History of American Literature Part 16

CHANGE IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.--Since the death of Jonathan Edwards in the middle of the seventeenth century, New England had done little to sustain her former literary reputation. As the middle of the nineteenth century approaches, however, we shall find a remarkable group of writers in Boston and its vicinity. The causes of this wonderful literary awakening are in some respects similar to those which produced the Elizabethan age. In the sixteenth century the Reformation and the Revival of Learning exerted their joint force on England. In the nineteenth century, New England also had its religious reformation and intellectual awakening. We must remember that "re-formation" strictly means "forming again" or "forming in a different way." It is not the province of a history of literature to state whether a change in religious belief is for the better or the worse, but it is necessary to ascertain how such a change affects literature.

The old Puritan religion taught the total depravity of man, the eternal d.a.m.nation of the overwhelming majority, of all but the "elect." A man's election to salvation depended on G.o.d's foreordination. If the man was not elected, he was justly treated, for he merely received his deserts. Even Jonathan Edwards, in spite of his sweet nature, felt bound to preach h.e.l.l fire in terms of the old Puritan theology. In one of his sermons, he says:--

"The G.o.d that holds you over the pit of h.e.l.l, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath toward you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire."

This quotation was not given when we discussed the works of Edwards, because it misrepresents his most often recurring idea of G.o.d. But the fact that even he felt impelled to preach such a sermon shows most emphatically that Puritan theology exerted its influence by presenting more vivid pictures of G.o.d's wrath than of his love.

A tremendous reaction from such beliefs came in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston and one of the greatest leaders of this religious reform, wrote in 1809 of the old Puritan creed:--

"A man of plain sense, whose spirit has not been broken to this creed by education or terror, will think that it is not necessary for us to travel to heathen countries, to learn how mournfully the human mind may misrepresent the Deity."

He maintained that human nature, made in the image of G.o.d, is not totally depraved, that the current doctrine of original sin, election, and eternal punishment "misrepresents the Deity" and makes him a monster. This view was speedily adopted by the majority of cultivated people in and around Boston. The Unitarian movement rapidly developed and soon became dominant at Harvard College. Unitarianism was embraced by the majority of Congregational churches in Boston, including the First Church, and the Second Church, where the great John Cotton (see p. 14.) and Cotton Mather (p. 46.) had preached the sternest Puritan theology. Nearly all of the prominent writers mentioned in this chapter adopted liberal religious views. The recoil had been violent, and in the long run recoil will usually be found proportional to the strength of the repression. Dr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes even called the old theology largely "diabology."

The name of one of his poems is _Homesick in Heaven_. Had he in the early days chosen such a t.i.tle, he would either, like Roger Williams, have been exiled, or, like the Quakers, have suffered a worse fate.

Many adopted more liberal religious beliefs without embracing Unitarianism.

Perhaps these three lines voice most briefly the central thought in man's new creed and his changed att.i.tude toward G.o.d:--

"For Thou and I are next of kin; The pulses that are strong within, From the deep Infinite heart begin."

THE NEW ENGLAND RENAISSANCE.--The stern theology of the Puritans may have been absolutely necessary to make them work with a singleness and an inflexibility of purpose to lay the foundations of a mighty republic; but this very singleness of aim had led to a narrowness of culture which had starved the emotional and aesthetic nature. Art, music, literature, and the love of beauty in general had seemed reprehensible because it was thought that they took away the attention from a matter of far graver import, the salvation of the immortal soul. Now there gradually developed the conviction that these agencies not only helped to save the soul, but made it more worth saving. People began to search for the beautiful and to enjoy it in both nature and art. Emerson says:--

"... if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being."

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the New Englanders engaged in a systematic attempt at self-culture, to an extent never before witnessed in America and rarely elsewhere. Many with an income barely sufficient for comfortable living set aside a fund for purchasing books before anything else. Emerson could even write to Carlyle that all the bright girls in New England wanted something better than morning calls and evening parties, and that a life of mere trade did not promise satisfaction to the boys.

In 1800 there were few foreign books in Boston, but the interest in them developed to such an extent that Hawthorne's father-in-law and sister-in-law, Dr. and Miss Peabody, started a foreign bookstore and reading room. Longfellow made many beautiful translations from foreign poetry. In 1840 Emerson said that he had read in the original fifty-five volumes of Goethe. Emerson superintended the publication in America of Carlyle's early writings, which together with some of Coleridge's works introduced many to German philosophy and idealism.

In this era, New England's recovery from emotional and aesthetic starvation was rapid. Her poets and prose writers produced a literature in which beauty, power, and knowledge were often combined, and they found a cultivated audience to furnish a welcome.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY.--The literature and thought of New England were profoundly modified by the transcendental philosophy. Ralph Waldo Emerson (p. 178) was the most celebrated expounder of this school of thought. The English philosopher, Locke, had maintained that intellectual action is limited to the world of the senses. The German metaphysician, Kant, claimed that the soul has ideas which are not due to the activity of any of the senses: that every one has an idea of time and s.p.a.ce although no one has ever felt, tasted, seen, eaten, or smelled time or s.p.a.ce. He called such an idea an intuition or transcendental form.

The student of literature need not worry himself greatly about the metaphysical significance of transcendentalism, but he must understand its influence on literary thought. It is enough for him to realize that there are two great cla.s.ses of fact confronting every human being. There are the ordinary phenomena of life, which are apparent to the senses and which are the only things perceived by the majority of human beings. But behind all these appearances are forces and realities which the senses do not perceive. One with the bodily eye can see the living forms moving around him, but not the meaning of life. It is something more than the bodily hand that gropes in the darkness and touches G.o.d's hand. To commune with a Divine Power, we must transcend the experience of the senses. We are now prepared to understand what a transcendentalist like Th.o.r.eau means when he says:--

"I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the range of sight."

The transcendentalists, therefore, endeavored to transcend, that is, to pa.s.s beyond, the range of human sense and experience. We are all in a measure transcendentalists when we try to pierce the unseen, to explain existence, to build a foundation of meaning under the pa.s.sing phenomena of life. To the old Puritan, the unseen was always fraught with deeper meaning than the seen. Sarah Pierrepont and Jonathan Edwards (p. 51) were in large measure transcendentalists. The trouble was that the former Puritan philosophy of the unseen was too rigid and limited to satisfy the widening aspirations of the soul.

It should be noted that in this period the term "transcendentalist" is extended beyond its usual meaning and loosely applied to those thinkers who (1) preferred to rely on their own intuitions rather than on the authority of any one, (2) exalted individuality, (3) frowned on imitation and repet.i.tion, (4) broke with the past, (5) believed that a new social and spiritual renaissance was necessary and forthcoming, (6) insisted on the importance of culture, on "plain living and high thinking," and (7) loved isolation and solitude. An excellent original exposition of much of this philosophy may be found in Emerson's _Nature_ (1836) and in his lecture on _The Transcendentalist_ (1842).

THE ECSTASY OF THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS.--Any age that accomplishes great things is necessarily enthusiastic. According to Emerson, one of the articles of the transcendental creed was a belief "in inspiration and ecstasy." With this went an overmastering consciousness of newly discovered power. "Do you think me the child of circ.u.mstances?" asked the transcendentalist, and he answered in almost the same breath, "I make my circ.u.mstance."

The feeling of ecstasy, due to the belief that he was really a part of an infinite Divine Power, made Emerson say:--

"I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light.

From the earth, as a sh.o.r.e, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind."

The greatest of the women transcendentalists, MARGARET FULLER (1810-1850), a distinguished early pleader for equal rights for her s.e.x, believed that when it was fas.h.i.+onable for women to bring to the home "food and fire for the mind as well as for the body," an ecstatic "harmony of the spheres would ensue."

To her, as to Emerson, Nature brought an inspiring message. On an early May day she wrote:--

"The trees were still bare, but the little birds care not for that; they revel and carol and wildly tell their hopes, while the gentle voluble south wind plays with the dry leaves, and the pine trees sigh with their soul-like sounds for June. It was beauteous; and care and routine fled away, and I was as if they had never been."

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARGARET FULLER]

The transcendentalist, while voicing his ecstasy over life, has put himself on record as not wis.h.i.+ng to do anything more than once. For him G.o.d has enough new experiences, so that repet.i.tion is unnecessary. He dislikes routine. "Everything," Emerson says, "admonishes us how needlessly long life is," that is, if we walk with heroes and do not repeat. Let a machine add figures while the soul moves on. He dislikes seeing any part of a universe that he does not use. Shakespeare seemed to him to have lived a thousand years as the guest of a great universe in which most of us never pa.s.s beyond the antechamber.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT]

Critics were not wanting to point out the absurdity of many transcendental ecstasies. AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT (1799-1888), one of the leading transcendentalists, wrote a peculiar poem called _The Seer's Rations_, in which he speaks of

"Bowls of sunrise for breakfast, Brimful of the East."

His neighbors said that this was the diet which he provided for his hungry family. His daughter, Louisa May, the author of that fine juvenile work, _Little Women_ (1868), had a sad struggle with poverty while her father was living in the clouds. The extreme philosophy of the intangible was soon called "transcendental moons.h.i.+ne." The tenets of Bronson Alcott's transcendental philosophy required him to believe that human nature is saturated with divinity. He therefore felt that a misbehaving child in school would be most powerfully affected by seeing the suffering which his wrongdoing brought to others. He accordingly used to shake a good child for the bad deeds of others. Sometimes when the cla.s.s had offended, he would inflict corporal punishment on himself. His extreme applications of the new principle show that lack of balance which many of this school displayed, and yet his reliance on sympathy instead of on the omnipresent rod marks a step forward in educational practice. Emerson was far-seeing enough to say of those who carried the new philosophy to an extreme, "What if they eat clouds and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ORCHARD HOUSE, HOME OF THE ALCOTTS]

THE NEW VIEW OF NATURE.--To the old Puritan, nature seemed to groan under the weight of sin and to bear the primal curse. To the transcendentalist, nature was a part of divinity. The question was sometimes asked whether nature had any real existence outside of G.o.d, whether it was not G.o.d's thoughts. Emerson, being an idealist, doubted whether nature had any more material existence than a thought.

The majority of the writers did not press this idealistic conception of nature, but much of the nature literature of this group shows a belief in the soul's mystic companions.h.i.+p with the bird, the flower, the cloud, the ocean, and the stars. Emerson says:--

"The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them."

Hawthorne exclaims:--

"O, that I could run wild!--that is, that I could put myself into a true relation with Nature, and be on friendly terms with all congenial elements."

Th.o.r.eau (p. 194) often enters Nature's mystic shrine and dilates with a sense of her companions.h.i.+p. Of the song of the wood thrush, he says:--

"Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring.

Whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.... It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion, makes me the lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. This minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the village can be contemporary."

Th.o.r.eau could converse with the Concord River and hear the sound of the rain in its "summer voice." Hiawatha talked with the reindeer, the beaver, and the rabbit, as with his brothers. In dealing with nature, Whittier caught something of Wordsworth's spirituality, and Lowell was impressed with the yearnings of a clod of earth as it

"Climbs to a soul in gra.s.s and flowers."

One of the chief glories of this age was the fuller recognition of the companions.h.i.+p that man bears to every child of nature. This phase of the literature has reacted on the ideals of the entire republic. Flowers, trees, birds, domestic animals, and helpless human beings have received more sympathetic treatment as a result. In what previous time have we heard an American poet ask, as Emerson did in his poem _Forbearance_ (1842):--

"Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?

Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARGARET FULLER'S COTTAGE, BROOK FARM]

THE DIAL.--Transcendentalism had for its organ a magazine called _The Dial_, which was published quarterly for four years, from 1840 to 1844.

Margaret Fuller, its first editor, was a woman of wide reading and varied culture, and she had all the enthusiasm of the Elizabethans. Carlyle said of her, "Such a predetermination to eat this big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul." She was determined to do her part in ushering in a new social and spiritual world, and it seemed to her that _The Dial_ would be a mighty lever in accomplis.h.i.+ng this result. She struggled for two years to make the magazine a success. Then ill health and poverty compelled her to turn the editors.h.i.+p over to Emerson, who continued the struggle for two years longer.

Some of Emerson's best poems were first published in _The Dial_, as were his lecture on _The Transcendentalist_ and many other articles by him.

Th.o.r.eau wrote for almost every number. Some of the articles were dull, not a few were vague, but many were an inspiration to the age, and their resultant effect is still felt in our life and literature. Much of the minor poetry was good and stimulating. William Channing (1818-1901) published in _The Dial_ his _Thoughts_, in which we find lines that might serve as an epitaph for a life approved by a transcendentalist:--