It was the reply of the arch-individualist to the tyrannous

complexities of society, and it set him apart even in the world of

transcendentalism. Other members of the group professed to have found

a better way out of the dilemma--the way of Brook Farm and Fruitland;

a richer life was to be achieved not by espousing poverty but by

coöperation. But Thoreau could not adopt the coöperative solution; he

must either accept society as it was or remove. Convinced that it was

not worth accepting--that one made a foolish bargain in selling oneself

to it--he was content to remove to Walden Pond. “I came into this

world,” he said, “not chiefly to make this a good place to live in,

but to live in it, be it good or bad.” “I desire to speak impartially

on this point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of

the present economical and social arrangement.” He did not advocate

that other men should build cabins and live isolated. He had no wish

to dogmatize concerning the best mode of living--each must settle that

matter for himself. But that a satisfying life should be lived, that

the fox should somehow get free even though he left his tail in the

trap, he was vitally concerned about. “The youth may build or plant or

sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he

would like to do.” Let him at least rid himself of the false gospel of

creature comforts, which men pay too high a price for.

The story of Thoreau’s emancipation from the lower economics is the one

romance of his life, and _Walden_ is his great book. More restrained

than the _Week_ and lacking the exuberant beauty of the latter--its

noble talk and scathing criticism--it is “informed by a more explicit

unifying philosophy.” It is a book in praise of life rather than of

Nature, a record of calculating economies that studied saving in order

to spend more largely. But it is a book of social criticism as well, in

spite of its explicit denial of such a purpose, and in its speculations

much of Carlyle and Ruskin and William Morris crops out. In considering

the true nature of economy he concluded, with Ruskin, that “the cost

of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to

be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Conceive of life

as cheap, a poor thing to be exploited, and the factory system becomes

the logical economic order; but conceive of it as dear, and the common

happiness the great objective of society, and quite another sort of

industrialism will emerge. Thoreau did not look with approval on the

rising city of Lowell, with its multiplying spindles and increasing

proletariat, and he did not understand why Americans should boast of

a system that provided vulgar leisure for the masters at the cost of

serfdom for the workers.

Where is this division of labor to end? [he asks] and what object

does it finally serve? I cannot believe that our factory system is

the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the

operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English;

and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or

observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and

honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be

enriched. (_Walden_, “Economy.”)

The whole middle-class philosophy of exploitation was hateful to him,

the middleman equally with the manufacturer. “Trade curses everything

it touches; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole

curse of trade attaches to the business.” Men have been deceived by a

false economy--lured by the bog lights away from the open fields to

flounder in the miasmic marshes. While Ruskin was still pottering over

Turner, Thoreau was elaborating in _Walden_ the text: The only wealth

is life.

In other bits _Walden_ is curiously like _Hopes and Fears for Art_,

and the drift of the whole is one with the revolutionary teachings of

Morris, that the abiding satisfactions are those which spring from free

creative work. This Yankee Greek had learned that it is a beautiful

life back of the tool that creates beauty, and that if the work of our

hands is ugly, it is because our liver are mean and sordid, affording

no outlet for the free creative spirit. In New England, Puritan and

Yankee alike had conspired against beauty, and the gods had taken

revenge by clothing life in drab.

Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls

must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful

living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful

is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no

housekeeping.

What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown

from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the

indweller, who is the only builder,--out of some unconscious

truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the

appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined

to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of

life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the

painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and

cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants

whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces

merely, which makes them _picturesque_; and equally interesting

will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be as

simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is no

straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. (_Walden_,

“Economy.”)

Thoreau needed only to have lived in a world that honored craftsmanship

to have opened fully the vein of gold that Morris dug his philosophy

from; he had the instinct of the craftsman but not his training. His

turning from the workshop to the fields, hearing no call in the humdrum

village economy to develop a beautiful craftsmanship, was an implied

criticism of the common sterility of labor in every-day Concord; yet

the honest sincerity of his nature led him to the conclusion that lies

at the heart of the philosophy of the great English craftsman:

None have so pleasant a time as they who in earnest seek to earn

their bread. It is true actually as it is true really; it is true

materially as it is true spiritually, that they who seek honestly

and sincerely, with all their hearts and lives and strength, to

earn their bread, do earn it, and it is sure to be very sweet to

them.

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to

maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime,

if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler

nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not

necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his

brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. (_Walden_, “Economy.”)

At Walden Pond and on the Merrimac River Thoreau’s mind was serene as

the open spaces; but this Greek serenity was rudely disturbed when he

returned to Concord village and found his neighbors drilling for the

Mexican War, and when authority in the person of the constable came

to him with the demand that he pay a due share to the public funds.

The war to him was a hateful thing, stupid and unjust, waged for the

extension of the obscene system of negro slavery; and Thoreau was

brought sharply to consider his relations to the political state that

presumed to demand his allegiance, willing or unwilling, to its acts.

Under the stress of such an emergency the transcendentalist was driven

to examine the whole theory of the relation of the individual to the

state. He was not political-minded; he had concerned himself little

with political theory; he would gladly let the government alone if

government would let him alone; he was even prepared to make excuses

for government. But he would not compromise with his conscience; and

when the state applied the principle of coercion, he applied the

counter principle of passive resistance. It was while he was domiciled

in Walden cabin that the hand of the law seized him and thrust him

into Concord jail. He went with the constable quietly, but there was

a dangerous contempt in his heart. It seemed absurd that a man could

not go to the cobbler’s for a pair of mended boots, but he must be

interfered with by a neighbor playing the rôle of constable. Constable,

jailer, the magistrate on the bench, all the elaborate machinery of

the law, Thoreau contemplated quizzically and judged his neighbors

fools to have exchanged their freedom for such masquerades. Those who

got anything from such instruments--lawyers and propertied men--might

think well of them, but they were a mere impertinence to Thoreau who

wanted to go huckleberrying. When they let him out he went quietly

after his berries, and discovered there was “no state in sight among

the berry bushes.” “I saw,” he remarked casually, “that the state was

half-witted, that it was as timid as a lone woman with her silver

spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost

all my remaining respect for it and pitied it.”

But Thoreau was not done with the comedy. It set him upon thinking,

and the result was the essay, _Civil Disobedience_. Taken by itself

alone, it is a somewhat astonishing performance. This Yankee

transcendentalist quite evidently has turned philosophical anarchist.

But read in the light of Emerson’s _Journals_, or in the light of

Godwin’s _Political Justice_, it is easily comprehensible. It is no

more than transcendental individualism translated into politics, with

all comfortable compromises swept away. Its sources run straight back

to eighteenth-century liberalism with its doctrine of the minimized

state--a state that must lose its coercive sovereignty in the measure

that the laws of society function freely. Very likely Thoreau had never

read Godwin, yet his political philosophy was implicit in _Political

Justice_. In Godwin’s thinking the problem of man in society is the

problem of a voluntary adjustment of the individual to the state; and

it is only by establishing economics and politics on morality, that

political justice is possible. The moral law is the fundamental law,

superior to statutes and constitutions; and to it the citizen is bound

to render allegiance. “The object of the present state of society is

to multiply labor,” asserted Godwin; “in another state it will be to

simplify it.” “The only adequate apology of government is necessity.”

“Government however reformed” is “little capable of affording solid

benefit to mankind.” “Give us equality and justice but no constitution.

Suffer us to follow without restraint the dictates of our own judgment,

and to change our forms of social order as fast as we improve the

dictates of our own judgment.” “The pretense of collective wisdom is

the most palpable of all impostures.” “The true reason why the mass of

mankind has so often been the dupe of knaves, has been the mysterious

and complicated nature of the social system. Once annihilate the

quackery of government, and the most homespun understanding will be

prepared to scorn the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead

him.”

By his own path Thoreau came to identical conclusions. There is

little in _Civil Disobedience_ that is not in _Political Justice_. To

neither thinker is there an abstract state, society or nation--only

individuals; and to both, the fundamental law is the law of morality.

Political expediency and the law of morality frequently clash, and

in such event it is the duty of the individual citizen to follow the

higher law. Thoreau went even further, and asserted the doctrine of

individual compact, which in turn implied the doctrine of individual

nullification; no government, he said, can have any “pure right over my

person or property but what I concede to it.”

I heartily accept the motto,--“That government is best which

governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more

rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to

this, which also I believe,--“That government is best which governs

not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the

kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but

an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments

are sometimes, inexpedient.

A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot

be based on justice.... We should be men first and subjects

afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law,

so much as for the right.... How does it become a man to behave

toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot

without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant

recognize that political organization as _my_ government which

is the _slave’s_ government also.... There is but little virtue

in the action of masses of men.... It is not a man’s duty, as a

matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any,

even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other

concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his

hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it

practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and

contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue

them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him

first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.... If the law is

of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice

to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter

friction to stop the machine.... As for adopting the ways which

the state has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such

ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone....

Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union.... Why do

they not dissolve it themselves,--the union between themselves and

the state,--and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?[458]

(_Works_, Vol. X, pp. 131-170.)

“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine”--in this

doctrine of individual syndicalism Thoreau’s conception of the relation

of the citizen to the state is tersely summed up. In so far as he

was a democrat it was of the transcendental school, rather than the

Jacksonian. He would be governed by the majority no more than by the

minority. The scorn of a fine ethical mind for practical government by

politicians could scarcely be more tellingly phrased than in the bit of

verse he tucks into _Civil Disobedience_:

A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut,

To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.

Such a man quite evidently would go for Nullification as fiercely as

Garrison. Even though he might wash his hands of society, the cries of

those who suffered injustice followed him, and when the Fugitive Slave

Law passed, it robbed him of his peace, destroying his pleasure in

wonted things. The slave hunters were in Boston streets, and justice

in the person of Commissioner Loring was sending Anthony Burns back to

slavery. As he contemplated the spectacle his wrath against a coercive

government flamed up. “My thoughts are murder to the state,” he

complained bitterly, “and involuntarily go plotting against her.”

I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and

Americans only at a late and convenient hour.... I hear a good deal

said about trampling this law under foot. Why, one need not go out

of his way to do that. This law rises not to the level of the head

or the reason; its natural habitat is in the dirt. It was born and

bred, and has its life, only in the dust and mire, on a level with

the feet; and he who walks with freedom, and does not with Hindoo

mercy avoid treading on every venomous reptile, will inevitably

tread on it, and so trample it under foot,--and Webster, its

maker, like the dirt-bug and its ball. (“Slavery in Massachusetts,”

in _Works_, Vol. X.)

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make

the law free. They are the lovers of law and order who observe the

law when the government breaks it.

Thoreau was a stern judge, and he held his age in low esteem. His

Concord neighbors seemed to him poor fellows with too little spirit to

be free men; they were the raw material of standing armies, militia,

jailors, constables, and the _posse comitatus_. And then one day into

the field of his vision came a plain Yankee, primitive and heroic,

John Brown of Ossawatomie. In the contemplation of his life and death

Thoreau felt a shock of new faith run like an electric current through

his veins. The age was no longer dead to him, for it had bred a man.

“I rejoice that I live in this age,” he exclaimed, “that I am his

contemporary.” He had found his hero--not in past times as Carlyle and

Emerson had done, but in the present and among his own Yankee kind. He

had talked with John Brown in Concord and recognized him as a primitive

idealist of rugged mold, a stern moralist who set justice above the

law. That this man should be so grossly misunderstood by lesser men, so

foully slandered, filled him with sorrow and with wrath also. “When a

noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble

themselves. I was not surprised that certain of my neighbors spoke of

John Brown as an ordinary felon, for who are they? They have either

much flesh, or much office, or much coarseness of some kind” (“The

Last Days of John Brown,” in _Works_, Vol. X, p. 241). His trial and

conviction Thoreau regarded as a judgment, not on John Brown, but upon

America; the lawyers and editors and politicians who judged him were

only convicting themselves.

His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to

pass muster. Each one who there laid down his life for the poor

and oppressed was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if

not millions; apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and

devoted humanity; ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for

the benefit of his fellow-man. It may be doubted if there were so

many more their equals in these respects in all the country,--I

speak of his followers only,--for their leader, no doubt, scoured

the land far and wide, seeking to swell his troop. These alone were

ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. Surely they

were the very best men you could select to be hung. That was the

best compliment this country could pay them. They were ripe for her

gallows. She has tried a long time, she has hung a good many, but

never found the right one before.

I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending

a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground,

and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence

whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial

cases. Business men may arrange that among themselves. If they were

the interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man,

that would be another thing. A counterfeiting law-factory, standing

half in a slave land and half in a free! What kind of laws for free

men can you expect from that? (“A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in

_Works_, Vol. X, p. 197.)

In Thoreau the eighteenth-century philosophy of individualism, the

potent liberalisms let loose on the world by Jean Jacques, came to

fullest expression in New England. He was the completest embodiment of

the _laissez-faire_ reaction against a regimented social order, the

severest critic of the lower economics that frustrate the dreams of

human freedom. He was fortunate in dying before the age of exploitation

had choked his river with its weeds; fortunate in not foreseeing how

remote is that future of free men on which his hopes were fixed:

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this

year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched

uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out

all the muskrats ... such is the character of that morrow which

mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out

our eyes is darkness to us. There is more day to dawn. The sun is

but a morning-star. (_Walden._)

With the dawning of that day perhaps men will sit once more at the feet

of the ancient wisdom and fashion their lives upon the principle that

the soul is more than the meat and the body than raiment. Perhaps they

may even shape for themselves new heroes--“above and after all, the Man

of the Age, come to be called workingman.” He and his deeds are looked

down upon in our time--“It is obvious that none yet speaks to his

condition, for the speaker is not yet in his condition.” “Literature

speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future; how much

to the East, how little to the West” (“Thomas Carlyle and his Works,”

in _Works_, Vol. X, p. 118). One of the great names in American

literature is the name of Henry Thoreau. Yet only after sixty years is

he slowly coming into his own.

Footnotes

[458] Compare the following entry in his _Journal_ under date of March

26, 1842: “I must confess I have felt mean enough when asked how I was

to act on society, what errand I had to mankind. Undoubtedly I did

not feel mean without a reason, and yet my loitering is not without

defense. I would fain communicate the wealth of my life to men,

would really give them what is most precious in my gift.... I know

no riches I would keep back. I have no private good unless it be my

peculiar ability to serve the public.... This is the only individual

property.... It is hard to be a good citizen of the world in any great

sense, but if we do render no interest or increase to mankind out

of that talent God gave us, we can at least preserve the principal

unimpaired.”

Chapter IV • Theodore Parker • Transcendental Minister

Theodore Parker was described by one of his biographers as “the best

working-plan of an American yet produced,” and by a fellow minister as

“a conscience since Luther unsurpassed.” The two comments suggest still

another, that he was completely and adequately New England. Yankee

and Puritan contributed equally to his making. His rich and plastic

mind was two-sided: one-half was wholly English, practical, logical,

concrete, lucid; loving fact and tireless in its acquisition; master

of everyday affairs and competent in dealing with this world; the

other was emotional, mystical, idealistic, deeply and spontaneously

religious, living daily with God as a son with the Father, carrying

the sorrows of men in his heart and the wrongs of the world on his

conscience. One of the greatest of New England ministers, he was

shepherd as well as counselor, pastor as well as teacher. “I wish to

stand on the earth,” he said with true critical insight, “though I

would look beyond the stars. I would live _with men_, but think with

philosophers” (Weiss, _Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker_,

Vol. I, p. 115). The generous amplitude of his nature was too large

for the narrow walls of a church; he took all Boston for his parish,

all New England for his congregation. Amazingly active and vital, he

consumed whole libraries in his pursuit of knowledge. “His mind,”

says Weiss, “was like the republican idea itself; it could afford to

be hospitable, but could not afford to be exclusive” (_ibid._, Vol.

I, p. 178). Conversant with many fields of knowledge, with a memory

extraordinarily retentive, he was master of many languages--nineteen

or twenty, according to Thomas Wentworth Higginson--and at home in the

most abstruse subjects. He spent his vast energy with the prodigality

of Cotton Mather, and he achieved what Cotton Mather with his inbred

parochialism could not achieve, an intellectual cosmopolitanism that

judged Boston by broader standards than it could gauge.

A first-class fighting-man was this child of yeoman New England--none

braver, not even Garrison, none more effective; and yet

tender-hearted, sympathetic, with the shrewd common sense of his

homespun forebears. The son of a Lexington farmer and mechanic,

self-trained, endowed with indomitable will, he came of the soundest

stock in Massachusetts. His grandfather was captain of the Minute Men

who faced the British troops on Lexington Common in April, 1775; and

a conscious pride of ancestry broke out frequently in his speech.

The words uttered before the Ministerial Conference in May, 1851,

in justification of his repudiation of the Fugitive Slave Law, were

characteristic: “I am not afraid of men, I can offend them. I care

nothing for their hate, or their esteem. I am not very careful of my

reputation.” He then goes on:

I have had to arm myself. I have written my sermons with a pistol

in my desk,--loaded, a cap on the nipple, and ready for action.

Yea, with a drawn sword within reach of my right hand. This I

have done in Boston; in the midst of the nineteenth century; been

obliged to do it to defend the (innocent) members of my church,

women as well as men! You know that I do not like fighting....

But what could I do? I was born in the little town where the

first bloodshed of the Revolution began. The bones of men who

first fell in that war are covered by the monument at Lexington,

it is “sacred to Liberty and the Rights of Mankind”; those men

fell “in the sacred cause of God and their country.” This is the

first inscription that I ever read. These men were my kindred. My

grandfather drew the first sword in the Revolution; my fathers

fired the first shot; the blood which flowed there was kindred to

this which courses in my veins today. Besides that, when I write

in my library at home, on the one side of me is the Bible which my

fathers prayed over, their morning and evening prayer, for nearly

a hundred years. On the other side there hangs the firelock my

grandfather fought with in the old French war, which he carried

at the taking of Quebec, which he zealously used at the battle of

Lexington, and beside it is another, a trophy of that war, the

first gun taken in the Revolution, taken also by my grandfather.

With these things before me, these symbols; with these memories in

me, when a parishioner, a fugitive from slavery, a woman, pursued

by the kidnappers, came to my house, what could I do less than take

her in and defend her to the last? (_Additional Speeches_, Vol. I,

pp. 13-15.)

With his sensitive conscience visited by such memories--a child of ’76

living in the evil days of the Fugitive Slave Law, a devout freethinker

borne on the crest of transcendental thought--Theodore Parker became

the embodiment and epitome of the New England renaissance. More

completely perhaps than any other representative, he gathered up and

expressed the major revolutionary impulses of his time and world: the

idealistic theism implicit in the Unitarian reaction from Calvinism;

the transcendental individualism latent in the doctrine of divine

immanence; and the passion for righteousness, to make the will of God

prevail in a world where the devil quite openly kept his ledgers. He

was an eager and thorough iconoclast, impatient to break the false

images--the God of John Calvin with its slanders of human nature,

and the god of State Street with its contempt for justice--which New

England, he believed, had worshiped too long, forgetting the ideals of

the Revolutionary fathers. The mind and conscience of Boston seemed

to him stifled by the strait-jacket of respectability. Righteousness

like a fugitive slave, was driven into hiding, or must walk the open

streets with a Derringer in its pocket. As a free soul loving freedom,

and a righteous man loving righteousness, he believed a duty was laid

on him to cut away the strait-jacket, to shame the Boston that sold

the poor in the gates for a pair of shoes. He must labor to set free

the mind and conscience of Boston that they might go forth purified to

work a beneficent work in a world that is God’s and not the devil’s.

His attack was keen and unsparing; he laid on with gusto; he used

homely words; he was just rather than polite. Impatient of humbug and

self-seeking he dealt in searching criticism rather than conventional

eulogy. At his touch distinguished reputations shrank to the mean and

commonplace, and inflated dignitaries collapsed like a pricked balloon.

Intellectually honest, he spoke the truth he had been at immense

pains to gather, and in consequence those who suffered the sting of

his attack--ministers and lawyers and merchants and politicians, men

in high position, distinguished leaders of Boston society--were not

slack in crying out against him as a demagogue and agitator. Next to

Garrison he became the most hated man in New England; and something of

that contemporary hatred, fierce and unforgiving, clings to his name

still, coloring later estimates of his worth, hinting that his manners

were not on a level with his morals.[459] An extraordinarily vital and

interesting person, in short, was this Yankee preacher with his Puritan

conscience--this transcendental critic with his quiver full of facts;

one not to be ignored in casting up the accounts of the New England

renaissance.

With his memorable sermon _On the Transient and Permanent in

Christianity_, preached in May, 1841--a sermon that ranks in the

history of Unitarianism with Channing’s Baltimore sermon--the

Unitarian movement entered upon its second broad phase. It abandoned

supernaturalism established on the sufficient authority of the

Scriptures, and adopted the conception of an evolutionary theism, of

God progressively revealing himself to the developing faculties of

men and speaking through the conscience. Under Channing’s guidance

Unitarianism had abandoned the major dogmas of Calvinism--total

depravity, predestination, a God of wrath; it had shifted the emphasis

from stable will to boundless love; and by such teachings it had

captured the greater churches of Boston. By 1830 it had become securely

established as the religion of Boston respectability, with implied

bounds set to its intellectual liberalism. As the first ardor abated it

fell to defining the new orthodoxy, resting content with what already

had been won. It was against this new orthodoxy that held fast to the

old supernaturalism that Theodore Parker protested. “The defect of

the Unitarians was a profound one,” he pointed out; “ceasing to fear

‘the great and dreadful God’ of the Old Testament, they had not quite

learned to love the all-beautiful and altogether lovely [God] of the

universe.”[460] He would have no pausing of the movement of adventurous

thought, no settling back into the ruts of dogmatism; and so he threw

himself with immense energy into the work of liberating Unitarianism

from a premature orthodoxy.

For this work he was admirably equipped. The greatest scholar of

his generation of New England ministers, deep in German theology

and philosophy, with the latest results of higher criticism on his

study table, he was critically trained to separate historical fact

from ecclesiastical tradition, and establish his theology on a basis

of naturalism. He was at once scientific and transcendental. He had

translated De Wette’s _Introduction to the Old Testament_ and was

intimately acquainted with Strauss’s _Leben Jesu_. He knew the oriental

backgrounds of Hebraic thought, had studied comparative religion with

its suggestive record of taboos and fetishism, and was gathering

materials for a comprehensive history of religion from primitive times.

Intellectually acquisitive and curious, he far outran the less informed

and courageous of his Unitarian brethren. But he was far more than

a critic, he may well be accounted a religious genius. A convinced

intuitionist, he tested every authority by appeal to transcendental

experience. He frankly abandoned faith in the supernatural, with its

corollaries of miracles and its “fetishism of the Bible,” and was

far advanced in a theism that compensated for the supernatural by a

passionate love of God. Thus established in personal experience his

religion issued in conduct. Love of God was more to him than historical

faith embodied in an historical church; love to his fellow men was

more appealing than dogma. Hence the profoundly ethical quality of

his religion, warm, palpitating, generous, that set it apart from

the colder and austerer ethicism of the conventional Unitarians. The

spirituality of Channing was enriched in Parker by the ardency of his

loving nature.

The three major doctrines of his theism, as elaborated in his “Letter

to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society,” were the

infinite perfection of God, the adequacy of man to all his functions,

and the sufficiency of absolute, natural religion. In his elaboration

of these doctrines the controlling influence of transcendental thought

is everywhere apparent. A metaphysical optimism throws a golden light

on all his thinking. The trinitarian Godhead, equally with the devil,

vanishes in “the infinitely perfect God,” “immanent in the world of

matter, and in the world of spirit, the two hemispheres which to us

make up the universe”--a universe created “from a perfect motive, for a

perfect purpose, of perfect substance, and as a perfect means.” Hence

it follows in Parker’s logic, that

there must be a complete solidarity between God and the two-fold

universe which He creates. The perfect Creator is thus also a

perfect providence; indeed, creation and providence are not

objective accidents of Deity, nor subjective caprices, but the

development of the perfect motive to its perfect purpose, love

becoming a universe of perfect welfare. I have called God Father,

but also Mother ... to express more sensibility, the quality of

tender and unselfish love, which mankind associates with Mother

more than aught else beside. (“Letter,” etc., in Weiss, Vol. II,

pp. 470-471.)

The doctrine of the adequacy of man flows logically from the doctrine

of the immanence of God, but Parker was not content to rest it on

such basis alone. The conception of human perfectibility, as it

filtered down to him through different strata of thought, romantic

and idealistic, found a high sanction in his transcendentalism; but

his practical nature demanded that it be established if possible on

a scientific foundation. Anthropology must substantiate philosophy.

Parker was not convinced that it could be thus adequately established;

nevertheless he would travel the objective path as far as it might

lead. Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ was published after Parker was

seized with his fatal illness, yet in much of the latter’s thinking he

was groping his way toward some similar conception of “the unity of

life of the human race,” with its “progressive development” from “the

state of ignorance, poverty, and utter nakedness of soul and sense,

the necessary primitive conditions of the race, up to the present

civilization.” In the deep-buried scattered records of the past, slowly

being gathered together and interpreted by science, he found “proof of

time immense, wherein man, this spiritual Cosmos, has been assuming

his present condition, individual, domestic, social, and national,

and accumulating that wealth of things and thoughts which is the mark

of civilization.” The doctrine of human perfectibility might not be

capable of scientific proof, but it was more than a reasonable hope; it

was implicit in all the past.

But this progressive development does not end with us; we have

seen only the beginning; the future triumphs of the race must be

vastly greater than all accomplished yet. In the primal instincts

and automatic desires of man, I have found a prophecy that what

he wants is possible, and shall one day be actual.... What good

is not with us is before, to be attained by toil and thought, and

religious life. (_Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 471-472.)

Of this slowly and painfully evolving man with his expanding ideals,

religion Parker believed to be the highest ultimate expression; and

religion, as the eyes of men slowly open to larger truths, will be seen

to be answerable to the needs of daily life, to embody the highest

ideal of social excellence. The noblest religion he believed was

not supernatural, but natural. “The absolute religion which belongs

to man’s nature, and is gradually unfolded thence,” “is the idea of

humanity, dimly seen but clearly felt, which has flitted before the

pious eyes of men in all lands and many an age, and been prayed for

as the ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’” It is forever refashioning its ideal,

re-embodying its vision, in every devout soul, in every creative age.

“The religious history of the race is the record of man’s continual

but unconscious efforts to attain this ‘desire of all nations’”

(_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 475). But unhappily every new advance soon

crystallizes in dogmas and institutions; taboos and fetishisms are

quick to re-imprison the mind that struggles to be free. Old forms,

therefore, must be daily broken to make room for evolving experience.

Religion must be free; it must rise spontaneously from the depths

of life. Christianity has suffered grievously from a fetishism of

the Bible, from its worship of the supernatural, from an ungenerous

sectarianism beloved of “ecclesiastic skeptics,” who believe “there is

no place for the Christian Church or the Bible till they have nullified

the faculties which created both, and rendered Bible-makers and

Church-founders impossible.” Every age must write a new Bible out of

its God-given instincts, permeated with the divine love that is slowly

shaping society to the divine purpose.

No more is the atheistic mocker or the ecclesiastic bigot

commissioned to stop the human race with his cry, “Cease there,

mankind, thy religious search! for, thousand-million-headed as

thou art, thou canst know nought directly of thy God, thy duty,

or thyself. Pause, and accept my authenticated word; stop, and

despair!” (_Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 475.)

It was this ethical quality of his religion that kept Theodore Parker

so sensitive to wrongs and so generous in response to the call of

social justice. His religion quickened his social conscience and

summoned him to serve the plentiful reform movements of the day. With

Garrison and Wendell Phillips he organized the militants of Boston

radicalism. His political principles were simple and uncompromising,

woven from the strands of English and French libertarianism of the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--from Sidney, Locke, Rousseau,

the great leaders of the natural-rights school. One who accepted as

axiomatic the nobility of human nature and the perfectibility of man,

might be a political romantic, but he was certain to be a liberal.

Parker was a primitive democrat, whose democracy was bone of his bone

and flesh of his flesh. But the democracy that answered the needs of

his dream of the kingdom was, like Emerson’s and Channing’s, ethical

rather than political or economic--it was “the enactment of God’s

justice into human laws” (“The Nebraska Question,” in _Additional

Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 327). “The democratic idea has had but a slow

and gradual growth even in New England,” he pointed out; nevertheless

he was convinced that it was spreading, and “government becomes more

and more of all, by all and for all”[461] (_ibid._, p. 33). He hated

Federalism with an intensity equaling Jefferson’s, and ecclesiastical

Federalism that twisted the authority of the church to the side of

wealthy pewholders, using Scripture as a sanction for exploitation, he

denounced as scathingly as Garrison. The power of the political state

he feared, because he discovered the political state to be the friend

of the rich rather than the poor, of selfish advantage rather than of

God’s justice. With other Abolitionists he distrusted the machinery

of centralization that was being skillfully erected at Washington.

“Opposition to centralization of authority is very old in America,” he

remarked; “I hope it will be always young” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 29).

But he was no partisan to the rule of the majority, if it determined

contrary to his conscience. A transcendental individualist, he went

for the nullification of an immoral statute in the name of the Higher

Law.[462]

Parker was never blind to the economic basis of politics. He saw

so clearly, indeed, the close alliance between group interests and

governmental statutes, that his political activities were almost

wholly determined by that recognition. As a political critic he was

the shrewdest realist of his generation. He was one constituent whom

politicians talking for Buncombe could not befuddle. He was too deeply

read in American history, gifted with too keen historical insight,

to be impressed by the glittering rhetoric of the Rufus Choates. He

had his own views of the American government, and majestic appeals to

the Constitution left him cold. The Constitution, he asserted, “is

a provisional compromise between the ideal political principles of

the Declaration, and the actual selfishness of the people North and

South.” America was not a democracy. It had thrown off theocracy,

aristocracy, and monarchy, only to set in their places the “institution

of money--the master of all the rest.” The economic basis of society in

America he considered to be open and patent. In church and state, money

“is this day the strongest power of the nation.” He declined to be

deceived by party cries and platforms, either Whig or Democratic; both

parties served economics rather than justice.

So there is a party organization about the dollar as its central

nucleus and idea. The dollar is the germinal dot of the Whig party;

its motive is pecuniary.... It sneers at the poor; at the many;

has a contempt for the people. It legislates against the poor,

and for the rich ... the few who are born with the desire, the

talent, and the conventional position to become rich. “Take care

of the rich, and they will take care of the poor,” is its secret

maxim. Everything must yield to money.... With this party there

is no Absolute Right, no Absolute Wrong.... There is Expediency

and Inexpediency.... Accordingly a millionaire is reckoned by this

party as the highest production of Society. He is the Whig ideal;

he alone has attained “the measure of the stature of a perfect man.”

The Democratic party appeals to the brute will of the majority,

right or wrong; it knows no Higher Law.... There is ... no vital

difference between the Whig party and the Democratic party; no

difference in moral principle. The Whig inaugurates the Money got;

the Democrat inaugurates the Desire to get money. That is all the

odds.... There is only a hand rail between the two, which breaks

down if you lean on it, and the parties mix ... a Democrat is but

a Whig on time; a Whig is a Democrat arrived at maturity; his time

has come. A Democrat is a young Whig who will legislate for money

as soon as he has got it; the Whig is an old Democrat who once

hurrahed for the majority--“Down with money! there is a despot!

and up with the desire for it! Down with the rich, and up with

the poor!” The young man, poor, obscure, and covetous, in 1812

was a Democrat, went a-privateering against England; rich, and

accordingly “one of our eminent citizens,” in 1851 he was a Whig,

and went a-kidnapping against Ellen Crafts and Thomas Sims. (“The

Nebraska Question,” in _Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, pp. 331-335.)

The America of Parker’s day was fast becoming middle class and Parker

knew it, and like Lincoln he did not disapprove. Honest thrift he found

wholly desirable, and wealth if it were honestly got. But speculation

dissociated from creative work he regarded with old-fashioned distrust.

“If a man fully pay in efficient, productive toil and thought, he is

entitled to all he gets, one dollar or many million dollars ... and

if his estate be but what he has thus actually and honestly paid for

with service given, equivalent to the service received, what he can

virtuously keep or humanely apply and expend, then it will never be

too large.”[463] But he believed there were other gods, and greater,

than the god of getting on; social justice was more desirable than

unearned increment; and he set his face like flint against the common

materialism of America. “I come to build up piety and morality; to

pull down only what cumbers the ground,” he said; but he had learned

that the temples of State Street were not easily leveled; that they

would not fall without a mighty crash. A less courageous man would

have hesitated, but Parker was utterly fearless. Boston he knew “was

a Tory town.” “The Mother city of the Puritans is now the metropolis

of the Hunkers” (_Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 111). But the

spirit of ’76 was strong in him and he would “appeal from Boston drunk

with gold, and briefly mad with hate, to sober Boston in her hour to

come.” He would appeal from Whiggish Boston to Revolutionary Boston;

from State Street to Lexington common; from the Faneuil Hall of Rufus

Choate to the Faneuil Hall of Sam Adams. He would awaken the ancestral

idealism of Boston that slept uneasily under the spell of middle-class

ambitions--that had sold its Puritan heritage for southern trade

profits. Such an appeal Boston had never before listened to, ardent,

unsparing, the Hebraic and the Yankee vernacular curiously mingled; and

Boston writhed uncomfortably and pronounced the prophet ill-mannered.

When the Fugitive Slave Bill passed, the six New England states lay

fast asleep: Massachusetts slept soundly, her head pillowed on her

unsold bales of Cotton and of woolen goods, dreaming of “orders

from the South.” Justice came to waken her ... and she started in

her sleep, and being frightened, swore a prayer or two, then slept

again. But Boston woke,--sleeping, in her shop, with ears open, and

her eye on the market, her hand on her purse, dreaming of goods for

sale,--Boston woke broadly up, and fired a hundred guns for joy. O

Boston, Boston! if thou couldst have known, in that thine hour, the

things which belong unto thy peace! But no: they were hidden from

her eyes. She had prayed to her god, to Money; he granted her the

request, but sent leanness into her soul. (“The Boston Kidnapping,”

in _Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 89.)

But he offended the Boston code of good breeding even more seriously.

He became personal. He named names. Before vast congregations, in

printed books, he pronounced judgment on Bostonians respected in

the Back Bay, mighty in State Street. Boston gentlemen had never

before suffered such tongue-lashings. How mercilessly he excoriated

Commissioner Loring, judge of probate and Harvard professor, for

soiling his hands in the Anthony Burns case! How neatly he pricked

the empty culture of Edward Everett for his pro-slavery ardor--“a

Cambridge professor of Greek, he studied the original tongue of the

Bible to learn that the Scripture says ‘slaves,’ where the English

Bible says only ‘servants’!” (_Additional Speeches_, Vol. II, p. 115.)

What an utterly devastating attack he made on the great Webster for

the latter’s subserviency to local economic interests! Much honest

realism underlies that criticism, and much honest American history. The

“Nebraska Address” and the “Webster Address” are notable historical

documents, incisive analyses--rare in those romantic days--done by

one who has kept a shrewd eye on current politics, and understands

the hidden springs of party policy. Into the Webster address he put

his vast knowledge, his power of analysis, his frank idealism. It was

“a sad and dreadful day” when duty bade Theodore Parker speak on the

man whose uncommon powers he had long admired; but he did his work

thoroughly, refusing to shut his eyes to ugly fact, refusing to indulge

in commonplace eulogy. It was the eighteenth-century economic realism

of Webster that stirred the wrath of the transcendentalist--that and

the lapses from integrity. Parker’s text was found in Webster’s dictum

that “the great object of government is the protection of property at

home, and respect and renown abroad”; and how starkly it runs counter

to his own ideal of government, “the enactment of God’s justice into

human laws,” is laid bare in page after page of scathing commentary.

To the exacting ethics of Parker, Webster was wanting in principles;

he followed expediency rather than justice; and how surely expediency

digs pitfalls for its own undoing he discovered tragic illustration of

in the career of the great senator. It is a hard fate for a politician,

accustomed to the cheap praise of the gullible public, to fall into the

hands of a critic who is honest and searching; and Webster had too many

weak points to emerge from such an analysis with credit. It is probably

the most critical examination of Webster’s career that has ever been

made, and withal just.

Surprisingly modern, far more so than Channing, was this brilliant

preacher--impulsive, colloquial, natural, whose every arrow was

pointed with a fact and feathered to fly true; concerned more with

righteousness than with policy; hating the dull commonplace and empty

dignity of Tory ways; careless of convention, somewhat spectacular,

with a keen relish for combat--a vital, vivid man, the apostle of

conscience, the advocate of every unpopular cause. He possessed an

amazing gift of words, yet he was too impatient, too practical, to

become an artist; preferring immediate ends to more lasting reputation,

and spending himself with a free prodigality. He was always the speaker

rather than the writer and his printed pages bear the unmistakable

marks of impetuous oral discourse. Emerson accounted him one of

the four great men of the age. Whether or not that judgment holds,

whether he was too eager a militant to become a great transcendental

philosopher, the historian sees in Theodore Parker one of the greatest,

if not the last, of the excellent line of Puritan preachers.

Footnotes

[459] See Wendell, _Literary History of America_, p. 348.

[460] See “Letter to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational

Society of Boston,” in Weiss, _Life and Correspondence of Theodore

Parker_, Vol. II, Appendix II, p. 482. This account of his “Experience

as a Minister” constitutes a brief intellectual autobiography, of first

importance to the student of Parker.

[461] This phrase of Parker’s was probably the source of Lincoln’s

phrase.

[462] See “The Law of God and the Statutes of Men,” in _Additional

Speeches_, Vol. II, p. 181.

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

Chapter V • Margaret Fuller • Rebel

The fame of Margaret Fuller has waned greatly since her vivid

personality was blotted out in the prime of her intellectual

development. Misunderstood in her own time, caricatured by unfriendly

critics, and with significant facts of her life suppressed by her

friends out of a chivalrous sense of loyalty, the real woman has been

lost in a Margaret Fuller myth and later generations have come to

underestimate her powers and undervalue her work. Yet no other woman

of her generation in America is so well worth recalling. She was

the completest embodiment of the inchoate rebellions and grandiose

aspirations of the age of transcendental ferment; for to the many

grievances charged against the times by other New England liberals, she

added the special grievance of the stupid inhibitions laid upon women.

Transcendental radical and critic, like Emerson and Thoreau and Parker,

she was feminist also; and to the difficult business of freeing her

mind from the Cambridge orthodoxies, she added the greater difficulty

of freeing her sex.

The written record that Margaret Fuller left is quite inadequate to

explain her contemporary reputation. In no sense an artist, scarcely

a competent craftsman, she wrote nothing that bears the mark of high

distinction either in thought or style. Impatient of organization and

inadequately disciplined, she threw off her work impulsively, not

pausing to shape it to enduring form. Yet she was vastly talked about,

and common report makes her out to have been an extraordinary woman

who creatively influenced those with whom she came in contact. Like

Alcott, her power lay in brilliant talk. Her quick mind seems to have

been an electric current that stimulated other minds to activity, and

created a vortex of speculation wherever she passed. Hungry for ideas,

intellectually and emotionally vibrant, she caught her inspirations

from obscure impulses of a nature thwarted and inhibited from normal

unfolding; and in her sensitive oscillations she was often drawn

away from polar principles to which she would later swing back. There

was quite evidently a fundamental unrest within her, a conflict of

impulses, that issued in dissatisfaction; and this contradiction was

aggravated by intense emotions, which both quickened her mind and

distorted it.

A product of Cambridge bookishness, Margaret Fuller was both a wonder

and a riddle to a generation that made little account of the psychology

of sex. She was commonly looked upon as an intellectual monstrosity,

the most fearful of Yankee bluestockings, and a later Bostonian has

gone so far as to suggest that she was “an unsexed version of Plato’s

Socrates” (Wendell, _Literary History of America_, p. 300). But to

present-day psychology her character is an extraordinarily suggestive

document, and a recent critic has read her seeming contradictions

like an open book.[464] Before Miss Anthony’s penetrating analysis

the Margaret Fuller myth vanishes, and a very real, natural, and

unfortunate woman takes its place. She came of vigorous stock,

independent, outspoken, opinionated. Her grandfather was a clergyman

who was unfrocked by his church for being lukewarm in the Revolutionary

War. Her father, Timothy Fuller, and her four uncles, worked their

way through Harvard. In Timothy Fuller there was a large measure of

Puritan grimness and severity that locked the door on the passions of

his heart, that none might know of them; yet there seems to have been

a volcano in the man who held off the world so brusquely. The rebel

was strong in him. The Fullers were not of Brahmin stock and had no

wish to please their social superiors. While a Harvard undergraduate,

Timothy Fuller turned Jeffersonian republican and lost his place as

first honor man by joining in an undergraduate protest against certain

hated regulations. As a lawyer and politician he repudiated respectable

Federalism, and although he was representative in Congress for four

terms and enjoyed certain other offices, his non-conformity in the end

cost him dear. No doubt he had counted on that, for he was stubborn oak

that might break but would not bend. The tragedy of Margaret Fuller’s

life seems to have been sketched before in the life of Timothy Fuller.

To an extraordinary degree the daughter was the child of the father,

in ideas and sympathies as well as blood. Like him she was a rebel,

but for the daughter to turn rebel involved greater hazards than

for the father. Her sex was a heavy handicap, for the experience of

Fanny Wright and Lucretia Mott had revealed that American chivalry

had definite bounds; it did not shield the woman who ventured beyond

the pale. Yet considering her blood and training, how could she help

thus venturing into freer fields without? From her earliest years her

father treated her as a comrade and gave her the training of a boy. In

her studies he dealt with her as James Mill dealt with his brilliant

son. Perhaps it was a mistake to force her into the rigid groove of

classical learning when she should have been playing with her dolls.

From it she got very unusual acquisitions, but overstimulation broke

her health, and isolation turned her mind in upon itself and made her

the victim of somnambulism and freaks of imagination. The result was

the development, on one side of her nature, of a female counterpart

of Cotton Mather--precocious, domineering, moody, visionary, given to

long hours of greedy reading, gorging herself on books and well-nigh

ruining her intellectual digestion as well as her health. Against this

unfortunate overstimulation her vigorous nature struggled for years,

and never quite successfully. Her emotions were forever embroiling

her intellect. To conceive of her as sexless is curiously to miss the

point of her emotionalism. She was rather the victim of sex. Her ardent

friendships with other women, her flashes of mystical experience, her

fondness for children, her love of luxury and creature comforts, her

eager love affair with James Nathan who unchivalrously found safety in

flight, her friendship with Mazzini and her more intimate friendship

with Count Ossoli, that ended in an unconventional marriage after her

situation rendered it necessary--such reactions can be explained on

no other hypothesis. Her ardent nature was the victim of disastrous

frustrations, rendered the more acute by premature development. If

she had married early, as Harriet Beecher did, and her excessive

energy had been turned into domestic channels, her life must have been

less tragic, whatever the effect might have been on her intellectual

development.

The acutest contemporary analysis of her contradictory character is

that given by her friend William Henry Channing, who found his clue in

the clash between endowment and environment:

Here was one fond as a child of joy, eager as a native of the

tropics for swift transition from luxurious rest to passionate

excitement, prodigal to pour her mingled force of will, thought,

sentiment, into the life of the moment, all radiant with

imagination, longing for communion with artists of every age in

their inspired hours, fitted by genius and culture to mingle as an

equal in the most refined circles of Europe, and yet her youth and

early womanhood had passed away amid the very decent, yet drudging,

descendants of prim Puritans. Trained among those who could have

discerned her peculiar power, and early fed with the fruits of

beauty for which her spirits pined, she would have developed into

one of the finest lyrists, romancers and critics, that the modern

literary world has seen. This she knew; and this tantalization of

her fate she keenly felt. (_Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli_,

by R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke, Vol. II, pp.

36-37.)

This disastrous clash between endowment and environment is strikingly

exemplified in her delight in Europe when at thirty-four she found

herself there--in her admiration for Georges Sand, and in particular

the extravagance of her love for Rome, where her starved heart found

satisfactions she had long dreamed of. “Italy receives me as a

long-lost child, and I feel myself at home here,” she wrote in 1847;

and a few weeks later, “I find how true was the lure that always drew

me towards Europe. It was no false instinct that said I might here

find an atmosphere to develop me in ways I need. Had I only come ten

years earlier! Now my life must be a failure, so much strength has

been wasted on abstractions, which only came because I grew not in the

right soil” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 225). She was too eagerly pagan to be

satisfied with either Puritan or Yankee Cambridge. The pale ethicism of

New England was thin gruel for such an appetite for life. Even Emerson

she found cold, and her stomach rebelled at the food he throve on. But

this was only half the story; the other half was this:

But the tragedy of Margaret’s history was deeper yet. Behind the

poet was the woman,--fond and relying, the heroic and disinterested

woman. The very glow of her poetic enthusiasm was but an outflush

of trustful affection; the very restlessness of her intellect was

the confession that her heart had found no home. A “book-worm,”

a “dilettante,” a “pedant,” I had heard her sneeringly called;

but now it was evident that her seeming insensibility was virgin

pride, and her absorption in studying the natural vent of emotions,

which met no object of life-long attachment. At once, many of her

peculiarities became intelligible. Fitfulness, unlooked-for changes

of mood, misconceptions of words and actions, substitutions of

fancy for fact ... were now referred to the morbid influence of

affections pent up to prey upon themselves. And, what was still

more interesting, the clue was given to a singular credulousness,

by which, in spite of her unusual penetration, Margaret might be

led away blindfold. As this revelation of her ardent nature burst

upon me, and ... I saw how faithful she had kept to her life

purposes,--how patient, gentle, and thoughtful of others, how

active in self-improvement and usefulness, how wisely dignified she

had been,--I could not but bow to her in reverence. (_Ibid._, Vol.

II, p. 37.)

The inchoate rebellions in her heart were stimulated and given form by

her reading. From the English, French, and German romantics she drew

much of her intellectual food. The long hours spent with her father

over Jefferson’s letters were the best of preparation for Rousseau

and Mary Wollstonecraft, and French romanticism provided an excellent

introduction to the German. Her emotions were in high ferment when she

came upon the German school, and she yielded her heart to it without

reserve. Novalis, Richter, above all Goethe, became a passion and

swept her along the path that Hedge and James Freeman Clarke were

following. For years she gathered materials for a life of Goethe, but

a feeling of self-distrust held back the project. Her love for him was

the great literary enthusiasm of her life. “It seems to me,” she wrote

in 1832, “as if the mind of Goethe had embraced the universe.... I am

enchanted while I read. He comprehends every feeling I have ever had

so perfectly, expresses it so beautifully; but when I shut the book,

it seems as if I had lost my personal identity; all my feelings linked

with such an immense variety that belongs to things I had thought

so different” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 119). Later, with more critical

analysis of Goethe, she found her enthusiasm modifying; she was

repelled by his calm, aloof intellectuality;[465] but she never wavered

in loyal recognition of his commanding powers.

Her romantic idealism was in full career when the transcendental

movement caught her up and put its stamp upon her. It came as an

emotional appeal to the vague aspirations of a life inadequately

motivated, and she threw herself eagerly into the new philosophy

and became the most hectic of its expounders. The intellectual

foundations of her transcendentalism were so slight in comparison

with the equipment of Hedge and Parker as scarcely to justify her

pretentions to their fellowship. But what she lacked in knowledge of

Kant and Fichte she made up in enthusiasm, and none questioned her

right to speak for the group. The editorship of the _Dial_ provided a

convenient safety valve for her energy, but it neither absorbed her nor

sufficed to satisfy her limitless desires. She needed to espouse a

cause more concrete and dramatic, personal in its demands, calling for

high sacrifice. Abolitionism was at hand, but it repelled her by its

narrow dogmatisms. Garrison was never a hero of hers. She regarded him

with “high respect” for his “noble and generous” course; but “he has

indulged in violent invective and denunciation till he has spoiled the

temper of his mind” (“Frederick Douglass,” in _Life Without and Life

Within_, p. 122). Later, when she was in Europe, she looked back half

regretfully at her indifference to the movement.

How it pleases me here to think of the Abolitionists! I could never

endure to be with them at home; they were so tedious, often so

narrow, always so rabid and exaggerated in their tone. But, after

all, they had a high motive, something eternal in their desire and

life. (_Memoirs_, Vol. II, p. 229.)

Even Brook Farm repelled her as much as it attracted her. Though

she loved many of the members, bore her share in the discussions

preliminary to its establishment, and often visited there, she would

not join the venture. She had had enough of farm life at Groton. To

open a road to Utopia with a common plow was, perhaps, too prosaic a

business for her romantic nature, and when the Fourier Phalanx was

introduced she grew skeptical. Fourierism seemed to her too mechanical

a conception, in spite of her sympathy for the humanitarian spirit that

lay behind it. As she looked back upon it from the vantage point of her

French experience, she modified her judgment somewhat, although the old

transcendental bias that Emerson had voiced still colored her views.

The more I see of the terrible ills which infest the body politic

of Europe, the more indignation I feel at the selfishness or

stupidity of those in my own country who oppose an examination of

these subjects,--such as is animated by the hope of prevention.

Educated in an age of gross materialism, Fourier is tainted by its

faults; in attempts to reorganise society, he commits the error

of making soul the result of health of body, instead of body the

clothing of the soul; but his heart was that of a genuine lover

of his kind, of a philanthropist in the sense of Jesus; his views

are large and noble; his life was one of devout study on these

subjects, and I should pity the person who, after the briefest

sojourn in Manchester and Lyons, the most superficial acquaintance

with the population of London or Paris, could seek to hinder a

study of his thoughts, or be wanting in reverence for his purposes.

(_Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 206.)

It was in part from Fourier, certainly from the collectivistic

theories discussed so generally by the transcendental group, that

she received her equipment for the cause which, more than any other

except the dramatic Roman revolution, appealed to the deeper rebellions

of her soul. She had dealt much with the woman question in her

“Conversations,” and in 1844 she published _Woman in the Nineteenth

Century_, a work that made a great stir in America. The “little book

was the first considered statement of feminism in this country”

(Katharine Anthony, _Margaret Fuller_, p. 80), and its novelty was

emphasized by its boldness. The question of woman’s place had emerged

sharply from the Abolition movement, when the appearance of women on

the platform had aroused opposition even from radical reformers, and

Angelina Grimké had encountered insults when she spoke at Abolition

meetings. But Margaret Fuller was the first since Mary Wollstonecraft,

fifty years before, to undertake a reasoned defense of the claims of

woman to emancipation from man-made custom. It was a somewhat shocking

book to fling at respectable Boston bluestockings--male as well as

female--for not only did she discuss equality of economic opportunity

and equality of political rights for women, but she went further and

spoke frankly about sex equality, marriage, prostitution, physical

passions--pretty much everything that was taboo in Boston society. It

was a bold thing to do, needing more courage even than to engage in a

Fourieristic onslaught upon the conventions of private property. Only a

first-class rebel would have had the temerity to offer such morsels to

wagging tongues.

This was her parting shot at a world that had done its best to stifle

her. Thenceforth her field was to broaden out immensely. In 1844 she

went to New York to live in the family of Horace Greeley and write

critical reviews for _The Tribune_--a shift that marked the beginning

of her intellectual maturity, the end of her mystical sentimentalism.

She was thirty-four years of age, and she plunged vigorously into the

work of criticism, never perhaps very successfully, certainly never

with high distinction. Her judgments were penetrating and individual,

she awakened some Cambridge animosities by her comment on certain

Cambridge poets, but she was not a notable critic. A fine craftsmanship

she never attained. A light touch she could never command. Nevertheless

the experience was sobering. Honest, practical Horace Greeley, with

his pugnacious fondness for social reform, was an excellent antidote

to Concord transcendentalism; and an awakening sociological interest

discovered ample opportunities in New York for the expression of her

mother-instinct. She took to her stormy bosom the inmates of Sing Sing

prison, the poor and outcast of the city. At last she went to Europe,

fell in with Mazzini, and found a cause dramatic enough and real enough

to satisfy her rebellious instincts. She was profoundly stirred by the

Roman revolution, took charge of one of the hospitals, and spent her

strength freely. On the tragic failure of the revolt she started home

with her husband and child, only to perish on the sandy shores of Fire

Island--a fate she did not turn her finger to escape. Perhaps it was

well. She had only too good reason to be fearful of her reception and

of the future. Tongues that had wagged before would certainly have

risen to a virtuous gabble over her misadventure in Italy. On the whole

one must be glad that her friends refused to permit her good name to

be thrown to the gossips. Why shouldn’t gentlemen lie stoutly if by so

doing they can cheat the salacious?

A sensitive emotional nature offers the best of social barometers,

and Margaret Fuller’s tragic life, despite its lack of solid

accomplishment, was an epitome of the great revolt of the New England

mind against Puritan asceticism and Yankee materialism. She was the

emotional expression of a rebellious generation that had done with

the past and was questioning the future. Not a scholar like Theodore

Parker, not a thinker like Thoreau, not an artist like Emerson, she was

a ferment of troubled aspiration, an enthusiasm for a more generous

culture than New England had known--the logical outcome of the romantic

revolution which, beginning with Channing’s discovery of humanitarian

France, and leading thence to idealistic Germany, was to break the

indurated shell of life in New England, and release its conscience and

its mind. She was the spiritual child of Jean Jacques even more than of

Goethe--a fact that she eventually came to realize. Writing from Paris

in 1847, she said:

To the ... Chamber of Deputies, I was indebted for a sight of the

manuscripts of Rousseau, treasured in their library. I saw them and

touched them,--those manuscripts just as he has celebrated them,

written on fine white paper, tied with ribbon. Yellow and faded

age has made them, yet at their touch I seemed to feel the fire

of youth, immortally glowing, more and more expansive, with which

his soul has pervaded this century. He was the precursor of all we

most prize. True, his blood was mixed with madness, and the course

of his actual life made some _detours_ through villainous places;

but his spirit was intimate with the fundamental truths of human

nature, and fraught with prophecy. There is none who has given

birth to more life for this age; his gifts are yet untold; they are

too present with us; but he who thinks really must often think with

Rousseau, and learn him ever more and more. Such is the method of

genius,--to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat

they complain. (_Memoirs_, Vol. II, pp. 206-207.)

The rebel pays a heavy price for his rebellions, as Margaret learned to

her cost. She suffered much in her daily life, but it was her art that

suffered most. She was evidently a far richer nature than her printed

works reveal. Intense in her extravagant demands upon life, a radical

humanitarian in all her sympathies and instincts, generous in response

to whatever was fine and high, living unduly an inner life as became a

daughter of Puritanism--Margaret Fuller was too vivid a personality,

too complete an embodiment of the rich ferment of the forties, to be

carelessly forgotten. The deeper failure of her career--its vague

aspirations and inadequate accomplishment--was a failure that may be

justly charged against the narrow world that bred her. Perhaps no

sharper criticism could be leveled at New England than that it could do

no better with such material, lent it by the gods.

Footnotes

[464] See Katharine Anthony, _Margaret Fuller, A Psychological

Biography_.

[465] See _Life Without and Life Within_, pp. 23-60.

Part IV: Other Aspects of the New England Mind

Chapter I • The Reign of the Genteel

I

The discussion of the New England mind hitherto has kept pretty much

to the outskirts of Boston, to Concord and Roxbury and undistinguished

precincts; it has not penetrated the Back Bay where dwelt the authentic

representatives of Brahminism, nor has it concerned itself greatly

with Cambridge that was a lesser Back Bay. Nevertheless there were

other ideals than those of transcendentalism and social reform in the

New England of the renaissance--ideals of culture, of scholarship, of

_belles lettres_, to which the Brahmin mind contributed, and which

after the subsidence of the ferment came to dominate genteel New

England and for a generation largely influenced American letters. To

the revolutionary aspirations of the forties the Back Bay contributed

little. Brahmin Boston might turn Unitarian with Channing, but it

was at heart neither French romantic nor German idealist; it desired

rather culture for its own sake, and scholarship it regarded as the

handmaid of culture. It hoped of course that righteousness and the

will of God should ultimately prevail in human affairs, but it was not

exigent in its demands. Occasion and means it willingly left to God,

anticipating that the walls of Jericho must fall of their own weakness.

It is surprising how little the greater issues of the time ruffled the

serenity of the Brahmin mind, and how uncritical were its judgments on

such issues as came under its review. Divided between State Street and

the Back Bay, its life ran a smoothly agreeable course with no hint of

potential antagonisms between exploitation and culture. It followed so

strictly the injunction, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand

doeth, that the two were almost total strangers to each other. Like

Edith Wharton’s contemporary Knickerbockers, the Brahmins conceived

the great business of life to be the erection of barriers against the

intrusion of the unpleasant. They took it ill when those barriers were

assaulted by rude militants, and when indisputable Brahmins--men like

Edmund Quincy and Wendell Phillips--took part in the assault, the Back

Bay regarded them as more than a little queer.

The immediate consequence of this concern for defensive breastworks

was the reign of the genteel in life and letters, a reign that set up

a court of critical jurisdiction over the domain of American letters.

The essence of the genteel tradition was a refined ethicism, that

professed to discover the highest virtue in shutting one’s eyes to

disagreeable fact, and the highest law in the law of convention. Gone

were the franker days of Robert Treat Paine when a wit might find his

choicest _bons mots_ in the bottom of his cups. Coarseness had given

way to refinement. It was the romanticism of Brahmin culture, with all

Falstaffian vulgarity deleted, and every smutch of the natural man

bleached out in the pure sunshine of manners. It was Victorianism of

a more maidenly purity than the English strain, so carefully filtered

by passing through the close Puritan mesh that the smallest impurities

were removed. The first of literary commandments was the commandment

of reticence. Literature was conceived of as belonging to the library

and the drawing-room, and it must observe the drawing-room amenities.

Only a vulgarian would lug a spade there. Any venture into realism was

likely to prove libidinous, and sure to be common. Certainly Margaret

Fuller had overstepped the bounds of decency with her remarks about

women of the streets. The Adamite school was the vulgar expression

of the natural man, and Continental realism--the French and the

Russian--was only bringing the gutter into the library. Literature

must be fine and pure and noble, and as such it will serve decency and

manners; what excuse is there for it otherwise? The case for the true

church of literature, as against the Adamite and other heresies, was

admirably stated by Lowell:

I have not seen Swinburne’s new volume--but a poem or two from it

which I have seen shocked me, and I am not squeamish.... Why should

a man by choice go down to live in his cellar, instead of mounting

to those fair upper chambers which look towards the sunrise of that

Easter which shall greet the resurrection of the soul from the body

of this death? _Virginibus puerisque?_ To be sure! let no man write

a line that he would not have his daughter read.... But I have

outlived many heresies, and shall outlive this new Adamite one of

Swinburne. The true Church of poetry is founded on a rock, and I

have no fear that these smutchy back-doors of hell shall prevail

against her. (_Letters_, Vol. I, p. 377.)

II

Though it willingly recognized the superior claims of poetry and the

essay, the Brahmin mind found a more congenial field for its literary

ambitions in history; and the quiet scholarship that it pursued with

exemplary diligence was likely to flower in substantial historical

studies. Excellent work much of it is, brilliant in certain instances;

yet it too is subtly marked by the psychology of the environment that

produced it. The renaissance of Boston scholarship began with Everett

and Ticknor, whose German training was imposed on natures instinctively

aristocratic, swayed by the older Federalist prejudices. The latter

applied himself to Spanish literature, but his colleague and fellow

historian, Jared Sparks, proved that in the American field even

painstaking scholarship could not subdue the temptation to improve upon

reality. Sparks applied Boston ethics to biography and conceived that

his mission in writing the life of a great American like Washington

was to portray a national hero as a model to the youth of the land. In

pursuance of this aim he studiously perfected nature by correcting all

the little blemishes of manner and little weaknesses of character in

order to produce an immaculate effect. He edited Washington’s letters

with a free hand, not only correcting the grammar and spelling, but

silently deleting such passages as did not become the hero he had in

mind. He did not of course go to the absurd lengths of Parson Weems

in inventing episodes and effects, but he refused to deal with his

materials realistically and the result was a falsifying of the total

impression.

The greatest and in certain respects the most characteristic work

of the period was George Bancroft’s _History of the United States_,

to which with single-minded purpose he devoted sixty laborious

years. Trained in Göttingen, he gathered his materials with German

thoroughness, but the underlying spirit and purpose of his exposition

were native to the ardent nationalism of Jacksonian America. Bancroft

was the only important member of the New England group of historians

who was a militant Democrat, and he set out to justify to the world

the ways of democratic America. It was a great undertaking and in the

opinion of Ranke, the German historian, it justified itself. “Your

history is the best book ever written from the democratic point of

view,”[466] he wrote Bancroft. The praise was perhaps not excessive.

Conceived in the early days of the Jacksonian triumph, it reflects

the grandiose conception of the future of America and the beneficent

influence of republican institutions on western civilization, that

were common in the golden days of equalitarianism and that even such

a scholarly legalist as Hugh Legaré shared. But unfortunately, with

his generation Bancroft had lost his economic bearings, and he drove

forward somewhat too confidently into the new seas of political

idealism trusting to the pole-star of emancipated human nature. As a

democrat he was too easily persuaded that democratic America lay in

the particular keeping of Providence, and he assumed too readily that

the democratic development of American institutions was in response to

the divine will. It reflects something of the partisanship of honest

patriots who believe God is on their side; but it served to correct

the teachings of Federalists like Richard Hildreth who insisted that

God was on the side of Federalism. Till Bancroft took up his pen the

bias of American chronicles had been anti-democratic. Every Federalist

with leisure, a quill, and a smattering of historical knowledge, had

added his mite to the Federalist myths that long constituted the body

of our history. The democratic interpretation ran so counter to Boston

tradition that Bancroft found little congeniality amongst his fellow

historians, and he eventually quitted his native state and took up his

home in Washington.

More representative of the Brahmin spirit was the work of William H.

Prescott, John L. Motley, and Francis Parkman, who constitute what may

be called the romantic school of Boston historians. They sought the

romantic in theme and aspired to the romantic in treatment quite as

consciously as did the contemporary novelists. Of excellent Brahmin

strain, with leisure, wealth, opportunity, they were free to pick

and choose as they would. Prescott and Motley turned away from the

partisanships of America, and while Jacksonianism was in full swing

the former wrote his _Ferdinand and Isabella_, and while the country

was wrangling over slavery the latter wrote his _Rise of the Dutch

Republic_. Broad in conception and dramatic in treatment, they are

admirable works, yet they suggest that aloofness from the sordid

realities of America so characteristic of the Brahmin mind. Far more

brilliant and significant was the work of Francis Parkman who turned

his imagination to the far West over which the struggle for exploration

and conquest had long persisted between the French and English. In his

twenties he had made a venturesome trip to the great plains, and that

experience gave life and vitality to his later historical writings,

that were enriched by close research, a brilliant style, and a creative

imagination. The theme he set himself was not alone a “history of the

American forest,” but a clash between civilizations--the “feudal,

militant, and Catholic France in conflict with democratic, industrial,

and Protestant England”; and with fine tenacity of purpose, in the

teeth of ill health, he wrought at his project till the America of the

old French War times was gathered into his pages. The Brahmin mind has

contributed to American letters no more brilliant work than came from

the pen of Francis Parkman.

III

If the highest aspirations of the Brahmin nature sought satisfaction

in poetry, Longfellow may be reckoned its most characteristic product.

In his work the romantic, the sentimental, and the moralistic,

blended in such just proportions, and expressed themselves with such

homely simplicity as to hit exactly the current taste and establish a

reputation that later generations have difficulty in understanding.

A gentle, lovable soul, widely read and in maturer years possessing

a ripe literary scholarship, he was a skillful purveyor of gentle,

lovable ideals. Although he drew his materials from Spain and Sweden

and Italy, from primitive New England and aboriginal America, it was

Germany that largely provided the staple of his romance. With Emerson

and Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker, he found Germany a singularly

congenial land--not Königsberg with its transcendental metaphysics, nor

Weimar with its pagan culture, nor Tübingen with its higher criticism.

Such things, transcendental and critical, he was not concerned about;

it was the minor romantics, Freiligrath rather than Heine, the gentle

melancholy and pervasive _Sehnsucht_ of the German folk-nature, that

drew him irresistibly and quickened his sympathetic pen. There was

little intellect in Longfellow, little creative originality. He was the

poet of an uncritical and unsophisticated generation, as yet untroubled

by science and industrialism, and his mind was detached from politics

and his conscience rarely disturbed by social questions. He came of

excellent Federalist stock, his father having been a delegate from

Maine to the Hartford Convention; and with his courteous manners he

fitted easily into the little world of Cambridge Brahmins. However one

might question his poetry, none could question that he was a gentleman

amongst gentlemen.

If he was never the omnivorous bookman that Lowell was, he was

distinctly a poet of the library. His placid and singularly happy

life was pretty much bounded by his library walls. One could scarcely

have lived more detached from contemporary America, more effectively

insulated against the electric currents of the times. Though Thoreau

might flee to Walden he carried his questioning intellect with him;

even the constable would not leave him alone there. But Longfellow’s

door shut securely against all intrusion. The winds of doctrine and

policy might rage through the land, but they did not rattle the windows

of his study to disturb his quiet poring over Dante. The translation

of the _Divina Commedia_ would go forward even while the country was

being torn asunder. In a sense such work was his refuge against the

storm and stress of malignant forces that troubled him. He did not like

the tumult and the shouting, and much of Longfellow is compressed into

the sonnets that preface the translation, much of the gentleness of his

evasion, and much of the finer craftsmanship of his later years.

Oft have I seen at some cathedral door

A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,

Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet

Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor

Kneel to repeat his paternoster o’er;

Far off the noises of the world retreat;

The loud vociferations of the street

Become an undistinguishable roar.

So, as I enter here from day to day,

And leave my burden at this minster gate,

Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,

The tumult of the time disconsolate

To inarticulate murmurs dies away,

While the eternal ages watch and wait.

How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!

This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves

Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves

Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,

And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers!

But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves

Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves,

And underneath, the traitor Judas lowers!

Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain,

What exultations trampling on despair,

What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,

What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,

Uprose this poem of the earth and air,

This mediaeval miracle of song!

A single incursion Longfellow made into the field of Abolition

controversy, prompted perhaps by Dickens, whose “grand chapter on

slavery” in _American Notes_ he had read in London. The seven poems

were written to beguile the tedium of a sea voyage. They are unreal

enough to seem quite harmless, yet they created a decided stir on

their appearance. For a Harvard professor to express publicly even a

mild sympathy with the Abolition movement, may well have been somewhat

perilous, considering the fate of Professor Follen; and the sacred

institution may have scented a real danger in such romanticisms.

Grotesque as these academic poems were, with their burnt-cork figures,

they perhaps served to romanticize and sentimentalize the negro

for northern minds, as _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ did a decade later with

tremendous effect. Slavery had no weapon against such an attack, and

no doubt Longfellow’s contributions proved serviceable to the cause

of Abolitionism. But this one venture satisfied him, and having got

safely back to his library, he shut the door on the whole vexatious

question of slavery. He was not made for battle, and causes commanded

an unwilling allegiance. Little remained of his Puritanism save

conscience, a sense of struggle against somewhat vague and indolent

powers of evil, a pleasant melancholy that transmuted itself into

pleasant verse. He lived vicariously the lives of other poets, sharing

their emotions, repeating their thoughts, reproducing their pictures;

yet adding some individual color from his own sincere nature. Not

richly endowed, he was more than an echo. He marked the transition

from the nebulous ferment of the creative renaissance to the scholarly

culture of Brahmin Cambridge. After Longfellow came Charles Eliot

Norton in whose blameless life that culture flowered, and after that

came sterility.

Footnotes

[466] Quoted in Stanton, _Manual of American Literature_, p. 101.

Chapter II • Nathaniel Hawthorne • Skeptic

After his immersion for some months in the Utopian dreams of Brook

Farm, Miles Coverdale in _The Blithedale Romance_ discovered that he

had drifted far from reality. “No sagacious man,” he remarked, “will

long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively among reformers and

progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled

system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old

standpoint.”

It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk

with the conservatives, the writers of the North American Review,

the merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those

respectable blockheads who still, in this intangibility and

mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which

had not come into vogue since yesterday morning.

In this suggestive pronouncement the intellectual position of Hawthorne

is revealed. Cool, detached, rationalistic, curiously inquisitive,

he looked out upon the ferment of the times, the clash of rival

philosophies and rival interests, only to bring them into his study

and turn upon them the light of his critical analysis. One after

another he weighed the several faiths of New England, conservative and

transcendental and radical, and ended skeptic. He was too much of a

realist to change fashions in creeds. Time, experience--he is always

remembering--have created men as we find them, and very likely only

time and experience can make them over into something different. The

conservatives would seem to have common sense on their side, for they

are seeking to retain what has hitherto been won; but the reformers

are not without justification as well, for impelled by an ardent

faith they are seeking to win new conquests. But whether that which

the conservatives defend so valiantly is worth defending, or whether

the goal towards which the reformers drive so furiously is worth the

trouble, are questions about which the rationalist may be permitted his

doubts. The universe in which he found himself was a moral universe,

Hawthorne on the whole believed; and if that were true then man’s

chief business and urgent problem was the matter of a sufficient

morality.

Radical in his intellectual processes, he could never become

greatly interested in specific radicalisms. He is often thought of

as a transcendentalist, and his association with the Peabodys and

his venture into Brook Farm might seem to lend color to such an

interpretation. Yet nothing in his intellectual sympathies marks him

as of the school. The polar conceptions of transcendentalism repelled

rather than attracted him. Political and metaphysical speculation

left him cold, and the twin revolutionary forces of the time, French

romanticism and German idealism, never deeply affected his thinking.

Amid all the flux he retained much of the older Calvinist view of

life and human destiny. Though nominally a Unitarian he did not share

Channing’s faith in the perfectibility of man. The buried voice of God

that the transcendentalists professed to have discovered in instinct,

he greatly distrusted. Man seemed to him quite as likely to turn out

to be a child of the devil as the first-born of God. Perhaps through a

long and uncertain process he may grow into something nobler than he

now is, but for the present the fact remains that the human heart, if

not desperately wicked, is at least on familiar terms with evil; too

often it is cold, selfish, malignant, and its secret promptings need

watching. Doubting the indwelling presence of the divine Over-soul,

he could find no justification for the transcendental faith in the

excellence of the universe, out of which came the genial optimism

of the Emersonians. Too pronounced a rationalist to comprehend the

mysticism that lurked in the heart of the transcendental faith, he

remained cold to the revolutionary criticism that was eager to pull

down the old temples to make room for nobler. Eager souls, mystics and

revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with

their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret

places of the heart, Utopia is only the shadow of a dream. And so while

the Concord thinkers were proclaiming man to be the indubitable child

of God, Hawthorne was critically examining the question of evil as

it appeared in the light of his own experience. It was the central,

fascinating problem of his intellectual life, and in pursuit of a

solution he probed curiously into the hidden, furtive recesses of the

soul.

The isolation in which he chose to brood over the problem, seeking to

take the solution by surprise in unguarded moments, was the natural

consequence of his temperament and his habits. He lived singularly

remote from common interests, singularly self-sufficient. Both as

thinker and artist he suffered from his self-imposed isolation.

The twelve years of his apprenticeship, closely immured and given

over to spinning cobwebs about the old Puritan rafters, drawing the

stuff of his romance out of his own bowels, may have facilitated the

development of technic, but it laid narrow limitations on the matter

of his art. Intellectually unlocalized in his Yankee world, he was

the romancer of a dead but unforgotten past, at home only where the

New England conscience brooded over sin--subduing the old nightmares

to less terrifying dreams, intruding his doubts into old dogmas yet

never emerging from the old shadows. Although he was a child of the

liberation and had broken the web that Calvinism had woven about the

mind of New England, he did not choose to quit the world from whose

bondage he had freed himself. He would examine the old problem in a

new light. In rejecting Calvinism as a religion, he retained it as a

background for his inquisitive probing. It appealed to his imagination

after his reason had rejected its dogmas; it determined his art after

it had ceased to command his loyalty. In consequence, all his life

Hawthorne dwelt between worlds. Though at times he tried to establish

contact with Yankee reality, though he essayed to establish an

intellectual _rapport_ with his generation, he never quite succeeded,

but remained to the last isolated, a frequenter of the twilight.

Only in a narrow and very special sense was Hawthorne a romantic.

With the romance of love and adventure he was never concerned; what

interested him was the romance of ethics--the distortions of the soul

under the tyranny of a diseased imagination. How little he shares in

common with other romantics is revealed in his detachment from his

native Salem. The place was not lacking in picturesque charm, present

and past. During the long years he spent in his Salem study, the city

was rising to the zenith of its brisk sea life, with its ships in the

China trade, its venturesome fisheries, its echoes of the whaling

industry at Nantucket. Materials for romance were lying all about

the Salem wharves--such a show of canvas and spars and rigging, such

briny smells, such suggestions of far voyages to outlandish places,

such strange figures slipping in from the ends of the earth--such

romantic promptings in short as would have intoxicated the imagination

of Herman Melville, and that Joseph Hergesheimer wove into the rich

tapestries of _Java Head_. A romantic could scarcely have found

in America a setting better calculated to awaken a sense of brave

adventure than in old Salem; yet for three years Hawthorne sat in the

Custom House, with such materials all about him, and then turned away

to the seventeenth century to write of Hester Prynne. For a man gifted

with imagination to fail to lift his eyes to the horizon beyond which

the hurrying ships were seeking strange markets, and instead to turn

them in upon a shadowy world of half unreal characters; to overlook

the motley picturesque in the foreground of the actual, in order to

brood over an old adultery and twist it into theological sin, can be

explained only on the ground that Hawthorne was concerned with ethical

rather than romantic values, that he was interested rather in the

problem of evil than in the trappings of romance. Aloofness of time and

place served to isolate the problem, stripping away the wrappings of

the physical, delocalizing it, transmuting the individual act into the

universal. Thus isolated, Hester’s sin becomes a symbol of that ancient

evil which forever waylays human life and by strange perversions

brings havoc to our hopes--the greatest havoc to him whose heart, like

Chillingsworth’s, is cold, selfish, malignant.

This temperamental aloofness from objective reality was both the

strength and the weakness of Hawthorne’s art. In choosing to follow

the way of the inner life he was true to his Puritan breeding. The

perpetual turning-in of the mind upon itself, the long introspective

brooding over human motives, came naturally to one who lived in the

shadow of a Puritan past. In their anxious concern over sin the

Puritans had become in some measure psychologists; how else could

the secret impulses of the soul be probed and its dark workings laid

bare? Hawthorne was only doing what Jonathan Edwards before him had

done in his psychological clinic of the Great Awakening--examining

the reactions of sin on conscience and character. From this comes the

simplicity of his theme and the compelling unity of his handling. To be

sure it is pathological phenomena that he deals with, as the phenomena

that Edwards dealt with in his _Narrative of the Surprizing Work of

God_, were pathological; and like Edwards, Hawthorne is led into

insubstantial and tenuous regions where he breathes with difficulty.

The substantial world of Puritan reality that Samuel Sewall knew,

Hawthorne seems scarcely to have been aware of; he created instead

his own Puritanism, fantastic and unreal. He was forever dealing

with shadows, and he knew that he was dealing with shadows, and this

consciousness was a perennial source of doubt and uncertainty that

bred self-distrust. In setting himself the task of dramatizing sin

rather than sinners, of creating romance out of the problem of evil,

he encountered difficulties that oppressed him. The well-springs of

his imagination were constantly running dry and he must wait till they

filled again slowly. Hence the “development of his art is towards

ever greater elaboration of scantier and scantier materials, until

the joy of the whole becomes lost at last in the milder pleasures of

detail.”[467]

From the grave difficulties inherent in his theme came the inveterate

habit of sliding into symbolism and allegory--from this and from

the narrowness of his emotional life and the restrictions of

his sympathies. The cold thin atmosphere of his work, one comes

increasingly to feel, was due not alone or chiefly to the severity

of his artistic restraint that forbade all rioting of the sensuous

imagination; it was due rather to a lack of nourishment, to a poverty

of ideas and sensuous imagery. His inveterate skepticism robbed him of

much, but his inhibitions robbed him of more. A romantic uninterested

in adventure and afraid of sex is likely to become somewhat graveled

for matter. Like the Pyncheon fowls, Hawthorne’s imagination had

suffered from too long inbreeding; it had grown anemic, and every grain

of fancy is clucked over and picked at and made much of. Once an idea

comes into his head he is loath to let it go, but he must turn it about

curiously and examine it from every angle. The striking chapter in

_The House of the Seven Gables_, where the death of Judge Pyncheon is

played upon so persistently, is only an extreme example of his habitual

method. The tongues that wagged over the minister’s black veil were no

more inquisitive and tireless than Hawthorne’s when his imagination

is fired by a vivid image. He will not let it go till it is sucked as

dry as last year’s cider cask. It is the way of one to whom ideas are

few and precious. Knowing how little is in the bottle he will linger

out the flavor of every drop. Hence his fondness for symbolism, and

hence his frequent lapse into allegory when imagination grows dull.

Because Hawthorne was an artist he was saved from the shipwreck that

such a method might seem to invite; yet perhaps it is not unreasonable

to suggest that he was an artist for the reason that only through the

mastery of a refined technic could his scanty stock of ideas make any

show at all.

The intellectual poverty that resulted from his long immuring himself

in a void is sufficiently revealed in his _American Note-Books_.

In the somewhat tedious volume covering the eighteen years between

1835 and 1853--the most vigorous years of the renaissance--there

is no suggestion of interest in the creative ideas of the time, in

metaphysics or politics or economics or humanitarianism. It is the

occasional record of one who lived an unintellectual life, and it

makes but a paltry showing when set beside the journals of Emerson

for the same years. Few books are referred to; systems of thought lie

beyond his ken. Compared with the thinkers and scholars of the time he

is only an idler lying in wait for such casual suggestions as he may

turn into stories. Almost childish is his delight in marvels. There is

something of the spirit of Cotton Mather in his persistent recording of

the gruesome and fantastic, in the hope that they will open a quarry

for his art. In the year that Emerson wrote _Nature_, Hawthorne set

down the following amongst some dozens of similar suggestions: “A

snake taken into a man’s stomach and nourished there from fifteen to

thirty-five years, tormenting him most horribly. A type of envy or some

other evil passion.” The _Note-Books_, of course, are very inadequate

records of his life, and yet that a mind should lie in wait for such

grotesqueries, and treasure them, offers food for speculation. After

his marriage they are much less frequent and his jottings become more

normal--a change which the Freudians, no doubt, would be ready enough

to explain.

The one great adventure of Hawthorne’s life was the plunge into Brook

Farm Utopianism, a plunge that only proved the waters colder and less

hospitable than he had hoped. It was a curious adventure for one of

his temperament to engage in, and his eventual disillusion might

have been foretold. Perhaps it may be explained as reaction from his

long isolation. The glowing enthusiasms of the times must often have

tempted him to leave his narrow walls, and share the intellectual and

emotional stimulus that others professed to discover in the work of

making society over. Whatever the explanation the venture turned out

to be a failure. His skepticism followed him there and came to later

expression in _The Blithedale Romance_, a work as thin and unreal as

anything he ever did. It is worse. There is in its pages more than a

hint of ill humor that colors his interpretation of the Fourieristic

stage of the experiment, and slips out in his portraiture of the

major characters. Hollingsworth both fascinates and repels him. A

dramatization of the intransigent spirit of reform, his single-minded

zeal for righteousness, is subtly fused with an intolerant egotism

that destroys Zenobia, cows Priscilla, and wrecks the venture. Perhaps

Albert Brisbane may have been in the background of Hawthorne’s mind

when he drew Hollingsworth, for it was Brisbane who influenced the

change he seems to have resented; perhaps Garrison may have served to

fill out the picture. Whoever it was, the figure of Hollingsworth is

Hawthorne’s reply to the summons of the social conscience of the times,

done by a critic whose insistent skepticism will not shut its eyes, but

discovers under a new masquerade the ancient evil of a cold imperious

heart. Seventeen years before he wrote _The Blithedale Romance_, he had

jotted down in his _Note-Book_ the conception out of which came the

later portrait:

A sketch to be given of a modern reformer,--a type of the extreme

doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and other such

topics. He goes about the streets haranguing most eloquently,

and is on the point of making many converts, when his labors

are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the keeper of a

mad-house, whence he has escaped. Much may be made of the idea.

(_American Note-Books_, pp. 20-21.)

Hawthorne’s interpretation of Margaret Fuller is not so easily

explained. Perhaps it came out of a subconscious personal spleen. Her

rich paganism may well have disturbed a nature so reticent as his,

so restrained by certain Puritan inhibitions. In an early sketch he

commented on the unfitness of authorship for women, on the ground

that “there is a delicacy ... that perceives, or fancies, a sort

of impropriety in the display of woman’s natal mind to the gaze

of the world, with indications by which its inmost secrets may be

searched out” (quoted by Amy Louise Reed, “Self-Portraiture in the

Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne”). Margaret’s frankness in displaying

her natal mind to the gaze of the world, her bold discussion of

prohibited subjects like prostitution, could not fail to rub across

Hawthorne’s deepest prejudices. She was too vigorous and outspoken,

too consciously endowed with sex, too frankly feminist, not to have

ruffled his instinctive squeamishness. It was not her radical feminism

in the abstract that offended him, if he may be trusted; but certainly

in the concrete. A sexless feminism would not greatly disturb a mind

tolerantly familiar with the current radicalisms; but the frank

avowal of sex touched a sensitive nerve. It offended certain latent

Puritanisms in him. He was fascinated by Zenobia and yet afraid of

her--or of himself; so his hero falls in love with the anemic and

witless Priscilla. How characteristic of a mind long fed on symbols, to

turn away from the wealth of reality and prefer a shadow!

After Brook Farm came no further experiments in the unsatisfactory

business of a _rapprochement_ with his generation. His marriage with

Sophia Peabody brought with it the prosaic duties of providing for a

family, and he had no leisure to play with social reform. Abolitionism

he would have none of, nor perfectionism, nor Jacksonianism--the

futility of such things became for him a fixed idea. That he once

had the courage to make his plunge he seems to have rejoiced over:

“Whatever else I may repent of,” Miles Coverdale wrote, “let it be

reckoned neither among my sins nor follies that I once had faith and

force enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny,--yes!--and

to do what in me lay for their accomplishment.” Yet the truer Hawthorne

is to be found in the judgments set down in the _Note-Book_: “It is my

opinion that a man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap,

or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.”

“Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it

without becoming proportionably brutified.” The man who wrote that had

much to learn about life and society, much that he might have learned

from Thoreau. But Hawthorne never grappled with economics as Thoreau

did, and he learned no more from him than from Melville, or from

Emerson, or from any of the books he read by the wise of other days.

Self-sufficient he remained to the last, hard-headed and practical,

yet missing many a deeper truth that more receptive minds discover.

He was traveling the path that leads to sterility, and the lifelong

business of playing Paul Pry to the secrets of the conscience brought

him at last to the comment, “Taking no root I soon weary of any soil in

which I may be temporarily deposited. The same impatience I sometimes

feel, or conceive of, as regards this earthly life.” He was the extreme

and finest expression of the refined alienation from reality that in

the end palsied the creative mind of New England. Having consumed his

fancies, what remained to feed on?

Footnotes

[467] Amy Louise Reed, “Self-Portraiture in the Work of Nathaniel

Hawthorne,” _Studies in Philology_, Vol. XXIII, No. I.

Chapter III • The Authentic Brahmin

I • Oliver Wendell Holmes • Beacon Street Wit

Since the death of Holmes in 1894, his reputation has shrunk and

dwindled with that of his group. With the rise of other literary

schools, New England standards have been submitted to a somewhat rude

overhauling, and Brahmin ideals are no longer reckoned so authoritative

as they were once believed to be, nor the supremacy of Boston genius

so indisputable. Concord has risen as Cambridge and Beacon Street

have declined, and in the shadow of Emerson and Thoreau, the wit of

Back Bay is in danger of being obscured. Unsupported by his physical

presence, his writings seem far less vital than they did when the

echoes of his clever talk were still sounding through them. Certain

intellectual shortcomings are more obvious when his works are brought

together in a library edition: in the mass his prose seems far more

discursive and his verse thinner and more jingly than when the several

bits appeared singly, personally sponsored by the author in whose

cleverness everybody delighted. Read with sprightly vivacity to a

group of sympathetic listeners at the mellowest hour of the dinner,

his occasional verse must have sparkled brightly and have gone off

with such a crackle of laughter as to convince the Back Bay that the

asthmatic little gentleman with bubbling spirits was a veritable poet,

on the same friendly footing with the muse that he was with Beacon

Street. So frequently on pleasant occasions did Holmes appear before

his classmates and friends copy in hand, so often and so happily did he

respond to the invitation to write something, that it would have been

ungenerous of Boston--and Boston meant the Back Bay, the Saturday Club

and Harvard College--not to have crowned him with a wreath of her own

ivy.

For upwards of half a century, throughout the prime and on past the

Indian Summer of the New England renaissance. Holmes was Boston’s own

wit, inexhaustible in clever sayings, bubbling over with satire and

sentiment, the autocrat of her social gatherings, the acknowledged

head of her mutual admiration society. Not since Robert Treat Paine

had there been such a master of Yankee small talk. If he monopolized

the conversation he dealt generously with his listeners. The stream

was copious and the waters were never bitter or astringent, but with

just enough effervescence to suit the Boston palate. As a young

man the wit sparkled more brightly; as an old man the humor exuded

more gently. At twenty-five he described William IV of England with

republican irreverence: “The King blew his nose twice, and wiped

the royal perspiration repeatedly from a face which is probably the

largest uncivilized spot in England”; late in life he commented on

his obvious fondness of praise: “I was always patient with those who

thought well of me, and accepted all their tributes with something more

than resignation.” Taste had changed with the times in Boston. Wit was

yielding place to humor; eighteenth-century frankness had given way to

nineteenth-century refinement; Victorianism was in full and vigorous

bloom in the Beacon Street of 1850, and so Holmes became a Yankee

Victorian. The morals of an impeccable society required no castigation,

and he was under no obligation to satirize vice. Audacious sallies

would have been reckoned in bad taste. If the old-fashioned masculine

wit of Robert Treat Paine, with its echoes of Charles Churchill,

had presumed to intrude itself into the teacup society of Back Bay

drawing-rooms, the indignant Doctor would have shown it the door, and

the small talk would have flowed again, decorous and clean and amiable,

far more refined than the wit that had delighted their fathers.

And yet, though a full-blown Victorian in manners and tastes, Holmes

was something of a child of the eighteenth century at heart. The

situation in which he found himself might have proved disconcerting

if he had chosen to speculate upon it. By nature a thoroughgoing

rationalist, he lived in a romantic age. A gentleman of “parts and

learning,” with a quick and lively fancy that blossomed in the

pat phrase and neat couplet, he loved wit and hated dullness with

true Augustan zeal. The great days of Queen Anne were a perennial

inspiration to him. He clung to the heroic couplet through all the

changes of romantic styles. He moralized in rime with the fluency

if not the finish of Pope.[468] He satirized Calvinism with an

honest wrath that he might have learned of Swift. He commented in his

table-talk on the manners of the times with the chatty discursiveness

of Addison. Like the earlier wits, he discovered a deep sympathy for

the maturity and ripe wisdom of the classics. Writing to his friend

John O. Sargent, he remarked:

I wish I had become as familiar with some classic author as you

are with Horace. There is nothing like one of those perennial old

fellows for good old gentlemenly reading; and for wit and wisdom,

what is there to compare with the writings of Horace? You make

me envious,--I vow I shall have to get up Juvenal or Catullus,

naughty but nice, or somebody that nobody else knows.... I get so

tired of the damp sheets of all sorts of _literati_ (worse than

the “screeching women of Marblehead”) and clamorous essayists,

that I want something always by me, calm, settled beyond cavilling

criticism,--a cool, clear draught of Falernian that has been

somewhere near two thousand years in the cellar. (Morse, _Life and

Letters_, Vol. II, p. 311.)

But unhappily what could he do? He was the most sociable of persons,

and he lived and moved in an atmosphere surcharged with various

and sundry romanticisms. How could he preserve the spirit of quiet

rationalism, or assure himself gentlemanly leisure, with a host of

“isms” clamoring in his ears? He was amongst them even if he was not

of them. He strove to keep himself aloof, unfuddled by heady idealisms

and untroubled by strident reforms, but he could not shut his study

door against the infection. He could not deny his generation, and

inevitably he suffered his thought to be streaked and pied with the

current romanticism. He gave Lyceum lectures on Wordsworth and Keats

and Shelley, and their influence seeped into his verse. The Longfellow

fame was all about him, and he fell to composing ballads and idyls and

tales, quite as if he did not know better. Romantic garments fitted

him ill, yet he persisted in trying them on. He even got to like

them, and came finally to prefer _The Chambered Nautilus_ above his

other poems--a strange perversion of taste for a rationalist. _The

One-Hoss Shay_ is worth a volume of such pretty moralizing. _Parson

Turell’s Legacy_ and _The Moral Bully_ are in better vein--witty,

lucid, critical--than any half-hearted ventures in romanticism. The

eighteenth-century wit does not appear to advantage patched with

Victorian sentiment, and he should have been rationalist enough to know

it.

As a Beacon Street Victorian Holmes was as full of virtuous prejudices

as an egg is full of meat; but as a rationalist, with a modest

scientific equipment that came from his professional training, he

kept the windows of his mind open to the winds of scientific inquiry

that were blowing briskly to the concern of orthodox souls. Many a

barnacled craft was foundering in those gales, and Holmes watched

their going-down with visible satisfaction. He was perhaps the most

militant Unitarian amongst Boston laymen. Hatred of Calvinistic dogma

was an obsession with him; it dominated his thought and colored much

of his work, _Elsie Venner_ and his table-talk as frankly as _The

One-Hoss Shay_. The criticism to which he subjected the old-school

dogmas was always vehement, often vindictive. Long after the battle

had been won he kept annoying the retreating enemy. His father, Abiel

Holmes, was a rigorous follower of the Edwardean school, who after

nearly forty years’ service lost his pulpit for refusing to compromise

with Unitarian liberalism that had gained the fortress of the near-by

College Yard; and the stalwart among his congregation, having to yield

the building, the endowment and the communion plate, were forced to

establish themselves anew. In this unhappy schism that came about the

time Oliver Wendell Holmes was graduating from Harvard in 1829, the

latter went with the liberals. He had broken with the Calvinism of his

father, and in the reaction he went further than most along the path

of Unitarian rationalism--not the path of Channing that led to French

romanticism and transcendentalism, but the path of Andrews Norton that

led to a harder-headed rationalism. The reasons for this shift are

sufficiently evident in his writings. At his father’s table he had

watched too many “whey-faced” brethren to like the breed--men with “a

weedy flux of ill-conditioned hair,” whose

acrid words

Turn the sweet milk of kindness into curds,

Or with grim logic prove, beyond debate,

That all we love is worthiest of hate,

As the scarred ruffian of the pirate’s deck,

When his long swivel rakes the staggering wreck!

(_The Moral Bully._)

The words are bitter, but they reveal the length of his reaction from

the Calvinism on which he had been over-fed at home and at Phillips

Andover Academy; and they suggest also why, next to Theodore Parker,

Holmes came to be the best hated of Boston Unitarians amongst the

orthodox. On this one subject he was militantly radical, never

shirking debate, but whetting the edge of his satire and impaling his

victim neatly with his logic. He took sardonic delight in turning

Calvinism against itself, in the clever _reductio ad absurdum_ of the

Edwardean argument. Perhaps this major intellectual interest appears

most adequately in his picture of the Master, the autobiographical

rationalist whom he introduces into _The Poet of the Breakfast Table_.

A dabbler in the law, theology and medicine, a philosophic contemplator

of the Order of Things, who refused to permit “the territory of a man’s

mind” to be “fenced in,” who agreed with the Poet in thinking somewhat

ill of the specialist who dedicated his life to the study of beetles,

preferring to range widely through time and eternity, who followed

Darwin and was deep in bacteriology, trying “curious experiments in

spontaneous generation”--this was Holmes on the intellectual side, a

genial disseminator of the latest scientific speculations, a tolerant

amateur of the things of the mind, a friendly dabbler in absolute

moralities, who hoped “to do some sound thinking in heaven” if he ever

got there, but who was too pleasantly engaged with Beacon Street to

settle things now.

In his own special way, then, as a Brahmin of the Brahmins, Holmes

was a rebel, a puller-down of worm-eaten structures, a freethinker

rejoicing when free thought tossed a cargo of obsolete dogma into

Boston Bay, or drew out a linchpin of some respectable social coach.

He loved Boston the more because he believed that Boston was the home

of free thought and free speech, the capital of American brains, the

intellectual rebel of the continent. He did not agree with Emerson’s

strictures, or Parker’s. He would not concede that Boston was the “home

of the Hunkers.” It was provincial; it had crooked little streets; but

I tell you Boston has opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that

lead straight to free thought and free speech and free deeds than

any other city of live men or dead men--I don’t care how broad

their streets are, nor how high their steeples. (_The Professor at

the Breakfast Table_, p. 4.)

When he contemplated the future of America, with Boston as its

intellectual leader, he was carried on the crest of an exuberant

optimism:

A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest

of ’em for washbasins! A new race, and a whole new world for the

new-born human soul to work in! And Boston is the brain of it,

and has been any time these hundred years! That’s all I claim

for Boston--that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and

therefore of the planet. (_Ibid._, p. 104.)

If the mind is free other things will take care of themselves--this

pretty much sums up Holmes’s social philosophy. Only, he would add,

when the mind is used to its freedom, it will create a culture that

is well-mannered, that does not run to extravagant agitation, that

considers time, place, and outward circumstance in effecting needful

changes--the quiet decency of Channing rather than the noisier way

of Parker. The Brahmin way, after all, was the better way, Holmes

believed; and Channing was a Brahmin:

Parson Channing put a little oil on one linchpin, and slipped it

out so softly, the first thing they knew about it was the wheel of

that side was down. T’other fellow’s at work now; but he makes more

noise about it. When the linchpin comes out on his side, there’ll

be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the old cart, and

they pretend to say that there are valuable things in it which may

get hurt. Hope not--hope not. But this is the great macadamizing

place--always cracking up something. (_Ibid._, p. 19.)

Certainly not on the intellectual side could Holmes be set down as

a conservative. He did not relish any such imputation and defended

himself with vigor:

If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke

up and keep the soul’s windows down--to shut out the sun from the

east and the wind from the west--to let the rats run free in the

cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the

spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul’s typhus

is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or

rave in its delirium--I, Sir, am a _bonnet-rouge_, a redcap of the

barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative. (_Ibid._, p.

18.)

It was this spirit of rationalism that made him--at some risk of

unpopularity--an unsparing critic of romantic equalitarianism. Here

again is an echo of the older century. Neither the Jacksonian nor the

transcendental version of the new gospel found favor in his eyes;

both seemed to run counter to the open facts of history. As a realist

he discovered justification for John Adams’s doctrine of economic

determinism: all society, he was convinced, tends to stratify in lines

of wealth distribution, in America as well as in Europe, and no dogmas

can prevent it. He went further and insisted that the possession of

wealth makes possible comfort, ease, leisure, culture; that those

lacking wealth are necessarily unfree and their lives in consequence

are meaner and narrower. Much of his criticism of Yankee villagers

and countrymen--and except Cooper, he was perhaps the most critical

commentator on Yankee provincialisms of speech and manners--springs

from the conviction that a niggardly economics had created a niggardly

society. He desired more wealth to the end of more culture. He was too

completely Brahmin to set material well-being as the ultimate goal

of the competitive struggle; that seemed to him the object of State

Street and of the plutocracy he frankly detested. In _The Poet at the

Breakfast Table_ he apologizes for calling one of his characters a

capitalist, on the ground that “the word seems to be equivalent to

highway robbery in the new gospel of Saint Petroleum.” Wealth as a

means to power he would have none of; but wealth as a means to leisure,

and leisure as a means to cultivated living, he was fond of extolling.

The machinery of Brahmin life must be well oiled, but the life is more

than the machinery. Always he returned to the intellectual as the

hallmark of every society that may be accounted excellent, and his

instinctive dislike of the middle class was founded on its intellectual

sterility. It lived opulently but meanly; its rich dinners wanted the

spice of wit, its ostentatious display lacked the salt of manners. It

was vulgar at heart, and Holmes hated vulgarity even more than he hated

John Calvin’s dogmas.

Unfortunately his Brahminism sealed pretty tightly certain windows of

his mind that might better have been kept open. A radical in the field

of theology where personal concern brought him to serious grappling

with the problem, a tolerant rationalist in the realm of the intellect,

he remained a cheerfully contented conservative in other fields. He was

unconsciously insulated against the currents of social and political

thought flowing all about him. Economic inequality he accepted rather

too complacently. His daily life ran so easy and comfortable a course

as never to prod him into questioning how other lives might be running.

By instinct and training he was an aristocrat, and he was never at

pains to conceal his preference for the well born and well mannered. He

professed a philanthropic sympathy for the cause of the slave, but he

shared the Beacon Street dislike of agitation--it was not well bred and

it might bring down more things than he cared to have brought down. The

most completely class-conscious of the Boston writers, he deprecated

all proletarian appeals. They were not, in his opinion, “wholesome

moral entertainment for the dangerous classes. Boys must not touch off

their squibs and crackers too near the powder-magazine.” The less said

about the wrongs of labor, the better--at least publicly. Social strata

being determined by economics, the agitator is little better than a

firebrand.

You can’t keep a dead level long, if you burn everything down flat

to make it. Why, bless your soul, if all the cities of the world

were reduced to ashes, you’d have a new set of millionaires in a

couple of years or so, out of the trade in potash. In the meantime,

what is the use of setting the man with the silver watch against

the man with the gold watch, and the man without any against them

both?... Here we are travelling through the desert together like

the children of Israel. Some pick up more manna and catch more

quails than others, and ought to help their hungry neighbors more

than they do; ... but we don’t want the incendiary’s pillar of a

cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to lead us in the march

to civilization, and we don’t want a Moses who will smite the rock,

not to bring out water for our thirst, but petroleum to burn us all

up with. (_The Poet at the Breakfast Table_, pp. 5-6.)

In his attitude toward the present comfortable arrangement of society,

Holmes was no rebel. He was not callous to the evils of society, but

he was willing to take a longer time in the march towards civilization

than more exigent souls wished; it was a pleasant march on the whole,

and why quarrel over the difference in packs? If his attitude was

not the indifferentism of the well-to-do, it was near kin to it. He

reflected the negative qualities of Unitarianism, rather than the

positive, the free mind rather than the tender conscience. His social

bias is sufficiently revealed in the tributes of praise he bestowed

so generously. Among those whom he delighted to honor, the names of

Garrison, Phillips, Parker, Thoreau, Greeley, John Brown, do not

appear; instead he offered his praises to Everett, Webster, Bryant,

Whittier, Agassiz, Parkman, Wilkie Collins, the Grand Duke Alexis,

and a host of lesser celebrities known to the Back Bay. His heroes

were respectable souls rather than militant. As a critic his vision

seems to have been blurred by certain astigmatisms, and he discovered

heroic qualities more readily in the militant dead than in the militant

living. He delighted in the Boston of ’76, but it is reasonably

certain that if he had lived then he would have walked the streets of

that older Boston as a genial Tory, and would have suffered the fate

of other gentlemen who found it desirable to withdraw with Gage’s

Redcoats--unless, indeed, his love of the place had held him despite

his politics.