American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  The results of Thoreau’s gift are apparent in less-restricted ways in his two travel essays from this same period, when he was not bound to the format of a review. “A Walk to Wachusett” recounts his and his friend Richard Fuller’s four-day trip to the mountain of that name, thirty-five miles from Concord, that dominates the central Massachusetts landscape and offers grand views of its larger sister, Mount Monadnock, forty miles northwest, in New Hampshire. Walking through the cool woods of Acton and Stow, just west of Concord, the pair rested in the highlands at Lancaster, looking longingly westward at their destination, and spent the night at a tavern at Stillwater, a village in the western part of Sterling, four miles from the base of the mountain. Early the next morning they were on its summit, nineteen hundred feet above Princeton and three thousand feet above sea level, not an immense height, yet making them feel a “sense of remoteness,” so “infinitely removed from the plain” did they seem.71

  They enjoyed looking to other mountain ranges, the Berkshires and Green Mountains to the west, the White Mountains to the north, and they even arose early enough to watch the sun rise from the sea. By noon they were descending to spend the night in the nearby town of Harvard. Evincing what became his trademark ability to draw truths from natural facts, Thoreau noted that even on the dusty road they endeavored to “import a little of that mountain grandeur.” “We will remember,” he wrote, “within what walls we live, and understand that this level life too has its summit” and that there is “elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from, and we have only to stand on the summit of our one hour to command an uninterrupted horizon.” 72 The lines typify Thoreau’s trademark eloquence.

  So, too, the language of “A Winter Walk,” for on a journey even closer to home, out from town the morning after a deep snowfall, Thoreau manages to elicit the beauty of newly fallen snow as it transforms the common landscape. Culled from his journal, his descriptions evoke synesthetically the serenity and purity in the aftermath of a storm. “Every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rail,” he writes, “and the dead leaves of autumn, are concealed by a clean napkin of snow.” A cold and searching wind “drives away all contagion, and nothing can withstand it but what has a virtue in it,” so that whatever we meet in the cold, we “respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness.”73 “In this lonely glen,” he observes, “with its brook draining the slopes, its creased ice and crystals of all hues, where the spruces and hemlocks stand up on either side, and the rush and sere wild oats in the rivulet itself, our lives are more serene and worthy to contemplate.”74 This was a paradise far from Etzler’s, for the wonders of technology were superfluous.

  In March 1845 Thoreau borrowed an ax and began to clear tall white pines on acreage that Emerson had purchased on Walden Pond, a mile from Concord’s center. On July 4 he moved into a cabin he had built on the land, and he remained there for two years, two months, and two days, “to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles,” as he put it.75 While at Walden Pond he continued his long-standing rituals of daily walking and writing, filling page after page in his various notebooks and his journal. He also mined these to assemble a draft of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which after much revision he published.

  In these years he also continued to oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow, but over time he thought of himself as more Emerson’s equal and less his disciple, a split that widened in the 1850s. Emerson was a hard taskmaster. “I am very familiar with all [Thoreau’s] thoughts,” Emerson wrote in his journal. “They are my own quite originally drest.” “But if the question be,” he continued, “what new ideas has he thrown into circulation, he has not yet told what that is which he was created to say.”76 But during the previous decade Emerson clearly regarded Thoreau as a valuable addition to the stable of young minds he had assembled in Concord, the young man’s essays being proof texts of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” Thoreau was, Caroline Dall recalled, “in his own person a powerful refutation of the theories of the Socialists.”77

  These four examples indicate that by the mid-1840s Transcendentalism was a pulsing, magnetic current, drawing many different people into it and subsequently freeing them to work in various innovative ways, indelibly marked by their contact with the ideas that characterized the movement. Greene, Clapp, Judd, and Thoreau are not so much extraordinary as exemplary. One could easily replace them with other individuals for whom Transcendentalist ideas provided comparable draughts of inspiration. Further, by this time, in the popular mind, Transcendentalism, no matter how much its representatives denied it, had assumed a fairly stable, if not fully describable, identity. People knew what to expect, for example, when they went to hear a sermon by Parker or sat down to read an essay of Emerson’s.

  These four also point up the increasingly visible fractures within the Transcendentalist movement, between disciples of Emerson, empowered by his enshrinement of the self-reliant individual, and those who, following Brownson’s and Ripley’s lead, found in Idealist philosophy the grounding for a truly egalitarian society. By the late 1840s, with the country plunged into war with Mexico and increasingly preoccupied with the issue of slavery, Transcendentalism changed even more as the transatlantic ideas that had proved the group’s main inspiration seemed less immediately relevant. The European democratic revolutions of 1848 briefly kept alive dreams of a transatlantic cadre of intellectuals whose humanitarian ideals might transform the world. After 1850, however, New England’s radicals, whether proponents of self-culture or advocates of broad social reform, were left alone with America. Transcendentalism’s rich intellectual garden began to bear different fruit.

  8

  SELF AND SOCIETY

  By the mid-1840s, with the increasing furor over the extension of American slavery into newly acquired Western Territories and widespread social upheaval in Europe, social reform was everywhere the subject of endless talk, if not always action. Thus, Emerson’s March 3, 1844, lecture, “New England Reformers,” at Amory Hall in Boston, was timely. He was invited by a group of Come-outers, who believed that everyone should be free to hold whatever religious views he pleased and that one’s faith should eventuate in action on behalf of the less fortunate. Hence their interest not only in ecclesiastical reform but also in matters of diet and health and in issues of social justice such as prison reform and antislavery. In the late winter and spring of 1844 one could not find a more radical meeting in Boston. Emerson joined a series of prominent speakers, including the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips; the communitarians Adin Ballou, the founder of the Hopedale Community, and Charles Lane, Bronson Alcott’s associate at Fruitlands; and, at Emerson’s suggestion, the young contrarian Henry Thoreau.1

  Amory Hall, which the group began to rent in January 1844, stood at the corner of Washington and West streets in Boston, just down the block from Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore and lending library. The Society at Amory Hall scheduled twelve Sunday lectures, at 10:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. Presentations were not repeated, but consisted of separate talks (or longer ones in two parts), usually by the same speaker, with the afternoon hours devoted to discussion on previously announced topics. Donations or subscriptions to the whole series were solicited but not required; in any event, the Society did not have any trouble making ends meet. Garrison, labeled the “chief Priest” by one opposition paper, presented on the first two Sundays as well as on the last, and addressed the group not, as one might expect, on abolition, but on “Worship,” the “Priesthood,” and “The Conditions and Rights of Women,” subjects that indicate the linkage in his mind (as well as in the minds of his listeners) of other sorts of reform to the pressing question of slavery.2 Emerson’s contribution to the series epitomized a version of the Transcendentalist ethos based on uncompromising self-reliance by now closely identified with the speaker. By no means, however, was his the ruling ethos, for many Transcendentalists questioned the eff
icacy of such self-reliance in light of the magnitude of the Mexican War, European revolutionary upheavals, or the horrors of slavery, causes that pitted communities and great aggregates of interests against one another.

  Emerson’s courteous if somewhat tongue-in-cheek advice on how to initiate social change provided an answer of sorts. He began by noting how New England recently had witnessed manifold signs that the impulse to reform society had fallen away from “the church nominal” and had reappeared in various societies (like that at Amory Street) composed of “ultraists, of seekers, of all the soldiery of dissent.” 3 Without a touch of irony he listed the more unusual initiatives—dietary and agricultural reform of the sort instituted at Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands, for example, as well as assaults on the institution of marriage (with Fourier’s speculations in mind). To these he added homoeopathy, hydropathy, mesmerism, and phrenology. Beyond the “petulance” and “puerility” of such efforts, Emerson saw greater problems.

  In the reformers’ haste to do away with the old, he observed, they often did not adequately prepare “to affirm and to construct,” for they were satisfied to eradicate an evil without consideration of what should take its place. “Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated,” attempts to renovate things around him, with the “disgusting result” of vanity or hypocrisy. Further, to be swept up too exclusively in one category of reform could make an individual morally obtuse. Emerson was adamant about the ill effects of such “partiality.” To focus solely on one moral evil elided the fact that “the wave of evil washes all our institutions alike,” so that one could not afford to waste one’s time in such exclusive attacks. “The street is as false as the church, and when I get to my house,” he continued, “or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie.”4

  Just as problematic as this moral obliquity and partiality was the reformers’ increasing reliance on “association” to combat social injustice, the approach Hedge, Ripley, and others advocated. Emerson applauded such intentions, admitting that Brook Farm and the Northampton Association of Education and Industry were comprised of “men and women of superior talents and sentiments.” Over time, however, he feared that the communities might become asylums for those who had “tried and failed” in the world. Friendship and association were fine, as long as one realized “that no society can ever be so large as one man.” In relying too much on others, a person becomes a fraction of himself. There simply can be “no concert in two,” Emerson declared, “where there is no concert in one.”5

  Here is the heart of Emerson’s belief about reform: only after an individual experiences the paradise within can he join with others, similarly enlightened, to restore the outer paradise. Only then would institutions, comprised as they were of discrete individuals, change. Admittedly, men and women at work together appeared to accomplish more when they met as equals. But reform remained only cosmetic unless this union was “inward.” It did not consist merely in external covenant, for those who banded together in an imperfect state were, on all sides, “cramped and diminished” in proportion. “The union,” he concluded, “must be ideal in actual individualism.”6

  This belief in radical individualism, articulated so powerfully in Emerson’s Essays (1841) and Essays, Second Series (1844), was at the heart of his Transcendentalism. In “New England Reformers,” the final essay in his second volume, he reiterated his profoundly democratic sense that “the net amount of man and man does not vary.” The new world that reformers seek, Emerson urged, would not arrive because “we drink water, we eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail.” Such activities were in vain if the heart was not pure. The new world would not arrive until each obeyed his or her genius, “the only liberating influence.”7

  In the six years between the publication of his address to the Divinity School and the appearance of Essays, Second Series, Emerson had moved from being a little-known lightning rod for the movement’s religious eccentricity to center stage as its chief proselytizer for an imperial self. He did so primarily through his career as a public lecturer, popularizing a compelling ethic of self-reliance in a prophetic mode that made auditors believe they were in the presence of genius. He also gathered around him in Concord a coterie of like-minded young seekers who welcomed his attention and gained from his sponsorship. Emerson’s success in this could be measured by his mounting critics. The Unitarian patriarch William Ellery Channing, for example, observed to Elizabeth Peabody that, had Frederic Henry Hedge become more a presence in Transcendentalism, he might have introduced it in such a way that “it would not have become identified with the extreme Individualism” by then indelibly associated with it. Channing also observed that the danger that beset Transcendentalists was that they sometimes mistook “their individualities for the Transcendent.”8 Even the young Caroline Healey found parts of Emerson’s thought problematic. Reading Essays shortly after the book appeared, she liked such pieces as “Compensation” and “History” but found what he had to say about self-reliance “extravagant and unsafe.” More unusually, she appears not even to have read Nature until 1846, even though she had been traveling in Transcendentalist circles for years.9 The seemingly willful obscurity of some of Emerson’s writings prompted another criticism of Transcendentalism, that its adherents were narcissistic and self-indulgent. Francis Bowen criticized “the insufferable arrogance of the new school, and their anxiety to place themselves apart from the mass of mankind.” He also noted that with them, “originality has become the cant of the day.10”

  Behind such criticism lay Emerson’s belief (expressed emphatically in “New England Reformers”) in the primacy of individual consciousness, that is, in the erection in every mind, as the conservative clergyman Simeon Doggett rightly characterized it, of “the standard of truth and right, and hence for every one to do what is right in his own eyes.”11 Emerson codified this version of the self in his first two books of essays. Coupled with his frequent lecture series in Boston, as well as his individual appearances in cities and towns throughout the Northeast, for many people these books, assembled from Emerson’s journals and lectures, typified American Transcendentalism, even as others in the group insistently condemned the egotism to which his ideas led.

  In Essays the pivotal essay was “Self-Reliance,” in which Emerson praised the individual who learns “to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.” Self-reliance, then, is nothing less than the willingness “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men.” This inner voice, however, Emerson observed, grows “faint and inaudible” the more mankind becomes wrapped in social bonds. “Society,” he noted, is nothing more than a “joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater,” a transparent dig at the Brook Farm experiment. Thus, “whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”12

  Emerson understood what such ideas implied, but he was supremely confident of their correctness. He recounted how one friend, on hearing him question, “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?” observed that “these impulses might be from below, not from above.” Emerson calmly replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil,” for no law was sacred to him but that of his own nature. Even more problematic was Emerson’s sense of what such beliefs implied for the nature of social reform. “Do not tell me,” he wrote, “as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations,” for “are they my poor?” As to “miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies,” he confessed that he sometimes gave a “dollar” but did not really expect it to do any good in any larger way.13 So much for the work o
f Brownson and Parker!

  Emerson maintained that greater self-reliance would “work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.” Reformers, he continued, might “summon conventions and vote and resolve in multitude,” but God would “deign to enter and inhabit you” only by “a method precisely the reverse.” Man would be strong and prevail when he threw off all foreign support and stood alone. “Is not a man better than a town?” he asked rhetorically. When one asserts his “Will,” he concluded, one chains “the wheel of Chance” and is free of worry over its revolutions. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself,” he concluded. “Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”14

  Other essays in the collection buttressed such ideas. “The Over-Soul” spoke to that divine current that flows through intuition and directs one’s morality, and “Compensation” posited a world always in perfect balance, even though on occasion one might think that the cosmic scales were weighted against one. Further, this collection of essays identifies not only the Emerson who resisted Ripley’s and Alcott’s appeals to join their communitarian ventures, but also the person who provided a culture in the midst of upheaval—the factory, the railroad, the steamboat, the daguerreotype, and the telegraph, among other inventions irrevocably changing notions of space and time—a way to cope with the attendant change and confusion. On the lecture platform and in the press Emerson provided tools through which Americans could adapt to their novel condition, neither resisting nor condemning it.