American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  Through the mid-1830s Cousin continued to influence Brownson greatly. As the decade advanced, however, other French thinkers, most notably the French Catholic priest Félicité Robert de Lamennais—who had left the church over its recalcitrance to undertake the kind of social reform he believed the Gospels demanded—became more important to him.57 Brownson found in the works of Lamennais a belief that liberty and democracy were closely related to Christianity, and thus that a just social system would exist only when the relationship among the three was acknowledged and acted on, in politics as well as in religion. Brownson went so far as to claim that democracy “was nothing but the political application of Christianity.”58

  A few months after Brownson’s letter to Boston’s daily press in defense of Emerson, he revisited the Divinity School address in a much longer review in his new periodical, clarifying his differences from Emerson. Although again praising his courage and inherent goodness, Brownson worried about the tendency to a “system of pure egotism” that ran through all Emerson’s writings. He was referring to Emerson’s inordinate emphasis on the soul as the center of the universe, for with self as “the center of gravitation,” Brownson asked, how can man be moral? He invoked a distinction that Jonathan Edwards had made a century earlier, noting that true holiness can exist only in disinterested benevolence, that is, when man regards himself as but a part of something much greater. The individual, Brownson maintained, cannot live for himself alone. Man must “sacrifice himself for a good which does not center in himself.”59

  Neither could Brownson countenance Emerson’s notion that God is nothing “but the laws of the soul’s perfection” and his dismissal of historical Christianity, for he believed that the past continued to have meaning and that Christ was not just another prophet, but essential to Christianity. The idea of Christ and the history of how men have received him were essential to keep in check man’s selfishness. Brownson believed that Emerson, on the other hand, for all his good intentions, spawned progeny whose obedience to the moral law was questionable.

  Brownson was increasingly uneasy with the self-centeredness of Emerson’s beliefs. But at least through the summer of 1840, when he reviewed Norton’s reprint of Two Articles from the “Princeton Review” in his Boston Quarterly Review, he continued to support the entire cohort, even though, as a writer in The Western Messenger put it, Brownson and Furness had become at least as important as Emerson to Unitarian “seekers.”60 Brownson opened this review with a description of the “signs of the times” in the Boston area, where he saw nothing less than a “revolution, which extends to every department of thought and threatens to change ultimately the whole moral aspect of our society.” As in every such period, there were those who greeted the prospect of change with open arms and others who feared it.61

  Brownson then detailed Norton’s and Ripley’s differing views of Christianity, specifically about the meaning of Christ, and aligned himself with those who believed that one only knew Christ’s truth through intuitive perception. Brownson also spent much time defending his favorite, Cousin, against Norton’s condemnation, and he closed with an embrace of fellow members of the New School. So far as Transcendentalism was understood as “the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining scientific knowledge of an order of existence transcending the reach of the senses, and of which we can have no sensible experience,” he declared, “we are Transcendentalists.” But if its critics took the word to imply that “feeling displaced reason,” that “dreaming” was valued above reflection or “instinctive intimation above scientific exposition,” he eschewed the cognomen.62 That was as large as Brownson wished to make the tent.

  By the beginning of the 1840s the public, reading critics such as Bowen and Norton, ignored such fine distinctions and believed that the Transcendentalists posed a serious threat not only to organized religion but also to the social order. Whether early in the 1840s the Unitarian vanguard would, or could, continue to develop a post-Christian theology in light of the other challenges they faced was unclear. Brownson’s acute discriminations, as well as the thrust of his social criticism, suggested not. By this point Transcendentalism was becoming a many-headed Hydra.

  5

  CENTRIPETAL FORCES AND CENTRIFUGAL MOTION

  In the late 1830s the Boston Common, on about seventy-five acres, was one of the country’s most beautiful parks. On hilly land accentuated by many unusual and beautiful trees (some planted a century earlier), it was dissected by beveled and graveled promenades that delighted Bostonians. At its head sat the imposing State House designed by the prominent eighteenth-century architect Charles Bulfinch, and across from it the Boston Athenaeum, an elegant private library founded in 1807. To the north, past Beacon Hill’s fashionable residences, was a vista toward the Charles River and then west to a new Botanic Garden paid for by private subscription. In the nineteenth century an iron fence, about a mile in perimeter, surrounded the Common, the crown jewel in a city that took its open space seriously.

  Tremont Street bordered this park on its south side. In the 1840s, turning on West Street and walking farther south, one came to a bustling commercial district at Washington Street, the center of, among other things, the city’s burgeoning printing trade. Halfway between Tremont and Washington stood a two-story brick building, Number 13 West Street, now the site of the famed Brattle Book Shop but in 1839 a town-house residence and business occupied by Nathaniel Peabody’s family. In the early 1840s this building’s public rooms were a center of the emergent Transcendentalist movement.

  Nathaniel was an apothecary, and his wife, Elizabeth, had run a private school. They had moved to West Street from Salem because they thought it a good business location. With them were three remarkable daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia. Elizabeth, the oldest, had been William Ellery Channing’s amanuensis, worked with Bronson Alcott at his Temple School as well as operating her own educational establishments, and was well connected to many young Unitarian intellectuals, including George Ripley and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mary had worked for a time with her sister Elizabeth at the Temple School, and now she had her own pupils on West Street; within a few years she married the educational reformer Horace Mann. Sophia was an artist, soon smitten by one of the region’s most secretive, though charismatic, intellectuals, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom she married. At their new home, the Peabody family lived upstairs, where there also was an extra room for Mary’s students. The first floor was devoted to commerce. There Nathaniel sold homeopathic drugs and—at the suggestion of the painter Washington Allston, another of Elizabeth’s friends—art supplies. In the town house’s front parlor Elizabeth established a foreign-language bookstore and “Foreign Library” that became a salon for the city’s intelligentsia. From the same location she published books, translations of foreign texts, and titles by her patrons.

  In the late summer of 1840 Elizabeth Peabody made her “debut in the mercantile world.”1 The first of its kind in Boston, her bookstore offered recent titles in English, French, Italian, German, Greek, and Latin, comprising philosophy, religion, history, and literature, among other subjects. Here one could purchase the books of such important English writers as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley; Cousin’s philosophical works, George Sand’s novels, and de Staël’s De l’Allemagne; Dante and Ariosto in Italian; and Jean Paul Richter in German. She carried Alphonse de Lamartine’s History of the Girondists and Jules Michelet’s Mémoires de Luther, Maximilien Robespierre’s Mémoires, and Gioacchino Rossini’s Luisa Strozzi. Satisfied patrons also recalled such important religious titles as the French socialist Pierre Leroux’s De l’Humanité, Benjamin Constant’s De la Religion, and Strauss’s Leben Jesu, and many other titles in belles lettres, including a fifty-five-volume set of Goethe’s Works in German. Peabody prided herself on handpicking her selections and worked to obtain what she needed. If a customer sought a European book that she did not carry, for example, she would try to secure it from overseas through t
he New York publisher John Wiley; it typically took six weeks to arrive. She also carried locally published works by her friends and customers. Her stock included, for example, Emerson’s Nature and Ripley’s Letters to Mr. Norton, as well as collections of short stories by her soon-to-be brother-in-law, Hawthorne.

  Peabody’s foreign lending library comprised close to two thousand items.2 Her friends lent some of the books for the enterprise; others she purchased outright. She took out a five-hundred-dollar loan and invested a hefty amount—one hundred and fifty dollars—in subscriptions to foreign periodicals. On the shelves were the venerable Blackwood’s Magazine, The Edinburgh Review, and the Revue des Deux Mondes, as well as such unusual titles as the Annales des Sciences Naturelles and the Journal des Literarische Unterhaltung. She also stocked the staple Unitarian journals: The Christian Examiner, Brownson’s Boston Quarterly Review, and The Western Messenger. One could borrow current issues of these periodicals for a week only (one could keep the books for a month, longer if there were no requests from other subscribers), with subscription and priority in borrowing the volumes, at a cost of five dollars per year. Nonmember patrons could “hire” books for 12½ or 25 cents each, “according to their sizes,” but such customers were not allowed to borrow the periodicals.

  Elizabeth Peabody’s rooms soon became exactly what she had hoped—in the teacher and Transcendentalist fellow traveler George Bradford’s words, a kind of “Transcendental exchange.”3 William Ellery Channing, for example, was in the habit of coming to West Street in the morning to keep abreast of the latest important periodical essays. Edward Everett Hale happily recalled coming into the rooms and seeing a long counter across the parlor, all the library’s books standing “on shelves in brown-paper covers.”4 Theodore Parker, a voracious reader of foreign texts, enthusiastically welcomed the business and assured Peabody that her operation “fill[ed] a vacancy, and suppl[ied] a want that has long been felt in Boston.”5 Other regular visitors were Channing’s nephew, William Henry Channing; Emerson; Fuller; the Ripleys; James Walker, now a professor at Harvard; and the young Caroline Healey, Fuller’s protégée.

  Presiding over this informal salon was Peabody herself, already a tad overweight (she became more so in middle age), inattentive to her dress, and famously absentminded. Thomas Wentworth Higginson remembered her as “desultory, dreamy, but insatiable in her love for knowledge and for helping others to it.”6 After a visit to “Miss Peabody’s Book Room” in August 1840, the young Healey recorded how she loved to hear the proprietor talk and “to see her smile.” Peabody, she continued, had “so deep learning—so youthful joyousness[,] so great experience & perfect simplicity [that] I never saw united in one character.”7 As Healey realized, despite her eccentricities—her dress and manners, “the world admit to be very outré”—Peabody was lovingly attentive to her store, for she wished it to be one “in which there were no worthless books.”8 By all accounts she kept her word, and through the 1840s—the store finally closed in 1851, when the family began to take in boarders—the bookstore and lending library remained a hubbub of activity.

  The West Street address was known for other things as well. Even before the library and bookstore opened, Peabody’s friend Margaret Fuller used the parlor for her renowned “Conversations.” The women who attended these meetings recalled them as an epoch in their lives. At West Street, too, plans were laid for The Dial, from 1840 to 1844 the mouthpiece of those at the forefront of religious and social reform in Boston, as well as of those who envisioned a new day in American literature. Peabody contributed a few essays to this journal and the venue for conversation about it. From 1841 to 1843, after the publishing house of Weeks, Jordan, and Company went bankrupt, she undertook The Dial’s publication and handled its business affairs. She also published works by Boston’s notables. One of the first titles to carry her imprint—Boston: E. P. Peabody, 13 West Street—was her friend William Ellery Channing’s Emancipation (1840), which sold more than a thousand copies. Soon thereafter Peabody published some of her brother-in-law Hawthorne’s historical tales as well as her own translation of a section of The True Messiah (1842) by Guillaume Oegger, a French Swedenborgian who had caught her and Emerson’s attention.

  Through these years Peabody’s “atom of a shop” served an important purpose.9 Against the backdrop of the well-stocked shelves at 13 West Street, disenchanted Unitarians voiced their increasingly strident criticism of the status quo and knew they would get an honest, if not always sympathetic, hearing from other customers. For a few years, united in their opposition to what they viewed as a desiccated and irrational theology, here and elsewhere the younger cohort became midwives to a whole new understanding of the spiritual life and its attendant social responsibility.

  As central as Peabody’s “Transcendental exchange” was to the emergent group, there were other projects, venues, and people that also served as its intellectual adhesive. Foremost among these were the quarterly journals that created a virtual community among readers throughout Massachusetts, the Northeast, and even into the Midwest and South. The prominence of The Christian Examiner is a case in point. From its founding in 1824 it served as the journal of record for American Unitarians, and under the editorship of James Walker it was particularly receptive to the essays and reviews of the younger Unitarians. When its leadership changed in 1839, however, it became increasingly hostile to the Transcendentalist wing of church reform. During this transition in the late 1830s and 1840s, several new periodicals offered space to those blackballed from what previously had served as their mouthpiece.

  Even before the first Transcendentalist Club meeting in the fall of 1836, these individuals had considered establishing their own journal. Though now at some distance at his pastorate in Bangor, Frederic Hedge was particularly interested in such a prospect. Sarah Clarke wrote her brother in Louisville, Kentucky, where he edited another Unitarian journal, The Western Messenger, that the “supernal coterie” was talking of a “Transcendental Journal.” Other names bandied about were The Transcendentalist and The Spiritual Inquirer, and named as potential editors were Hedge, Emerson, Ephraim Peabody (recently returned from the Ohio Valley), Clarke, and Ripley.10 Emerson even proposed to Thomas Carlyle that he immigrate to the United States to assume the periodical’s editorship.11

  In the fall of 1837 Brownson, whose commitment to social reform grew in the aftermath of the nation’s severe economic depression, decided that there had been enough talk. The following January saw the first issue of his Boston Quarterly Review, devoted to extended discussion of religion, philosophy, and politics. As he put it in the first issue, he saw the journal’s work as “effecting a reform in the church, giving us a purer and more rational theology; in philosophy seeking something profounder and more inspiring than the heartless sensualism of the last century; [and] in society demanding the elevation of labor with the loco-foco, or the freedom of the slave with the abolitionist.”12 For his first issue he recruited as contributors such friends as Parker, William Henry Channing, and the Democratic politician George Bancroft; and over the next four years he also enlisted Alcott, Ripley, Peabody, and Fuller, among others.

  Brownson, however, usually contributed most of (and occasionally, all) the essays to each issue, for he used the periodical to forward his own radical views of social reform. Most memorable was his July 1840 essay, “The Laboring Classes,” a scathing indictment of the condition of workingmen and -women, and a prophecy of class warfare if the situation was not remedied. With as many as a thousand subscribers before his increasing radicalism cut the number in half, the Boston Quarterly Review was the most widely circulated Transcendentalist organ.

  Because this periodical revolved around Brownson’s own social and political agenda, other Transcendentalists did not regard it as the group’s vehicle. Thus, Alcott, Emerson, Fuller, and others continued to discuss another, more inclusive mouthpiece, open to serious literature as well as to essays and reviews in philosophy and religion. By October 1839
, after Hedge, Parker, and Emerson were considered and dropped as candidates for its editorship, the logical choice became the brilliant and mercurial Fuller. “My vivacious friend Margaret Fuller,” Emerson noted in a letter that month to Carlyle, “is to edit a journal, whose first number she promises for 1 July next.” It was to be called The Dial, and Emerson promised Carlyle that it would give him “a better knowledge of our young people” than any he had.13 Though Brownson, miffed that the group did not take up his offer to join his already established periodical, and Hedge, who had been drifting away from the group’s theological radicalism, resisted Fuller’s entreaties, most of the younger Unitarians showed interest in contributing. Fuller published the inaugural issue in July of 1840.

  Emerson provided the introduction to this “Journal in a new spirit.” “No one can converse much with different classes of society in New England,” he continued, “without remarking the progress of a revolution” shared by those who had no “external organization, no badge, no creed, no name.” Rather, they were “united only in a common love of truth, and love of its work.” This new spirit, Emerson explained, affected different individuals in different ways. To some it implied reform of the state. To others, it urged “modifications in the various callings of men, and the customs of business.” To yet others it opened new vistas for art and literature, and “philosophical insight.” At its core, though, it was “in every form a protest against usage, and a search for principles.” For such seekers the journal’s editor would set The Dial “on the earth” to allow them to measure “no hours but those of sunshine,” to apprise them of “what state of life and growth is now arrived and arriving.”14