She also wrote poetry, which Emerson applauded. Its “objectiveness” most pleased him, he noted. He also admired Clapp’s “fidelity of observation,” for she had “a true eye” and could “see the fact as it appears,” allowing her to express “some law of this Divine Life of ours.” He returned her poems with comments and suggestions, and eventually published several in The Dial, both on Fuller’s watch and his.27
Clapp published little else save some occasional pieces in The Christian Register, a Unitarian paper, and her Studies in Religion, the work from which Wood quoted so often. Clapp’s little book, however, identified only as by “the Author of Words in a Sunday School” (the title of her book of Sabbath lessons), circulated widely among Transcendentalists. Not all of its publicity was positive, though. A reviewer for The Harbinger wrote that while he was prepared to read “the lofty thought and melodious utterances” of Transcendentalism’s leader, Emerson, he could not stomach the “twaddle of the younger born,” among whom he unfortunately numbered Clapp.28 More positive responses came from those aligned with Transcendentalism’s “individualist” wing. In a letter appended to the preface to Clapp’s later Essays, Letters, and Poems, Hedge termed her Studies in Religion “a revelation.” “Of all my female friends,” he wrote, “and indeed of all my friends—there was none who seemed to me to possess more profound spiritual insight.”29 Not only is Studies in Religion one of the few extended Transcendentalist texts by a woman, it provides a superb understanding of how the Unitarian rank and file received, understood, and recycled the high intellectual philosophizing of Emerson and the other prominent Transcendentalists.
A letter of Clapp’s from 1884 clarifies her earlier beliefs. “Mr. Emerson’s method,” she wrote, explaining her onetime predisposition to it, “as translated into practice by his ordinary disciples, was to seek the presence and authority of spiritual law in one’s own consciousness” and to “consider the innermost facts of the consciousness as one in nature with God, and consequently divine in essence and infallible in its moral guidance.” This analysis of consciousness, she continued, drew “to its magic circle the intuitively religious,” the “more delicate and subjectively constituted moral natures, offended by the hollowness and insincerity of social forms, and the young and imaginative, to whom common life and received maxims” were “prosaic and hard.” In retrospect, she grew to understand the danger of such self-reliance among those ill suited to practice it. “Hurt and disorder,” she wrote, often “followed the releasing of ordinary minds and temperaments from the bondage of accredited and invested wisdom,” and “the serene star of Emerson’s thought was often traversed by lurid meteors,” minds “assertive and dogmatic in their ignorance only.” She had been one of those “caught up on the wild wings of that cyclone,” and in that emotion had published her Studies in Religion as a testament to its power. Though by 1860, she, like Brownson, felt the want of “the rites and dogmas of Christianity” and sought the comfort and inclusiveness of a more organized church, in the 1840s she had been, as she put it, “a thorough Transcendentalist.”30
Her Studies in Religion constitutes precisely what the reviewer for The Harbinger said, a “quotation,” in an “oracular mode,” of that “remarkable intellectual and moral phenomenon, New England Transcendentalism.”31 More precisely, it reflects that part of the movement represented by Convers Francis and Frederic Hedge, who, while deeply influenced by the new intellectual crosscurrents, remained firmly attached to Christianity, unlike, say, Emerson and Parker, whose beliefs moved them beyond Christianity, which they viewed as only one of many equally available, and admirable, faiths. Although Clapp had moved in that direction, and while her book showed the heady effects of conversation and correspondence with the likes of Emerson and Peabody, she is best described as a member of Unitarian’s “evangelical” wing, reinterpreting Christianity in light of contemporary scriptural exegesis and Idealist philosophy.
Her chapter titles provide an index of her interests: “Spirit,” “Truth,” “Law and Love,” “Grace,” “Baptismal,” “Communion,” “Faith,” and “Retribution,” among others in the two-hundred-page book. Showing the pervasiveness of Swedenborg’s influence in the 1840s, her first chapter, on the “Spirit,” redacts his position on the subject. Spirit, she explains, is the invisible force behind or in everything, for the “outward is not the reality, but the form of it,” the “manifestation of the inward.” A star is one form of spirit, a flower is another, she continues, and the human body a third. All creation manifests spirit to the senses but finally is insufficient to satisfy man’s cravings for the absolute.32 “Every material fact,” she writes, “must express some spiritual fact.”33 Simply put, as Emerson had said in Nature, nature is the symbol of spirit.
Clapp argues similarly in “Law and Love,” in which she asks, what is meant by “Revelation”? Here, too, she was indebted to Emerson. Appearances, impressions, the sensuous, are all parts of the veil that hides us from the eternal, she observed, and whenever we are absorbed in “the transitory, the passing, by vanity, ambition, any love or mode of life that has the outward for its end and aim,” so much thicker the veil. Concomitantly, those least in thrall to outward fact discern inward truth most clearly. To those who dwell in the spirit, the veil becomes transparent, and “they see truth, and tell what they see, and we receive what they tell and call it a revelation.” The mistake is to think that only Moses or Jesus offer revelation, while it is available to all. “How few of us realize,” Clapp writes, the constant action of “Eternal Law” and how we try to elude its “terrible Presence.” Christ revealed this great law of selfless love, which mankind must try to emulate, for this was “the highest we can attain unto” and most evident “in the sense of necessity, of obligation,” our service to others. To discover and serve this revelation is the reason for our existence.34 In another chapter, Clapp elaborates Emerson’s remark in Nature that the true mark of virtue is to see the miraculous in the simple. “Daily employments, intercourse with one’s family, risings and retirings, walks and talks, meetings and partings,” Clapp observed, we consider quite ordinary things, failing to recognize “that there is no such thing as common-place life or uninteresting circumstances.” That which looks so common, so shopworn and dusty, in reality is divine, “an inexhaustible well of truth.”35
Consider, also, Clapp’s section on “Sonship,” in which she treats Jesus. Here too the Transcendentalist influence is readily apparent. She notes, as Emerson did in his address at the Divinity School, that Jesus “is of the same race as ourselves, not a son of angels, but a son of man,” so that all he could assert as actually true of himself could be true of all men. The holy life thus consists of man’s “working out of him what God works in him,” for there is “no limit to the son’s power but the Father’s revelation.”36 How shall we find out what we believe? “By noting,” she replies, “that upon which we act.” We may act from a “conviction” or a “sentiment” or an intuition. Whatever we term it, it constitutes the bedrock of faith.37
Studies in Religion constitutes a remarkable example of lay Transcendentalism. Clapp was never well known. She was no minister like Parker or reformer like Brownson; no woman’s rights advocate like Margaret Fuller or mystic like Alcott. But in her youth the new views deeply touched her, and she incorporated them in moving ways into her personal belief as well as in her classes for women’s edification. Late in life Clapp came to believe that Transcendentalism finally had been insufficient to carry her as far into the world of spirit as she desired. Yet it had been “a preparation, through antagonism and opposition, for a coming statement of spiritual truth as a revelation to Reason.”38 One of her friends offered the best assessment of where such reasoning took Clapp. “Miss Clapp’s rare ability,” she wrote, “would have enabled her to fill honorably a large public sphere,” had she sought it, but she chose to live in a quiet and retired way. Her personal influence, however, was “very distinctly felt as a stimulus to intellectual an
d moral growth by the circle that drank from her unfailing spring of inspiration.”39 Studies in Religion thus testifies to how powerfully Transcendentalist ideas influenced even the commonest of lives.
Margaret Fuller initially dismissed Sylvester Judd’s novel, Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal (1845), but she changed her mind. Then living in New York, Fuller apologized in Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune for the “stupidity” of an earlier brief notice of Judd’s effort. Now that she had read it more carefully, she found it “full of genius, profound in meaning, and of admirable fidelity to Nature in its details.” Her friends, she added, concurred. They drew “from it auspicious omens, that an American literature is possible even in our day.”40 Margaret offers another illustration of how Transcendentalism fertilized the Unitarian mind and nurtured remarkable intellectual fruit. When the book was reissued later in the century, a writer for the Springfield Republican claimed that Judd’s novel was, without doubt, one of “the manifold utterances” of Transcendentalism.41
Judd was born in Westhampton, Massachusetts, in 1813 and was raised, as Greene and Clapp had been, in a religiously conservative household. Educated at nearby Hopkins Academy, he entered Yale College and after his graduation in 1836 taught at a private academy in the Worcester County, Massachusetts, town of Templeton. This small hill-country community comprised a sizable population of Unitarians as well as orthodox Christians. Exposed to liberal Christianity by some of his new friends and neighbors, Judd realized soon enough, as he wrote to his sister-in-law, that though he had been “employed by the Orthodox party,” he had become “too liberal.” That May he began to attend the local Unitarian services and wrote in his journal that he loved to worship “in Nature’s temple” whose “dome is the sky, whose pillars are the mountains.”42
Moving to Northampton, Massachusetts, Judd prepared a lengthy manuscript called his “Cardiagraphy,” an analysis of his “heart” in which he strove to come to grips with his conflicted religious state. In it he explained that, while many of his friends found him changed, in his deepest self he remained the same, having in view the great end of doing good to man and glorifying God.43 What had changed, however, was his acceptance of consciousness as the “primary, incontrovertible, unequivocal source” of spiritual evidence. Consciousness was nothing less than “the eye of the soul.” Anything that contradicted its testimony was false, including the stringent Calvinist faith in which he had been raised. Through the eye of his soul Judd saw a beautiful, not a fallen, world, and men and women who were good, not irretrievably lost to sin. His soul had “burst from its prison-house,” and he walked forth “buoyant with freedom, upwards towards its God.” He had found his way to Transcendentalism.
In the late summer of 1837 Judd entered Harvard’s Divinity School and was in Cambridge when Emerson delivered his Phi Beta Kappa address, although we do not know if he heard it. In Judd’s second year of study Emerson delivered his notorious address to the graduating class at the Divinity School, and it is inconceivable that Judd could ignore the rancorous debate that ensued. He soon met the great Channing, whose soul he found “full of great thoughts, great plans of progress, reformation, and Christianization,” and he also became a close friend of the brilliant but eccentric Jones Very, tutor of Greek at Harvard, whose Essays and Poems (1839) Emerson helped to publish.44 An exemplary student, Judd used his Harvard years not only to prepare for the Unitarian ministry but also to widen his reading. He knew his Carlyle and Coleridge, followed the Norton-Ripley debate, and, like other young men at the Divinity School, learned German and borrowed books by Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling from the college library. On Visitation Day in June 1840, he was chosen as one of two speakers for his class, and he addressed the gathering on “The Uses of Intellectual Philosophy to the Preacher,” presaging his career as a minister and writer.45
That summer, Judd was called to a Unitarian church in Augusta, Maine, where the nearest person in the same intellectual orbit was Frederic Henry Hedge, in nearby Bangor. Like Hedge, Judd considered himself one of the “Evangelical Unitarians” and proselytized for what he termed the “Birthright Church,” an open church into which every person is born, just as he is born into a family and a community, and to which he owes allegiance and from which he receives benefits like the sacraments.46 In his role as moral leader of the community, Judd also encouraged reform, taking special interest in the temperance movement as well as the work of the American Peace Society. He did his good work locally and remained in the Augusta ministry until his death, in 1853.
Judd is remembered for his literary output, especially the novel Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom; Including Sketches of a Place Not Before Described, Called Mons Christi, which the Boston publishers Jordan and Wiley issued in 1845 in an edition of one thousand copies, half of which Judd subsidized. The book was intended, he wrote his friend the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, “to promote the cause of liberal Christianity” and “give body and soul to the divine elements of the gospel.” The novel was about Christ, he continued, and “him it would restore to the church, him it would develop in the soul, him it would enthrone in the world.” Judd designed the book to show how a life in Christ led one to the causes of “peace, temperance, and universal freedom.”47 It was also, he wrote, a “New England book,” designed to “embody the features and improve the character of our favorite region.” What was more, it would “fill a gap, long left open in Unitarian literature,—that of imaginative writings,” and as such be of some use in the hands of the clergy, in families, and in “Sunday-school libraries.”48 Judd also clearly envisioned his work as a contribution to the small stock of American regional fiction, a genre pioneered by James Fenimore Cooper and Catharine Maria Sedgwick. No novelist published with more vaunted hopes.
Judd’s novel tells the story of the eponymous Margaret, a country girl unencumbered by artificial religion or philosophy, open to the genial influences of the natural world, which speak to her intuition. She is, in other words, a young, unconscious Transcendentalist, reading the lessons of nature at every step, making the right decision because she follows her conscience. Margaret lives in the backwoods, at “the Pond,” with the family of Didymus Hart, to whom she had been brought at a young age by one of their sons, Nimrod, following the death of her parents and to evade the machinations of an evil grandfather. Among the Harts, and particularly under the tutelage of their second son, Chilion, Margaret flourishes, even as she encounters more and more of civilization’s corruptions, including her neighbors’ harsh Calvinist faith. Because of her natural piety she resists attempts to bring her to the “true” faith, although she is moved by descriptions of the remarkable Jesus, about whom she has had a moving dream that marks her movement into Unitarianism, though she cannot yet name it. In memorable passages Judd provides vivid pictures of what it is like to grow up untrammeled by society, and he ends the first section, “Childhood,” with Margaret on the verge of adolescence.
The second part, “Youth,” finds Margaret in her teens, still resisting attempts to win her to the orthodox fold even as she pays the penalty for so doing. One day she meets a Mr. Evelyn, who, recognizing her as a troubled though pure soul, speaks to her of his religion. Evelyn is Unitarian, his theology perfectly congruent with what hitherto had been unspoken, though everywhere evident, in Margaret’s life. His words, filled with Transcendentalist-inspired appreciation of nature and its relation to spirit, deeply move his young tutee, as does his sense of Christ as the ultimate Transcendentalist, who preached the divinity of all men and the miracle of quotidian existence.
In the final section, “Womanhood,” which Judd narrates in epistolary form, Margaret and Evelyn, now her husband, regenerate the community by inculcating the ethic of Transcendental Christianity: a white cross on the summit of nearby “Mons Christi” marks the reformation. Importantly, Judd did not imagine such societal transformation as an Associationist experiment, but rather as the triumph, in each individual, of the Christ
ian doctrine of love. As remarkable a utopian vision as any presented by Brisbane, Ripley, or Alcott, Judd’s Mons Christi most resembles William Henry Channing’s Christian socialism and Elizabeth Peabody’s “Glimpse of Christ’s Idea of Society.” 49 Mons Christi, that is, exists because the inhabitants of the village have recognized the centrality of Christ and the inherent goodness of the human heart. Margaret, Judd hoped, might help to initiate just such a transformation on a large scale, making Mons Christi more influential than Brook Farm ever could be.
No brief redaction captures the intellectual and emotional richness of this novel; it was indeed all that Judd had hoped. And it enjoyed a measurable degree of success. In 1851, for example, Judd published a revised two-volume edition, eliminating passages that some critics found “vulgar”; this emended version was reissued as late as 1882. Also, F.O.C. Darley, one of the country’s premier book illustrators, was “so much struck with the graphic delineations of the book, and their truly American character,” that he produced an elegant oversize portfolio of engravings, Compositions in Outline … from Judd’s “Margaret” (1856), of scenes and characters from the novel, speaking to his, and his publisher’s, sense of its significance. 50 Margaret was also heralded not only “as a record of great ideas and sentiments” but also as being “among the few good books of the age.” One critic recognized how effectively Judd dispensed with religious cant, and how sincerely and accurately he depicted “the deep and universal spirit of Christ.” The book’s immediate and chief practical work, one reviewer wrote, is that it “contemplates social advancement and reform.” And in this vein, “we recognize a higher truth in it than in any other writings that have come under our notice, which advocate the reorganization of society,” a slap at the Associationists’ pipe dreams.51
Writing in The Christian Examiner, another Unitarian, Frederic Dan Huntington, criticized the “unnaturalness and stiffness,” as well as the vulgarity and “low life,” of the first part of the novel, but he was pleasantly surprised that such imperfections later vanished, when “earnest thoughts were uttered and earnest sympathies are engaged.” We do not often meet, he wrote of the third section, “with finer illustrations and statements of the nature, character and real mission of Christ, and the significance of the Gospel.”52 James Russell Lowell, reviewing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Kavanagh: A Tale a few years later, compared it to Margaret and effusively praised the latter as a major contribution to the nation’s literature. He termed Judd’s novel “the most emphatically American book ever written.” 53
American Transcendentalism Page 23