divides and detaches bone and marrow, soul and body, yea, almost
the man from himself. It is the age of severance, of dissociation,
of freedom, of analysis, of detachment. Every man for himself. The
public speaker disclaims speaking for any other; he answers only for
himself. The social sentiments are weak; the sentiment of patriotism
is weak; veneration is low; the natural affections feebler than they
were. People grow philosophical about native land and parents and
relations. There is an universal resistance to ties and ligaments
once supposed essential to civil society. The new race is stiff, heady
and rebellious; they are fanatics in freedom; they hate tolls, taxes,
turnpikes, banks, hierarchies, governors, yea, almost laws. They have a
neck of unspeakable tenderness; it winces at a hair. They rebel against
theological as against political dogmas; against mediation, or saints,
or any nobility in the unseen.
The age tends to solitude. The association of the time is accidental
and momentary and hypocritical, the detachment intrinsic and
progressive. The association is for power, merely,--for means; the end
being the enlargement and independency of the individual. Anciently,
society was in the course of things. There was a Sacred Band, a Theban
Phalanx. There can be none now. College classes, military corps, or
trades-unions may fancy themselves indissoluble for a moment, over
their wine; but it is a painted hoop, and has no girth. The age of
arithmetic and of criticism has set in. The structures of old faith in
every department of society a few centuries have sufficed to destroy.
Astrology, magic, palmistry, are long gone. The very last ghost is
laid. Demonology is on its last legs. Prerogative, government, goes to
pieces day by day. Europe is strewn with wrecks; a constitution once a
week. In social manners and morals the revolution is just as evident.
In the law courts, crimes of fraud have taken the place of crimes of
force. The stockholder has stepped into the place of the warlike baron.
The nobles shall not any longer, as feudal lords, have power of life
and death over the churls, but now, in another shape, as capitalists,
shall in all love and peace eat them up as before. Nay, government
itself becomes the resort of those whom government was invented to
restrain. “Are there any brigands on the road?” inquired the traveller
in France. “Oh, no, set your heart at rest on that point,” said the
landlord; “what should these fellows keep the highway for, when they
can rob just as effectually, and much more at their ease, in the
bureaus of office?”
In literature the effect appeared in the decided tendency of criticism.
The most remarkable literary work of the age has for its hero and
subject precisely this introversion: I mean the poem of Faust. In
philosophy, Immanuel Kant has made the best catalogue of the human
faculties and the best analysis of the mind. Hegel also, especially.
In science the French _savant_, exact, pitiless, with barometer,
crucible, chemic test and calculus in hand, travels into all nooks and
islands, to weigh, to analyze and report. And chemistry, which is the
analysis of matter, has taught us that we eat gas, drink gas, tread on
gas, and are gas. The same decomposition has changed the whole face
of physics; the like in all arts, modes. Authority falls, in Church,
College, Courts of Law, Faculties, Medicine. Experiment is credible;
antiquity is grown ridiculous.
It marked itself by a certain predominance of the intellect in the
balance of powers. The warm swart Earth-spirit which made the strength
of past ages, mightier than it knew, with instincts instead of science,
like a mother yielding food from her own breast instead of preparing it
through chemic and culinary skill,--warm negro ages of sentiment and
vegetation,--all gone; another hour had struck and other forms arose.
Instead of the social existence which all shared, was now separation.
Every one for himself; driven to find all his resources, hopes,
rewards, society and deity within himself.
The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to
introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives. The popular
religion of our fathers had received many severe shocks from the
new times; from the Arminians, which was the current name of the
backsliders from Calvinism, sixty years ago; then from the English
philosophic theologians, Hartley and Priestley and Belsham, the
followers of Locke; and then I should say much later from the slow
but extraordinary influence of Swedenborg; a man of prodigious mind,
though as I think tainted with a certain suspicion of insanity, and
therefore generally disowned, but exerting a singular power over an
important intellectual class; then the powerful influence of the genius
and character of Dr. Channing.
Germany had created criticism in vain for us until 1820, when Edward
Everett returned from his five years in Europe, and brought to
Cambridge his rich results, which no one was so fitted by natural grace
and the splendor of his rhetoric to introduce and recommend. He made
us for the first time acquainted with Wolff’s theory of the Homeric
writings, with the criticism of Heyne. The novelty of the learning
lost nothing in the skill and genius of his relation, and the rudest
undergraduate found a new morning opened to him in the lecture-room of
Harvard Hall.
There was an influence on the young people from the genius of Everett
which was almost comparable to that of Pericles in Athens. He had
an inspiration which did not go beyond his head, but which made him
the master of elegance. If any of my readers were at that period in
Boston or Cambridge, they will easily remember his radiant beauty of
person, of a classic style, his heavy large eye, marble lids, which
gave the impression of mass which the slightness of his form needed;
sculptured lips; a voice of such rich tones, such precise and perfect
utterance, that, although slightly nasal, it was the most mellow and
beautiful and correct of all the instruments of the time. The word
that he spoke, in the manner in which he spoke it, became current and
classical in New England. He had a great talent for collecting facts,
and for bringing those he had to bear with ingenious felicity on the
topic of the moment. Let him rise to speak on what occasion soever, a
fact had always just transpired which composed, with some other fact
well known to the audience, the most pregnant and happy coincidence.
It was remarked that for a man who threw out so many facts he was
seldom convicted of a blunder. He had a good deal of special learning,
and all his learning was available for purposes of the hour. It was
all new learning, that wonderfully took and stimulated the young men.
It was so coldly and weightily communicated from so commanding a
platform, as if in the consciousness and consideration of all history
and all learning,--adorned with so many simple and austere beauties
of expression, and enriched with so many excellent digressions and
significant quotations, that, though nothing could be conceived
beforehand less attractive or indeed less fit for green boys from
Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, with their unripe Latin
and Greek reading, than exegetical discourses in the style of Voss and
Wolff and Ruhnken, on the Orphic and Ante-Homeric remains,--yet this
learning instantly took the highest place to our imagination in our
unoccupied American Parnassus. All his auditors felt the extreme beauty
and dignity of the manner, and even the coarsest were contented to go
punctually to listen, for the manner, when they had found out that the
subject-matter was not for them. In the lecture-room, he abstained
from all ornament, and pleased himself with the play of detailing
erudition in a style of perfect simplicity. In the pulpit (for he was
then a clergyman) he made amends to himself and his auditor for the
self-denial of the professor’s chair, and, with an infantine simplicity
still, of manner, he gave the reins to his florid, quaint and affluent
fancy.
Then was exhibited all the richness of a rhetoric which we have never
seen rivalled in this country. Wonderful how memorable were words
made which were only pleasing pictures, and covered no new or valid
thoughts. He abounded in sentences, in wit, in satire, in splendid
allusion, in quotation impossible to forget, in daring imagery, in
parable and even in a sort of defying experiment of his own wit
and skill in giving an oracular weight to Hebrew or Rabbinical
words;--feats which no man could better accomplish, such was his
self-command and the security of his manner. All his speech was
music, and with such variety and invention that the ear was never
tired. Especially beautiful were his poetic quotations. He delighted
in quoting Milton, and with such sweet modulation that he seemed to
give as much beauty as he borrowed; and whatever he has quoted will
be remembered by any who heard him, with inseparable association
with his voice and genius. He had nothing in common with vulgarity
and infirmity, but, speaking, walking, sitting, was as much aloof
and uncommon as a star. The smallest anecdote of his behavior or
conversation was eagerly caught and repeated, and every young scholar
could recite brilliant sentences from his sermons, with mimicry, good
or bad, of his voice. This influence went much farther, for he who was
heard with such throbbing hearts and sparkling eyes in the lighted
and crowded churches, did not let go his hearers when the church was
dismissed, but the bright image of that eloquent form followed the boy
home to his bed-chamber; and not a sentence was written in academic
exercises, not a declamation attempted in the college chapel, but
showed the omnipresence of his genius to youthful heads. This made
every youth his defender, and boys filled their mouths with arguments
to prove that the orator had a heart. This was a triumph of Rhetoric.
It was not the intellectual or the moral principles which he had to
teach. It was not thoughts. When Massachusetts was full of his fame it
was not contended that he had thrown any truths into circulation. But
his power lay in the magic of form; it was in the graces of manner; in
a new perception of Grecian beauty, to which he had opened our eyes.
There was that finish about this person which is about women, and which
distinguishes every piece of genius from the works of talent,--that
these last are more or less matured in every degree of completeness
according to the time bestowed on them, but works of genius in their
first and slightest form are still wholes. In every public discourse
there was nothing left for the indulgence of his hearer, no marks of
late hours and anxious, unfinished study, but the goddess of grace had
breathed on the work a last fragrancy and glitter.
By a series of lectures largely and fashionably attended for two
winters in Boston he made a beginning of popular literary and
miscellaneous lecturing, which in that region at least had important
results. It is acquiring greater importance every day, and becoming
a national institution. I am quite certain that this purely literary
influence was of the first importance to the American mind.
In the pulpit Dr. Frothingham, an excellent classical and German
scholar, had already made us acquainted, if prudently, with the genius
of Eichhorn’s theologic criticism. And Professor Norton a little later
gave form and method to the like studies in the then infant Divinity
School. But I think the paramount source of the religious revolution
was Modern Science; beginning with Copernicus, who destroyed the pagan
fictions of the Church, by showing mankind that the earth on which we
live was not the centre of the Universe, around which the sun and stars
revolved every day, and thus fitted to be the platform on which the
Drama of the Divine Judgment was played before the assembled Angels of
Heaven,--“the scaffold of the divine vengeance” Saurin called it,--but
a little scrap of a planet, rushing round the sun in our system,
which in turn was too minute to be seen at the distance of many stars
which we behold. Astronomy taught us our insignificance in Nature;
showed that our sacred as our profane history had been written in
gross ignorance of the laws, which were far grander than we knew; and
compelled a certain extension and uplifting of our views of the Deity
and his Providence. This correction of our superstitions was confirmed
by the new science of Geology, and the whole train of discoveries in
every department. But we presently saw also that the religious nature
in man was not affected by these errors in his understanding. The
religious sentiment made nothing of bulk or size, or far or near;
triumphed over time as well as space; and every lesson of humility, or
justice, or charity, which the old ignorant saints had taught him, was
still forever true.
Whether from these influences, or whether by a reaction of the general
mind against the too formal science, religion and social life of the
earlier period,--there was, in the first quarter of our nineteenth
century, a certain sharpness of criticism, an eagerness for reform,
which showed itself in every quarter. It appeared in the popularity
of Lavater’s Physiognomy, now almost forgotten. Gall and Spurzheim’s
Phrenology laid a rough hand on the mysteries of animal and spiritual
nature, dragging down every sacred secret to a street show. The attempt
was coarse and odious to scientific men, but had a certain truth in it;
it felt connection where the professors denied it, and was a leading
to a truth which had not yet been announced. On the heels of this
intruder came Mesmerism, which broke into the inmost shrines, attempted
the explanation of miracle and prophecy, as well as of creation. What
could be more revolting to the contemplative philosopher! But a certain
success attended it, against all expectation. It was human, it was
genial, it affirmed unity and connection between remote points, and
as such was excellent criticism on the narrow and dead classification
of what passed for science; and the joy with which it was greeted
was an instinct of the people which no true philosopher would fail to
profit by. But while society remained in doubt between the indignation
of the old school and the audacity of the new, a higher note sounded.
Unexpected aid from high quarters came to iconoclasts. The German
poet Goethe revolted against the science of the day, against French
and English science, declared war against the great name of Newton,
proposed his own new and simple optics: in Botany, his simple theory
of metamorphosis;--the eye of a leaf is all; every part of the plant
from root to fruit is only a modified leaf, the branch of a tree is
nothing but a leaf whose serratures have become twigs. He extended this
into anatomy and animal life, and his views were accepted. The revolt
became a revolution. Schelling and Oken introduced their ideal natural
philosophy, Hegel his metaphysics, and extended it to Civil History.
The result in literature and the general mind was a return to law;
in science, in politics, in social life; as distinguished from the
profligate manners and politics of earlier times. The age was moral.
Every immorality is a departure from nature, and is punished by natural
loss and deformity. The popularity of Combe’s Constitution of Man;
the humanity which was the aim of all the multitudinous works of
Dickens; the tendency even of Punch’s caricature, was all on the side
of the people. There was a breath of new air, much vague expectation, a
consciousness of power not yet finding its determinate aim.
I attribute much importance to two papers of Dr. Channing, one on
Milton and one on Napoleon, which were the first specimens in this
country of that large criticism which in England had given power and
fame to the Edinburgh Review. They were widely read, and of course
immediately fruitful in provoking emulation which lifted the style of
Journalism. Dr. Channing, whilst he lived, was the star of the American
Church, and we then thought, if we do not still think, that he left
no successor in the pulpit. He could never be reported, for his eye
and voice could not be printed, and his discourses lose their best in
losing them. He was made for the public; his cold temperament made him
the most unprofitable private companion; but all America would have
been impoverished in wanting him. We could not then spare a single word
he uttered in public, not so much as the reading a lesson in Scripture,
or a hymn, and it is curious that his printed writings are almost a
history of the times; as there was no great public interest, political,
literary, or even economical (for he wrote on the Tariff), on which he
did not leave some printed record of his brave and thoughtful opinion.
A poor little invalid all his life, he is yet one of those men who
vindicate the power of the American race to produce greatness.
Dr. Channing took counsel in 1840 with George Ripley, to the point
whether it were possible to bring cultivated, thoughtful people
together, and make society that deserved the name. He had earlier
talked with Dr. John Collins Warren on the like purpose, who admitted
the wisdom of the design and undertook to aid him in making the
experiment. Dr. Channing repaired to Dr. Warren’s house on the
appointed evening, with large thoughts which he wished to open. He
found a well-chosen assembly of gentlemen variously distinguished;
there was mutual greeting and introduction, and they were chatting
agreeably on indifferent matters and drawing gently towards their great
expectation, when a side-door opened, the whole company streamed in to
an oyster supper, crowned by excellent wines; and so ended the first
attempt to establish æsthetic society in Boston.
Some time afterwards Dr. Channing opened his mind to Mr. and Mrs.
Ripley, and with some care they invited a limited party of ladies
and gentlemen. I had the honor to be present. Though I recall the
fact, I do not retain any instant consequence of this attempt, or any
connection between it and the new zeal of the friends who at that time
began to be drawn together by sympathy of studies and of aspiration.
Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Dr. Convers Francis, Theodore Parker,
Dr. Hedge, Mr. Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William H. Channing,
and many others, gradually drew together and from time to time spent
an afternoon at each other’s houses in a serious conversation. With
them was always one well-known form, a pure idealist, not at all a
man of letters, nor of any practical talent, nor a writer of books; a
man quite too cold and contemplative for the alliances of friendship,
with rare simplicity and grandeur of perception, who read Plato as an
equal, and inspired his companions only in proportion as they were
intellectual,--whilst the men of talent complained of the want of point
and precision in this abstract and religious thinker.
These fine conversations, of course, were incomprehensible to some
in the company, and they had their revenge in their little joke.
One declared that “It seemed to him like going to heaven in a
swing;” another reported that, at a knotty point in the discourse,
a sympathizing Englishman with a squeaking voice interrupted with
the question, “Mr. Alcott, a lady near me desires to inquire whether
omnipotence abnegates attribute?”
I think there prevailed at that time a general belief in Boston that
there was some concert of _doctrinaires_ to establish certain
opinions and inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy,
and religion, of which design the supposed conspirators were quite
innocent; for there was no concert, and only here and there two or
three men or women who read and wrote, each alone, with unusual
vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having fallen upon Coleridge and
Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with pleasure and sympathy.
Otherwise, their education and reading were not marked, but had the
American superficialness, and their studies were solitary. I suppose
all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or sect, and
certainly at the name of Transcendentalism, given nobody knows by whom,
or when it was first applied. As these persons became in the common
chances of society acquainted with each other, there resulted certainly
strong friendships, which of course were exclusive in proportion to
their heat: and perhaps those persons who were mutually the best
friends were the most private and had no ambition of publishing their
letters, diaries, or conversation.
From that time meetings were held for conversation, with very little
form, from house to house, of people engaged in studies, fond of books,
and watchful of all the intellectual light from whatever quarter
it flowed. Nothing could be less formal, yet the intelligence and
character and varied ability of the company gave it some notoriety and
perhaps waked curiosity as to its aims and results.
Nothing more serious came of it than the modest quarterly journal
called “The Dial” which, under the editorship of Margaret Fuller,
and later of some other, enjoyed its obscurity for four years. All
its papers were unpaid contributions, and it was rather a work of
friendship among the narrow circle of students than the organ of any
party. Perhaps its writers were its chief readers: yet it contained
some noble papers by Margaret Fuller, and some numbers had an instant
exhausting sale, because of papers by Theodore Parker.
Theodore Parker was our Savonarola, an excellent scholar, in frank
and affectionate communication with the best minds of his day, yet
the tribune of the people, and the stout Reformer to urge and defend
every cause of humanity with and for the humblest of mankind. He was no
artist. Highly refined persons might easily miss in him the element of
beauty. What he said was mere fact, almost offended you, so bald and
detached; little cared he. He stood altogether for practical truth; and
so to the last. He used every day and hour of his short life, and his
character appeared in the last moments with the same firm control as
in the mid-day of strength. I habitually apply to him the words of a
French philosopher who speaks of “the man of Nature who abominates the
steam-engine and the factory. His vast lungs breathe independence with
the air of the mountains and the woods.”
The vulgar politician disposed of this circle cheaply as “the
sentimental class.” State Street had an instinct that they invalidated
contracts and threatened the stability of stocks; and it did not
fancy brusque manners. Society always values, even in its teachers,
inoffensive people, susceptible of conventional polish. The clergyman
who would live in the city _may_ have piety, but _must_
have taste, whilst there was often coming, among these, some John the
Baptist, wild from the woods, rude, hairy, careless of dress and quite
scornful of the etiquette of cities. There was a pilgrim in those days
walking in the country who stopped at every door where he hoped to find
hearing for his doctrine, which was, Never to give or receive money.
He was a poor printer, and explained with simple warmth the belief of
himself and five or six young men with whom he agreed in opinion, of
the vast mischief of our insidious coin. He thought every one should
labor at some necessary product, and as soon as he had made more than
enough for himself, were it corn, or paper, or cloth, or boot-jacks,
he should give of the commodity to any applicant, and in turn go to
his neighbor for any article which he had to spare. Of course we
were curious to know how he sped in his experiments on the neighbor,
and his anecdotes were interesting, and often highly creditable.
But he had the courage which so stern a return to Arcadian manners
required, and had learned to sleep, in cold nights, when the farmer at
whose door he knocked declined to give him a bed, on a wagon covered
with the buffalo-robe under the shed,--or under the stars, when the
farmer denied the shed and the buffalo-robe. I think he persisted for
two years in his brave practice, but did not enlarge his church of
believers.