Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920

Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;--not that man is fitted to sit down on tombstones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon” (Weaver, _Herman Melville_, pp. 151-152). After _Pierre_ came _Clarel_--years later--in which the theological doubts and religious unrest that mark the poetry of Arnold and Clough in England came to expression in a world that was untouched by them.[432] The abyss that lay between Melville and America had become deeper and wider. Like all the transcendentalists Melville was a democrat, but his democracy sprang rather from his sympathies than from his philosophy. It was a democracy learned rather from Ecclesiastes than from Emerson; it sprang from his pessimism rather than from any transcendental faith in the divinity of man. He knew only too well how weak and foolish are the children of Adam; but in presence of the common fate to which the indifferent years hurry us, how stupid and callous are the social distinctions that society erects! Why should not life be a leveler, as well as death? His experience before the mast had taught him sympathy for the common man; he regarded quizzically the ways of the exploiting few and the sufferings of the exploited many; and he smiled ironically at the neat little classification that divides the human animal into sinners and saints. He was as comprehensive a democrat as Whitman, of the same all-embracing school that denied the common social and ethical categories of excellence; but alienated from his fellows, not drawn to them as Whitman was. It was not a sense of social aloofness that held him apart, but the isolation of loneliness. “When you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides,” he wrote to Hawthorne, “you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort. It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington.... It seems an inconsistency to assert unconditioned democracy in all things, and yet confess a dislike to all mankind--in the mass. But not so” (_ibid._, pp. 320-321). He then goes on: “But truth is the silliest thing under the sun,” and does not deign to explain. “Believe me,” he says of _Pierre_, “you will pronounce Pierre a thoroughgoing Democrat in time; perhaps a little too Radical altogether to your fancy” (_ibid._, p. 37). Such a man would not so much turn critic as embody criticism. His life--even more than Emerson’s--laid upon America, was a yardstick to measure the shortcomings of a professed civilization. Cooper was a critic whom America could understand, and America hated him for his unpleasant frankness. Melville it could not understand, and it turned away and ignored him. Perhaps it was well enough that his generation could not comprehend his devastating speculations, and called him mad; or it would have cried out to crucify this maligner of all the tribal fetishes. He would level every barrier against the unpleasant that his age was erecting. He outran Thoreau in contempt for current material ideals. To turn scornfully away from the triumphs of his fellows--from the fruits of the industrial revolution and the romantic gospel of progress--this was incomprehensible blasphemy! Yet what had Herman Melville in common with middle-class America? Its hopes and fears were not his. He was troubled about life, and not about things. He was not concerned about politics or the political state. He was not concerned with trade, or money-getting, or romantic imperialisms. He was not even greatly concerned with political democracy, although in his time he had been as hot a republican as the best of them. The shoddy democracy of his time made his gorge rise; and to this shoddy democracy that shrilly proclaimed its excellence he paid his respects in words that suggest Lowell’s _Cathedral_, but with a depth of significance that Lowell was incapable of. In the poem _Clarel_, into which Melville crowded so much of his later speculations, he comments thus: This world clean fails me: still I yearn.... This side the dark and hollow bound Lies there no unexplored rich ground? _Some other world_: well, there’s the New-- Ah, joyless and ironic too! Ay, Democracy Lops, lops; and where’s her planted bed? The future, what is that to her Who vaunts she’s no inheritor? ’Tis in her mouth, not in her heart. The past she spurns, though ’tis the past From which she gets her saving part-- That Good which lets her evil last. Behold her whom the panders crown, Harlot on horseback, riding down The very Ephesians who acclaim This great Diana of ill fame! Arch strumpet of an impious age, Upstart from ranker villeinage: Asia shall stop her at the least That old inertness of the East.... But in the New World things make haste: Not only things, the _state_ lives fast-- Fast breed the pregnant eggs and shells, The slumberous combustibles, Sure to explode. ’Twill come, ’twill come! One demagogue can trouble much: How of a hundred thousand such?... Indeed, those germs one now may view: Myriads playing pigmy parts-- Debased into equality: Dead level of rank commonplace: An Anglo-Saxon China, see, May on your vast plains shame the race In the Dark Ages of Democracy.... Your arts advance in faith’s decay: You are but drilling the new Hun Whose growl even now can some dismay; Vindictive in his heart of hearts. He schools him in your mines and marts A skilled destroyer.... Old ballads sing Fair Christian children crucified By impious Jews: you’ve heard the thing: Yes, fable; but there’s truth hard by: How many Hughs of Lincoln, say, Does Mammon, in his mills, to-day, Crook, if he does not crucify? The impieties of ‘Progress’ speak; What say _these_, in effect to God? ‘How profits it? And who art Thou That we should serve Thee? Of Thy ways No knowledge we desire; _new_ ways We have found out, and better. Go-- Depart from us!’ And if He do? Is aught betwixt us and the hells?... For Herman Melville, at least, the barriers betwixt him and the hells had long been gone, and only Nirvana awaited him. Footnotes [426] See his satire on Fanny Wright in _The Evening Post_, January 29, 1829, quoted by Allan Nevins, _The Evening Post, etc._, pp. 126-127. [427] For his statement, see “Labor’s Political Economy,” in _Hints toward Reforms_. [428] See “The Organization of Labor,” in _Hints toward Reforms_. [429] See Charles Sotheran, _Horace Greeley_, p. 255. [430] See William A. Robinson, _Jeffersonian Democracy in New England_, pp. 43-45. [431] Garrison, _Life of Garrison_, Vol. IV, p. 248. [432] See Weaver, p. 365. Book Three • The Mind of New England The New England renaissance was tardy in appearing and of brief duration, yet in the few years of its extraordinary vigor it imparted a stimulus to American life that its historians have not greatly exaggerated. We are now far enough from it to see that it was the last flowering of a tree that was dying at the roots, but in the tumultuous thirties it seemed to be a new birth of the native New England mind, opening on new worlds and great adventures. Though its prophecies might be little heeded at its own fireside, and unheard in the vast stretches of the West where men were clearing and building after quite different plans than the Concord architects were drawing, its significance in the development of American idealism--the ethical imprint it stamped on American culture--endured long after it had spent its force. It was the last and in certain aspects the most brilliant of the several attempts to domesticate in America the romantic thought of revolutionary Europe; and with its passing, civilization in this western world fell into the hands of another breed of men to fashion as they saw fit. The revolutions in thought that lie between the eighteenth century with its aristocratic rationalism that conceived of human nature as evil, and the nineteenth century with its middle-class economics that conceived of human nature as acquisitive, are more clearly defined in New England and more sharply differentiated, than elsewhere in America. The flood of romantic speculation with its humanitarian emphasis on the potential excellence of man and the equality of human rights, that in Europe had diffused itself widely, in Massachusetts flowed into narrow channels prepared by Puritan discipline, and swept away habits of thought that had dominated New England for two hundred years. The intensity of the Puritan nature, once it embraced the new conceptions, imparted to them an intellectual and emotional unity that serves to explain the creativeness of the New England renaissance, as it serves to explain its failure to spread widely beyond the confines of Massachusetts. Appearing a generation later than in Virginia, it drew its inspiration more largely from Germany than from France; it was intellectual and ethical rather than political and economic; and in consequence it held little in common with the Physiocratic agrarianism of Jefferson. The latter was sufficiently native to American economics to appeal to the common man from Maine to Georgia; the former was native only to New England Puritanism. Its idealism appealed only to rare souls, disciplined by speculation and trained in ethical values, men of strong character and fine distinction who counted for much more than numbers. After all it is the ethical note that marks the Puritan. That New England has run so different a course from other parts of America has been due chiefly to its desire to serve God even though it might be serving self. Its material life has always been plentifully seasoned with the salt of religion. It sat under the teachings of an austere ethics, as it lived under the compulsions of a narrow economics; and the result was the development of a middle class distinct from that of the West where the desire to get on was less hampered by the desire to get to heaven. The outstanding social figures in early New England were the minister and the merchant; and these twin authorities--joined after the Revolution by the rising profession of the law--ruled in patriarchal fashion the inarticulate mass of the yeomanry. From these traditional leaders the policy of New England received a twofold bent: a bent to the ethical and a bent to the practical. The two have rarely fused in a harmonious and fruitful life, but for the most part have dwelt side by side under a covenant of noninterference, the character of current social ideals taking its impress from one or the other as it gained a temporary ascendency. In the three hundred years of New England history the minister has enjoyed two periods of intellectual ascendency: the first during the early days of the theocracy, when the commonwealth was ruled by the laws of God and John Calvin; and the second, between the years 1830 and 1850, when John Calvin was finally put aside and New England was in the way of being remodeled in accordance with the plans of God alone. Between these brief periods of ethical enthusiasm lies the main history of New England, a history that counts for little in our intellectual and aesthetic development, but that meant much and ill to the cramped minds of her sons. This long stretch, arid and unlovely, was dominated wholly by the merchant. Its parsimonious thrift, relieved by few generous impulses, was hostile to all change and to the romance that is bred of change. There was no rapid inflow of settlers to bring fresh energy and expansion. The exuberant growth of other parts of America was never