Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
rafters of the triumph it builds? It is the immortal principle.
It is an indestructible essence. It is part and parcel of the
Divinity it adores. It can no more die than he can. It needs no
more insurance of life than its author does. Prove its title? It
is proof of all things else. It is substantive, and everything
adjective beside. It is the kingdom all things will be added to.
(C. A. Bartol, quoted by Frothingham in _Transcendentalism in New
England_, Chapter XIV.)
This is sheer mysticism, and mystics in greater or less degree all
the transcendentalists were--isolated and lonely in the midst of men,
seeking always a larger fellowship, awaiting those fleeting moments
of illumination that should light up the meaning of life. “Mine is
a certain brief experience,” says Emerson, “which surprised me in
the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time,--whether
in the body or out of the body, God knoweth,--and made me aware
that I had played the fool with fools all this time, but that law
existed for me and for all; that to me belong trust, a child’s trust
and obedience, and the worship of ideas, and I should never be fool
more” (_The Transcendentalist_). Fleeting and incommunicable are such
illuminations, yet like the clear sunlight to eyes that are open. “If
you do not need to hear my thought, because you can read it in my
face and behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset. If
you cannot divine it, you would not understand what I say” (_ibid._).
And because the realist found himself quite incapable of such
understanding, the transcendentalist turned away from him to live by
himself. “They feel that they are never so fit for friendship, as when
they have quitted mankind, and taken themselves to friend.”
Such an attitude of mind may easily become the father of criticism.
Communing with the ideal rarely begets complacency; the actual
seems poor and mean in comparison with the potential. Hence the
transcendentalists, willingly or not, were searching critics of their
generation. They were impatient of any falling short of the ideal, and
their lives in consequence Became an open indictment of a Yankee world
given over to materialism. “By their unconcealed dissatisfaction,” said
Emerson, “they expose our poverty, and the insignificance of man to
man.” “Their quarrel with every man they meet, is not with his kind,
but with his degree. There is not enough of him,--that is the only
fault.... They make us feel the strange disappointment which overcasts
every human youth. So many promising youths, and never a finished man!”
(_The Transcendentalist._)
As to the general course of living, and the daily employments of
men, they cannot see much virtue in these, since they are parts of
this vicious circle; and as no great ends are answered by the men,
there is nothing noble in the arts by which they are maintained.
Nay, they have made the experiment, and found that, from the
liberal professions to the coarsest manual labor, and from the
courtesies of the academy and the college to the conventions of the
cotillion-room and the morning call, there is a spirit of cowardly
compromise and seeming, which indicates a frightful skepticism, a
life without love, and an activity without aim. (_Ibid._)
Idealists though they were, they could not escape meddling with the
real which encompassed them on all sides--with institutions, laws,
society, with the state itself. They were far more interested in God
than in Caesar, and they found it impossible to divide loyalties
that too often clashed. When Caesar essayed to impose his will upon
theirs, when he put their ideals in jeopardy by demanding allegiance
to laws they did not approve, they quietly denied him sovereignty and
followed their own paths. With such men nothing could be done; their
very lives were a criticism and a judgment on New England and America.
Transcendentalism may have run into its follies, but foolish in its
critical judgment--blind to the gap between profession and reality--it
was not. It might be severe, but it was honest and intelligent, and
honest intelligent criticism America stood greatly in need of.
Footnotes
[455] See Frothingham, _Transcendentalism in New England_. Chapter VI.
Chapter II • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Transcendental Critic
At the age of thirty-six the man who was to become the most searching
critic of contemporary America expressed his conception of his mission
in the following passage:
What shall be the substance of my shrift? Adam in the garden, I am
to new-name all the beasts of the field and all the gods in the
sky. I am to invite men drenched in Time to recover themselves
and come out of time, and taste their native immortal air. I
am to fire with what skill I can the artillery of sympathy and
emotion. I am to indicate constantly, though all unworthy, the
Ideal and Holy Life, the life within life, the Forgotten Good, the
Unknown Cause in which we sprawl and sin. I am to try the magic of
sincerity, that luxury permitted only to kings and poets. I am to
celebrate the spiritual powers in their infinite contrast to the
mechanical powers and the mechanical philosophy of this time. I am
to console the brave sufferers under evils whose end they cannot
see, by appeals to the great optimism, self-affirmed in all bosoms.
(_Journals_, Vol. V, p. 288.)
Seven days before Emerson set down this transcendental pronouncement,
he had written in his journal a different comment:
A question which well deserves examination now is the Dangers of
Commerce. This invasion of Nature by Trade with its Money, its
Credit, its Steam, its Railroad, threatens to upset the balance of
man, and establish a new, universal Monarchy more tyrannical than
Babylon or Rome. Very faint and few are the poets or men of God.
Those who remain are so antagonistic to this tyranny that they
appear mad or morbid, and are treated as such. Sensible of this
extreme unfitness they suspect themselves. And all of us apologize
when we ought not, and congratulate ourselves when we ought not.
(_Ibid._, Vol. V, pp. 285-6.)
In such comments and others scattered plentifully through his Journals,
Emerson essayed to make clear to himself the function of transcendental
criticism as he felt himself called to practice it. It was to be
no trivial or easy duty. In the midst of a boastful materialism,
shot through with cant and hypocrisy and every insincerity, fat and
slothful in all higher things, the critic proposed to try the magic
of sincerity, to apply the test of spiritual values to the material
forces and mechanical philosophies of the times. His very life must
embody criticism; his every act and word must pronounce judgment on
the barren and flatulent gods served by his countrymen. He must be a
thinker and as such he must summon to the bar of a nobler philosophy
the current standards of value and conduct. Men of the greatest
reputation must not be spared; he must “issue a _quo warranto_ and
revoke the characters of fame,” overruling the verdict of newspaper
editors and the acclaim of the electorate. Here was a revolutionary
business indeed, that the critic was proposing to himself; and the
calm serenity with which he set about it was disconcerting. A thinker
loose in the America of Daniel Webster, a thinker who proposed to
test men and measures by the magic of sincerity, was likely to prove
an unpleasantly disturbant factor in a world of pretense. Measured by
such standards the current philosophies must bate and dwindle, and the
common ideals shrink to the mean and paltry. The life of an honest
thinker laid on the America of 1840 would reveal how far short it came
from the stature of intellectual manhood.
Emerson the critic has been too much obscured to common view by Emerson
the brilliant dispenser of transcendental aphorisms. The oracular
_Essays_ with their confident wisdom--the sententious expression of
the middle period of a life that came to late maturity--interpose
themselves between the young priest whose intellectual interests
quietly detached themselves from Unitarian orthodoxy, and the mature
critic whose loyalties quietly detached themselves from the gods of his
generation. The very brilliancy of the _Essays_ conceals the laborious
processes by which their abundant wisdom was distilled. One must go
to the _Journals_ for that--to those intimate records that reveal how
patiently he sought for truth and how honestly he followed it. Wisdom
did not come to him of its own accord; it was painfully groped for.
As an introspective Puritan youth he began early to keep a diary of
his intellectual life, gathering into successive journals the savings
from his discursive readings. For years as a quiet student he lived
in a world of moral aphorisms, a cold, thin atmosphere where gnomic
phrases bloomed and ancient oracles uttered judgment. This was the
seedtime of his mind. He was making acquaintance with the noble dead,
gathering their utterances to make for himself a new testament. “No
man could be better occupied,” he said later, “than in making his own
bible by harkening to all those sentences which now here, now there,
now in nursery rhymes, now in Hebrew, now in English bards, thrill
him like the sound of a trumpet.” As a young man he made this his
chief concern. His early journals are an ample nursery where cuttings
from all philosophies are set out, there to grow into such plants as
circumstance should permit. The ancestral cult of the book was in his
blood, and living as he did under the threat of ill health, none too
confident that the years would lengthen out before him, he forced
himself to a severe intellectual regimen. To invest his days wisely
was his single purpose. He wanted only the best securities for his
investments, and what he got he carefully deposited, together with
the increments of his own thought, to draw upon at later need. There
were no wastrel forays in his intellectual life, no unpruned riot of
growth, but the very odds and ends of his meditation were carefully
treasured to be used when other materials were lacking. Fortunately
the stuff was of good quality that outlasted many makings-over, till
finally he got the cut to his liking. From this discipline of years
came his superlative mastery of the sententious sentence; his brilliant
utterances are rich with the thought he has crammed into them.
The cheerful serenity that never deserted him was a triumph of will
over circumstance. It was a singularly cheerless world that bred him,
subsisting by sheer will power, eating its heart out with heroic
ambitions, too grimly earnest to enjoy what it got so laboriously--the
lean aftermath of two centuries of asceticism. The business of plain
living and high thinking was a joyless manner of life, and the young
Emerson got little pleasure from it. A nature less insulated must have
broken under the strain. It was a world stricken with tuberculosis.
Of the five brothers one was mentally defective, another burnt up his
vitality and went to the West Indies to die, a third of brilliant
powers succumbed to consumption, his first wife died of the same
scourge, his second wife and Emerson himself were long affected with
incipient tuberculosis. To ease such anxious lives there was need of a
great solace, and that solace was sought in religion. The ascetic youth
ran as naturally to religious meditation as a normal child to play.
No call to conversion ever came to him; the natural man postulated
in Calvinistic dogma was washed out of him before he was born. The
earlier jottings in the journals, before philosophy came to soften the
inherited asceticism, and a transcendental revulsion from the common