Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
Chapter I • The Renaissance
To write a history of Massachusetts, I confess, is not inviting to
an expansive thinker.... From 1790 to 1820 there was not a book, a
speech, a conversation, or a thought in the State. About 1820, the
Channing, Webster, and Everett era begun, and we have been bookish
and poetical and cogitative since. (Emerson, _Journals_, Vol. VIII,
p. 339.)
In such summary fashion in the year 1852, Emerson recorded his
judgment on half a century of intellectual life in Massachusetts. It
was the comment of an exacting critic. In its characterization of
the extraordinary ferment of thought that marked the decades of the
thirties and forties, it is quite inadequate; but in its contemptuous
dismissal of the age of Fisher Ames and Robert Treat Paine it was
scarcely unjust. The utter sterility of those old times Emerson
understood only too well. It was the world of his own youth, whose
pale negations he had come to hate. The creative impulse was stifled,
the mind had grown stale from tedious iteration. But at last the old
barriers gave way, and into this narrow illiberal world, that had long
fed on the crusts of English rationalism and Edwardean dogmatism--dry
as remainder biscuit after voyage--broke the floods that had been
gathering in Europe for years, the waters of all the streams of
revolution that were running there bank-full. Before this inundation
the old provincialisms were swept away, and for the first time in its
history, and the last, the mind of New England gave itself over to a
great adventure in liberalism.
Quite evidently the renaissance resulted from the impact of the
romantic revolution upon the Puritan mind, and it issued in a form
native to New England experience. Animated by the common spirit
of Utopianism, its dreams were unlike those of Virginia or the
West, founded on a different economics and seeking different ends.
Massachusetts had discovered a particular road leading to Utopia by way
of the industrial revolution, and the textile mills on the Merrimac
began weaving a new pattern of life for New England. The old static
agricultural order was broken in upon, and with the social disruption
came naturally an intellectual disruption. The mind of that older New
England had been held in the close keeping of the church, and the
movement of intellectual emancipation became therefore at the outset a
movement leveled at theological conservatism; it was concerned first
to rid New England of the incubus of Calvinistic dogma. The Calvinists
were of tough fiber and tenacious of opinion, and to turn their flank
was no summer campaign. The result was a long battle of ideas, a fierce
struggle between the old deterministic theology and the new romantic
philosophy, with victory slowly inclining to the latter. This major
struggle gave to the renaissance its profoundly ethical spirit that
set it off sharply from the earlier renaissance of Virginia; and not
the least important of the results of the movement was the liberation
of the New England conscience from its long bondage to dogma, setting
it free to engage in a larger work in the world. What that conscience
accomplished in the brief period of its freedom; what causes it
espoused and what reforms it carried through--how it quickened a
humanitarian zeal in New England and imparted a militant spirit to its
culture--these are phases of the total movement not to be neglected by
the historian.
In the realm of ideas the renaissance was largely dominated by
old-world thought. From the abundant stores of European revolutionary
doctrine the New England liberals drew freely--more freely perhaps
from German idealism than from French Utopianism. Germany meant much
to the awakening mind of New England, by reason of its spiritual and
intellectual kinship. Plato was their common father, a transcendental
mysticism their common experience. Philosophical idealism with its
indwelling Godhood that exalted man to the divine and transformed
a mechanical universe into the dwelling place of divine love--this
was a dynamic faith, appealing to men long nurtured in faith, more
seductive to the children of Puritanism than any political or economic
romanticisms. It opened to them new heavens when the old were closed
and encouraged them to go forth on great ventures.
But the renaissance was very much more than a transplanting of German
idealism. France had a shaping hand in it, and England. Jean Jacques
came before Hegel, and Unitarianism before transcendentalism. It was
social and literary as well as philosophical. In so far as that which
was essentially one may be divided, the movement involved three major
strands: the social Utopianism that came from revolutionary France; the
idealistic metaphysics that emerged from revolutionary Germany; and the
new culture that spread with the development of literary romanticism.
To distinguish these three strands is one thing; to endeavor to
separate them is quite another. They interweave and blend in varying
patterns; they are but different, new-world phases of a comprehensive
European movement that runs far back into the preceding century--a
movement that in transferring economic and political mastery from the
aristocracy to the middle class, in destroying the worm-eaten feudal
order and clearing the way for the new capitalistic order, laid open
a broad path into the nineteenth century. The extraordinary appeal of
this vast movement to the liberal mind of America resulted from the
fact that an identical revolution was under way here. In New England,
perhaps more dramatically than elsewhere in America, the day of the
middle class was dawning, aristocratic ideals were disintegrating, and
the hopes of men were running high. To humanize this emerging society,
to awaken it to a nobler faith in human destiny, to further the cause
of social justice, to create a democracy of the spirit--this was
the deeper romantic purpose, however vaguely comprehended, that was
fermenting in the New England renaissance, and it was this that gave to
it a spirit so warmly ethical.
Now quite evidently a movement so extraordinarily complex would appeal
diversely to different minds, and in its development it drew to itself
a singularly various following. To the sons of respectable Federalism
it was the new romantic culture that appealed; to the militant
conscience of Puritanism it was the inspiration of social Utopianism;
to the emancipated intellectuals it was the metaphysical idealism. Its
many-sidedness was both confusing and stimulating. How shall we explain
a movement that embraced such different men as Everett and Channing
and Parker and Garrison and Whittier and Emerson and Longfellow and
Holmes; men often mutually repellent, sometimes sharply critical
of each other? No single mind sums up the whole--the theological,
humanitarian, mystical, critical, and cultural aspirations of the
awakening--as perhaps Goethe may be said to have done for Germany.
Emerson, Thoreau and Parker possibly embodied it most adequately; they
were transcendental individualists, intellectual revolutionaries,
contemptuous of all meanly material standards. But quite evidently
Everett would not travel far along the transcendental path they pointed
out, nor Holmes, nor Longfellow. These latter expected no romantic
Utopias, wanted no such Utopias. Cambridge and Boston satisfied their
hopes; they found the world not such a bad place for those who knew
how to meet it on its own terms. Yet they too were children of the
awakening, and in following their individual paths they contributed
in their own way to the disintegration of the old authoritarian order
that had long held the mind of New England in subjection. Each in
some measure and after his own fashion was a rebel, and their total
rebellions made up the sum of New England’s bequest to a more liberal
America. Yet in this eager and somewhat vague liberalism to which
the renaissance was dedicated in spirit, the note that runs through
the several programs is a note of reaction from the aspirations of
the middle class. It was an ethical protest against the harsh and
unjust realities of the industrial revolution that was so ruthlessly
transforming the old order of life in New England; and it took the form
of a return to a simpler life. To struggle free from the chains of the
eighteenth century, only to be bound in new chains, was an ignoble
ending to the emancipation that free men could not envisage with
satisfaction.
Chapter II • Liberalism and Calvinism
The first stirrings of new life were felt within the church, the
repository of such learning as Harvard College disseminated through
the Massachusetts villages. For two hundred years the dogmas of Calvin
had lain as a heavy weight on the mind of New England. Revolutions
had taken place in English and continental theology, but New England
Calvinism had kept closely within the narrow confines of its creed,
annually turning over the exhausted soil and reaping an ever scantier
harvest. Since the days of Edwards there had been abundant speculation
and much exercise in syllogisms, but no scrutiny of major premises.
Such an examination was long overdue, with the romantic revolution
under way in France, and new theories of human nature and the relation
of man to society and the state, spreading widely. But unfortunately
the odium which New England conservatism quickly fastened upon the
French school frightened the orthodox. The stigma of atheism was put
upon every harmless bantling of the numerous French brood, and in the
terror of reaction the pulpit, following the lead of the reactionary
pew, aroused itself to cleanse the church of every innovation. English
Arianism, even worse things, it was discovered, had stolen into
Congregational pulpits during the relaxed period of the Revolution;
a dangerous spirit of liberalism had spread silently through the
tidewater churches, capturing the strongholds of Boston orthodoxy.
By the year 1800 it was high time for the old Congregationalism of
Jonathan Edwards to take counsel with itself. “Let us guard against
the insidious encroachments of _innovation_--that evil and beguiling
spirit which is now stalking to and fro in the earth, seeking whom
it may devour,” exclaimed Jedidiah Morse, the arch reactionary, in
the days when French ideas were knocking at the doors of New England.
And by innovation the doughty Jedidiah meant any idea that had been
stumbled on, new since the days of the great Edwards. To go back to the
pure Edwardean doctrine, to purge the church of incipient Arminianism
and Arianism and Socinianism--together with such other innovations as
might show their faces anywhere--became thenceforth the chief business
of the devout New England of 1800. To timid souls the ideas of their
grandfathers seemed far safer than the ideas of their fathers; and so
theology followed politics in turning its back upon the freer, more
generous world that beckoned.
Nevertheless French liberalism slowly won its victories. It needs
high walls to keep out ideas. Excluded from the drawing-rooms and
counting-houses, ostracized in society and politics, romantic
philosophy slipped quietly into Boston by the door of theology, and
took lodgings in the homes of the first families. To those who enjoy
the little ironies of history, the easy subjugation of respectable
Boston by that very Jacobinical heresy against which Boston was so
bitter is too amusing to be overlooked. Changing its name and arraying
itself in garments cut after the best Yankee fashion, the gospel
of Jean Jacques presently walked the streets of Boston and spoke
from its most respectable pulpits, under the guise of Unitarianism.
The heretical doctrines of the excellence of human nature and the