation had dreamed of, and which he

sketched in the lovely poem prefacing the _Essay on Politics_. Much of

Emerson is compressed in these lines:

Fear, Craft, and Avarice,

Cannot rear a State.

Out of dust to build

What is more than dust....

When the Muses nine

With the Virtues meet,

Find to their design

An Atlantic seat,

By green orchard boughs

Fended from the heat,

Where the statesman ploughs

Furrow for the wheat;

When the Church is social worth,

When the state-house is the hearth,

Then the perfect State is come,

The republican at home.

The contrast between such Utopian conceptions and the realities of

America in the forties was calculated to edge the critical judgment

with a certain asperity. The older agrarian simplicity of New England

was being submerged by the industrial revolution, and in the midst

of the change Emerson quietly pronounced judgment upon the new idols

of his generation, upon State Street and Beacon Street, upon Webster

and Clay and Douglas, upon Everett and Choate, upon black slavery and

white, upon the Mexican War and the Fugitive Slave Bill, upon the

stolid poor and the callous rich. His judgment was severe but it was

never unjust. His later journals are a rich storehouse of critical

comment, keen, illuminating, disastrous in its analysis of all cant

and humbug. At times--in his comment on Webster, in his hatred of

State Street, in his criticism of the common materialism--he is almost

savage; at other times he is consumed with a vast sympathy for the

long-suffering, exploited mass of the people. “Alas, for the majority,”

he exclaimed, “that old, inevitable dupe and victim. What a dreary

Iliad of woes it goes wailing and mad withal. Some dog of a Cleon

or Robespierre or Douglas is always riding it to ruin” (_Journals_,

Vol. VIII, p. 449). When the Fugitive Slave Bill passed he wrote:

“This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people

who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God” (_ibid._, Vol.

VIII, p. 236). In smug and prosperous Boston he found no comfort--the

Boston that applauded when “Thank-God Choate thanked God five times” in

denouncing “the trashy sentimentalism of our lutestring enthusiasts.”

Emerson would have none of Boston:

In Boston is no company for a fine wit. There is a certain

_poor-smell_ in all the streets, in Beacon Street and Mount Vernon,

as well as in the lawyers’ offices, and the wharves, and the same

meanness and sterility, and leave-all-hope-behind, as one finds in

a boot manufacturer’s premises. (_Ibid._, Vol. VIII, p. 363.)

With Theodore Parker he judged Boston to be the home of Hunkers, of

that “cotton aristocracy” that Webster served. It groveled servilely

before State Street; how should the homely moralities get a hearing in

such a place? Even Harvard College he charged with being a tool of the

Boston counting-houses.[457]

It was the crass materialism of America, of the Democrats equally

with the Whigs, of the northern capitalists equally with the southern

planters, that drove him to exasperation, and tempered his optimism.

There is no jaunty optimism in a passage written during the panic days

of ’37:

... Society has played out its last stake; it is checkmated.

Young men have no hope. Adults stand like day-laborers idle in

the streets. None calleth us to labor. The old wear no crown of

warm life on their gray hairs. The present generation is bankrupt

of principles and hope, as of property. I see man is not what man

should be. He is a treadle of a wheel. He is the tassel at the

apron-string of society. He is a money-chest. He is the servant

of his belly. This is the causal bankruptcy, this the cruel

oppression, that the ideal should serve the actual, that the head

should serve the feet.... Pride, and Thrift, and Expediency, who

jeered and chirped and were so well pleased with themselves, and

made merry with the dream, as they termed it, of Philosophy and

Love,--behold they are all flat, and here is the Soul erect and

unconquered still. What answer is it now to say, It has always

been so? I acknowledge that, as far back as I can see the widening

procession of humanity, the marchers are lame and blind and deaf;

but to the soul that whole past is but one finite series in its

infinite scope. Deteriorating ever and now desperate. Let me begin

anew; let me teach the finite to know its master. (_Journals_, Vol.

IV, p. 242.)

To be a critic rather than a fighter, and a critic because he was a

poet and philosopher--this was the duty laid upon Emerson; and yet he

was sorely troubled when men from the skirmish line of social conflict

reported to him the need of leaders. Why should he be privileged to

remain in his study when slaves were abducted on the streets of Boston

and John Brown was fighting at Harper’s Ferry? With the extremest

reluctance he was drawn into the struggle--it was not his fight.

I waked at night [he recorded in his journal] and bemoaned myself,

because I had not thrown myself into this deplorable question of

Slavery, which seems to want nothing so much as a few assured

voices. But then, in hours of sanity, I recover myself, and say,

“God must govern his own world, and knows his own way out of this

pit, without my desertion of my post, which has none to guard it

but me. I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to

wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the

brain of man,--far retired in the heaven of invention, and which,

important to the republic of Man, have no other watchman, or lover,

or defender, but I.” (_Ibid._, Vol. VIII, p. 316.)

But always in the end he was drawn in, and none spoke wiser or braver

words to a careless generation. He never faltered, never compromised;

the prophet of the ideal faced the real and told the truth about it,

serenely and with clear insight. His heroes were not the heroes of

State Street; Horace Greeley, Theodore Parker, Horace Mann, Henry

Ward Beecher, he accounted the great Americans of his day, and not

Everett and Webster and Clay and Calhoun. A friend of civilization, he

was partisan only to the ideal; to justice, truth, righteousness. A

Yankee of the Yankees, a Puritan of the Puritans, he had emancipated

himself from all that was mean and ungenerous in the one and harsh

and illiberal in the other. A free soul, he was the flowering of two

centuries of spiritual aspiration--Roger Williams and Jonathan Edwards

come to more perfect fruition.

Footnotes

[456] See, for example, _Journals_, Vol. VII, p. 221.

[457] “Harvard College has no voice in Harvard College, but State

Street votes it down on every ballot. Everything will be permitted

there which goes to adorn Boston whiggism: ... but that which it exists

for,--to be a fountain of novelties out of heaven, a Delphi uttering

warning and ravishing oracles to elevate and lead mankind,--_that_ it

shall not be permitted to do or to think of. On the contrary, every

generosity of thought is _suspected_, and gets a bad name.” (_Ibid._,

Vol. IX, p. 215.)

Chapter III • Henry Thoreau • Transcendental Economist

“Wisdom crieth in the streets and no man regardeth her”; yet “she

teacheth temperance and forethought, justice and fortitude; than which

men can have in their life nothing more profitable.”

The single business of Henry Thoreau, during forty-odd years of

eager activity, was to discover an economy calculated to provide a

satisfying life. His one concern, that gave to his ramblings in Concord

fields a value as of high adventure, was to explore the true meaning

of wealth. Honest, fearless, curiously inquisitive--a masterless

man who would give no hostages to fortune--he proved his right to

be called a philosopher by seeking wisdom as a daily counselor and

friend, and following such paths only as wisdom suggested. Out of his

own experience, tested in the clear light of the Greeks, he wrote a

transcendental declaration of independence that may be taken as the

final word of the Concord school touching the great issues of practical

living. _Walden_ is the handbook of an economy that endeavors to refute

Adam Smith and transform the round of daily life into something nobler

than a mean gospel of plus and minus.

It was the common opinion of his neighbors that Henry Thoreau was a

queer fellow who had somehow got all his values topsy-turvy. And yet

the more thoughtfully one considers him, the more doubtful it appears

whether the queerness lay with him or with his critics. Unfortunately

a wholly honest and original man is so rare as to fall under common

suspicion. To the inmates of Bedlam a sane man will appear queer. In a

society of serfs a masterless man will be accounted an outlaw. To the

Concord farmers Thoreau appeared strange only because he applied in

his daily life a truth they assented to on the Sabbath. The principle

that life is more than the meat and the body than raiment was familiar

enough to the Sunday doctrines of Concord; but that a man should

seriously apply it on week-days; that he should propose to regulate his

mid-week activities by the economy of the Sermon on the Mount, passed

the comprehension of practical Yankees who followed quite another

economy. It was Thoreau’s conduct that perplexed them, rather than his

philosophy.

From first to last that conduct was serenely logical. To this disciple

of the ancient wisdom, Sabbath and week-day were one, and in seeking

to square his daily life with the ancient precept, Thoreau became the

arch-rebel of his group, the most individual amongst the “lunatic

fringe” of the transcendental movement, the one who escapes elusively

from the grip of an adjective. He slips out of all phrases devised

to imprison him. “A bachelor of nature,” Emerson, with his gift for

cryptic phrase, called him; “poet-naturalist,” Ellery Channing who

knew him intimately, chose to call him. “I am a poet, a mystic, and a

transcendentalist,” Thoreau said of himself, disregarding his nature

writings. Yet none of these phrases, true as they are, quite adequately

sums him up. At the risk of committing a fresh futility, one may

perhaps suggest that he was a Greek turned transcendental economist.

His life seems to have been a persistent experiment in values. A

philosopher of the open air who kept his mind clear and his nerves

robust by daily contact with wind and weather; a mystic who pried

curiously into the meaning of nature and was familiar with Hellenic

and Oriental systems of thought; a Yankee, skilled in various homely

crafts, yet rather interested in proving for himself what things were

excellent and taking nothing on hearsay--Thoreau’s chief business

would seem to have been with life itself, and how it might best be

lived by Henry Thoreau; how a rational being, in short, might enjoy

the faculties God has given him, following the higher economy and not

enslaving himself to the lower, so that when he came to die he might

honestly say, I have lived.

Amongst the members of the transcendental school Thoreau was the one

Concord man, born and bred there, literally of the soil and loving

the things of the soil. His tireless rovings were commonly bounded

by the familiar Concord horizons. His life had taken deep root in

the Concord fields, and he refused to join the restless multitude

of the _déracinés_, who seek novel experiences in a succession of

transplantings. No English peasant ever clung to the home-acres with

more loving tenacity. He was a countryman in instinct, distrusting the

great city twenty miles away that disseminated its virus through the

outlying villages and farms. The city was wedded to the economy of

industrialism and exploitation. But as a child of Jean Jacques, Thoreau

chose to believe that the road to heaven ran through the fields and

not over the cobblestones of Boston; he discovered an honest integrity

of character oftener in the country than in Lowell mills, yet none

too often there. It was easier to be free there, yet even in Concord

village the herd mind was always laying springes to catch the unwary;

and Thoreau would not be caught. He was poet and philosopher as well as

countryman, and he weighed his own life and the life of his neighbors

in the scales of Hellenic thought. He was surveyor of broader fields

than his neighbor’s wood-lot; was acquainted with other mysteries than

the mystery of pencil-making. He desired other ends than those his

shopkeeping, farm-tending neighbors served; he would not be encumbered

as they were. He could not carry such gross impedimenta in his pack

and be a free man; the pack was too heavy; and he proceeded to lighten

it with a thoroughness that startled Concord. He “signed off” from

Dr. Ripley’s church; with Alcott, he refused to pay his poll tax: he

severed his allegiance to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the

Federal government; he rid himself of all concern at what Concord

thought of his ways; he spoke out his honest convictions in the village

Lyceum--convictions about John Brown and slavery and Massachusetts’

part in sending negroes back to their masters--quite careless of the

disapproval of Judge Hoar and other Concord dignitaries. Such a man had

never before walked the village streets, and the spectacle filled his

neighbors with amazement.

With so much useless luggage got rid of, Thoreau was ready to set

about the high business of living. To outward appearance a somewhat

angular Yankee, practical and capable, he was at heart a Greek, with

the delight in the simple round of the seasons and a responsiveness

to natural beauty that belonged to the older civilization. Brought

up under the “pale negations” of Dr. Ripley’s theology, he emerged a

pagan. He was the most widely read in Greek literature of the Concord

transcendentalists; had translated _Prometheus Bound_, and much of

Pindar; and was completely at home in the clear Greek atmosphere. Who

but a Hellenist could utter such words as these which serve as his

apology for the Walden experiment?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front

only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could learn what

it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I

had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living

is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was

quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow

of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout

all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to

drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and,

if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine

meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it

were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true

account of it in my next excursion. (_Walden_, “What I Lived For.”)

To seek Pan in a tired world and recover joys that have long been

forgotten is a business that only a romantic will engage in; yet

Thoreau set out on the quest with a clear-eyed purpose:

... My Good Genius seemed to say,--Go fish and hunt far and wide

day by day,--farther and wider,--and rest thee by many brooks

and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the

days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek

adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night

over-take thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields

than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild

according to thy nature, like those sedges and brakes, which will

never become English hay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it

threaten ruin to farmer’s crops? that is not its errand to thee.

Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds.

Let not to get a living by thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the

land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are

where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like

serfs. (_Ibid._, “Baker Farm.”)

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and

life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is

more elastic, more starry, more immortal,--that is your success.

All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily

to bless yourself.... The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat

as intangible and indiscernible as the tints of morning or evening.

It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I

have clutched. (_Ibid._, “Higher Laws.”)

To save one’s soul has always been accounted in New England a matter

worthy of a man’s best effort, and Thoreau’s days were given over to

it with a single-heartedness without parallel even in New England.

The Puritan, he believed, had suffered his high spiritual mission

to be sacrificed to the economic; he would recover that mission by

sacrificing the economic to the spiritual; but he would interpret

the spiritual as a Hellenist rather than a Hebraist. The Christian

other-worldliness seemed to him unduly regardless of the loveliness of

this world. “Christianity,” he says in the _Week_, “only hopes. It has

hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land.

It has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with

joy.”

I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the

liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country’s God....

In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his

ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and

his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the

great God Pan is not dead, as was rumored. Perhaps of all the gods

of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his

shrine. (_The Week_, “Sunday.”)

His extraordinarily frank evaluation of the New Testament, and

of Calvinistic New England that had too long chewed the cud of

conscience--“they did not know when to swallow their cud, and their

lives of course yielded no milk”--is the work of a pagan from whom all

creeds slip easily. Few more searching sermons have been preached in

Massachusetts than the sermon that composed itself as Thoreau’s boat

floated down the Concord River, past the Billerica meeting-house where

the honest villagers were worshiping the God of New England--a sermon

that with fine irony summons minister and congregation to consider the

deeper teachings of their sacred book.

I know of no book that has so few readers. There is none so truly

strange, and heretical, and unpopular. To Christians, no less than

Greeks and Jews, it is foolishness and a stumbling-block. There

are, indeed, severe things in it which no man should read aloud but

once. “Seek first the kingdom of heaven.”--“Lay not up for yourself

treasures on earth.”--“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that

thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in

heaven.”--“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole

world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange

for his soul?”--Think of this, Yankees!... Think of repeating these

things to a New England audience! thirdly, fourthly, fifteenthly,

till there are three barrels of sermons! Who, without cant, can

read them aloud? Who, without cant, can hear them, and not go out

of the meeting-house? They never _were_ read, they never _were_

heard. Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any

pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that

meeting-house upon another.

... When one enters a village, the church, not only really but

from association, is the ugliest-looking building in it, because

it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is

most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall ere long

cease to deform the landscape.... Really, there is no infidelity,

now-a-days, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath,

and rebuilds the churches. (_The Week_, “Sunday.”)

As Thoreau understood the problem of economics there were three

possible solutions open to him: to exploit himself, to exploit his

fellows, or to reduce the problem to its lowest denominator. The

first was quite impossible--to imprison oneself in a treadmill when

the morning called to great adventure, to burden oneself with useless

fardels when the pack must be kept light, was the folly of a slave

mind. He had observed his neighbors closely and found little good in

their way of self-exploitation.

I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops,

and offices, and field, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be

doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.... How many a poor

immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its

load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn

seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed,

and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture and

wood-lot.... The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the

soil for compost. (_Walden_, “Economy.”)

To exploit one’s fellows seemed to Thoreau’s sensitive social

conscience an even grosser infidelity. The leisure of a slave driver,

got by imprisoning his fellows in a treadmill, was an ignoble leisure

from which came the empty vulgarity of modern life. “If I devote myself

to other pursuits and contemplations,” he said, “I must first see, at

least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders.

I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations, too.”

Freedom with abstinence seemed to him better than serfdom with material

well-being, for he was only giving up the lesser to enjoy the greater,

as was the privilege of the philosopher.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor

even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according

to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity,

and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only

theoretically, but practically.... When he has obtained those

things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative

than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life

now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. (_Walden_,

“Economy.”)