Literary Transcendentalism

Style and Vision in the American Renaissance

Lawrence Buell

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501707650
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Broader in scope than any previous literary study of the transcendentalists, this rewarding book analyzes the theories and forms characteristic of a vital group of American writers, as well as the principles and vision underlying transcendentalism. All the movement's major literary figures and forms are considered in detail. Lawrence Buell combines intellectual history and critical explication, giving equal attention to general trends and to particular works and individuals. His chapters on conversation, religious discourse, catalog rhetoric, and literary travelogue treat intensively topics that have been relatively neglected. His analyses of Ellery Channing's poetry and the use of persona in Emerson and Very are also innovative. In the final section, he offers the first systematic account of the autobiographical tradition in transcendentalist writing.This incisive and sympathetic overview of transcendentalist writing and thought will attract readers interested in American culture, and it will suggest new critical approaches to nonfiction.

PART I

BACKGROUND AND GENERAL PRINCIPLES

The outstanding symbolic event in the history of Transcendentalism is Emerson’s resignation from his Boston pastorate in 1832 in order to become a scholar-at-large. Most of the other Transcendentalists were also Unitarian ministers or in some sense lay preachers who came to distrust the institutional aspects of religion and were drawn to the literary life. A number of those who began as clergymen defected like Emerson; most of the rest pursued literary avocations on the side. The writings of laymen like Thoreau, Alcott, and Margaret Fuller also have a religio-aesthetic cast. The best-known Transcendentalist periodical was rightly subtitled “A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion.” Though individual Transcendentalists differed considerably on particular issues, they shared in common a lofty view of the relationship between religion and art: art (with a capital “A” always understood) is the product of the religious sentiment, and the religious sentiment, by its very nature, demands an imaginative expression. Though it was first of all a religious movement, Transcendentalism, as its first historian said, “was essentially poetical and put its thoughts naturally into song.”1 The purpose of Chapter 1 is to show why this was the case, by examining the relation between piety and aesthetics in early nineteenth-century New England, and the way in which the Transcendentalists redefined this relation in the course of their departure from Unitarianism.2 Having thus seen their literary aspirations in this larger intellectual context, we outline, in Chapter 2, their views on the nature of literary craftsmanship per se, and show how these too are informed by spiritual considerations.

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1 O. B. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England (1876; rpt. New York: Harper, 1959), p. 134.

2 Studies of the relationship between the religious views of Unitarians and Transcendentalists are copious, though until recently they tended to exaggerate both the conservatism of the one and the liberalism of the other and to see a sharper break between the two than was the case. Perry Miller’s scholarship is, for the most part, a distinguished example of this position. An excellent short discussion of the factors within Unitarianism which made it first abet and then disown the Transcendentalist movement is Clarence H. Faust, “The Background of the Unitarian Opposition to Transcendentalism,” Modern Philology, 35 (1938), 297–324. The best recent study of the theological and ecclesiastical relationship between Unitarianism and Transcendentalism is William R. Hutchison, The Transcendentalist Ministers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). For two useful studies of the aesthetic side of Unitarianism, see Chapter 1, n. 4. Van Wyck Brooks’s The Flowering of New England (New York: Dutton, 1936), in its impressionistic manner, also affords some valuable insights into the ways Unitarianism stimulated the literary side of Transcendentalism. Two works which discuss the relation between religious liberalism and aesthetic developments in America as a whole during this period are William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810–1835 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), and Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860 (New York: Braziller, 1966), pp. 170–186, 300–316.

1 The Emergence of the Transcendentalist Aesthetic from American Unitarianism

Since the Puritan ministers were traditionally the cultural as well as the religious leaders of their people, it was natural that their successors should participate actively in the so-called flowering of New England letters during the early nineteenth century. The best of the literary and intellectual periodicals which mark the first stage of this process were thus run and written largely by clergymen: the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review (1803–1811), the North American Review (1815–1939), and the Christian Examiner (1824–1869). What is more noteworthy about these experiments is that their clerical supporters were almost exclusively Unitarian ministers. The Orthodox Congregationalists and other evangelical sects had their journals too—for this was the golden age of the religious magazine. But theirs were much more narrowly theological in scope.

Conversely, in the area of theology itself, the liberal clergy rarely approached the best of the evangelicals in depth, rigor, and thoroughness.1 Just as Jonathan Edwards was a far more profound thinker than Charles Chauncy, his leading liberal opponent during the Great Awakening, so Chauncy’s descendants were less sophisticated theologians than Samuel Hopkins, Nathaniel Taylor, Lyman Beecher, and Edwards A. Park. Among the Unitarians, only Andrews Norton had any claims to real distinction in this respect. Nor were they greatly concerned about this fact. Even among themselves, Unitarian divines were reputed more for other attainments. One Unitarian minister-historian, for example, after running fondly down the roster of the movement’s early leaders, blithely declared that it was “difficult to say, out of hand, just what the Unitarian opinion is on any given matter, or what it is that Unitarians believe in.” Indeed, he added, “I am a little impatient that they should ever be judged by their theology, which was so small a fraction of either their religion or their life!”2 Among eminent early Unitarians, the two Henry Wares were respected primarily for their kindliness, piety, and devotion to duty; Orville Dewey for his eloquence; F. W. P. Greenwood for the beauty of his style; Buckminster and Channing for all of these. “An atmosphere of elegant taste pervades the denomination,” as O. B. Frothingham says of this period. “Even where occasion calls for polemics the argument is usually conducted after the manner of one more interested in the style than in the dogmas under discussion, and who would gladly be let off from the duty of debate.”3 The imputation of lackadaisicalness here is unfair; but the remark is correct in suggesting that what chiefly distinguished the liberal ministry from its evangelical counterparts was its achievement in such avocations as essay-writing, literary criticism, poetry, and a variety of other secular pursuits from science to philosophy. Channing, for example, won international fame for his essays on Milton and Napoleon; the younger Ware wrote an epic; his brother William invented a new literary genre, the Biblical novel; Jared Sparks and J. G. Palfrey became two of the leading historians of their day.4

The difference in literary attitudes between liberal and Orthodox Congregationalism was great enough even to become a point of dispute in the Unitarian controversy. The Unitarians tended to look down upon Orthodox preachers as dogmatic and narrow-minded ranters, while the Orthodox stigmatized Unitarian preaching and writing as hollow displays of elegance which “please delicate tastes and itching ears, but awaken no sleeping conscience.”5

One must naturally beware of taking the language of controversy at face value. The Orthodox reviewer who condemned a volume of liberal sermons as “a poisonous infusion in a delicious bowl” showed considerable sensitivity to their beauties; the Reverend Leonard Withington, who dismissed Channing as a “nightingale of the moral grove,” was himself an essayist and poetaster.6 Nevertheless the controversy did have a deeper basis. Part of the explanation lay in the fact that a higher percentage of Unitarians than of any other American sect except the High Church Episcopalians were people of sophistication and refinement. But beyond this, their theological liberalism led them to draw a closer analogy between religious and aesthetic experience than Orthodoxy would allow. The main impetus behind the Unitarian departure from Orthodoxy—the shift from a Calvinist view of human nature as depraved to an Arminian view of man as improvable—also helped to produce a climate of opinion more favorable to the arts.7 Believing that the essence of religion is to stimulate the growth of moral character, the Unitarians tended to differentiate less sharply between “sacred” and “secular” pursuits and to view the arts as a means of evangelism rather than as a threat to religion. Beauty and truth came to seem inextricably intertwined. “There is no such thing as naked truth, at least as far as moral subjects are concerned,” Channing declared. Such truth must come to us “warm and living with the impressions and affections which it has produced in the soul from which it issues.”8 Even the much more conservative W. B. O. Peabody considered “poetry as not distantly related to religion,” as “alike” in its “tendency, which is to raise the thoughts and feelings above the level of ordinary life.”9

Orthodox writers, though not entirely opposed to the arts, tended to be cautionary and restrictive. From this point of view, the Panoplist in 1808 endorsed a Presbyterian minister’s estimate that five hundred out of every thousand novels were “so contemptibly frivolous, as to render the perusal of them a most criminal waste of time” and that four hundred ninety-nine of the remaining five hundred might “be considered as positively seductive and corrupting in their tendency.”10 The prejudice against prose fiction was such that even religious novels were suspect. The Christian Spectator, one of the most enlightened of early evangelical sect periodicals, did not have a good word to say for the genre until the 1830s. And Lyman Beecher, even in his old age, continued to fulminate against “effeminate, religious-novel-reading Christians.”11

Liberal divines also fretted about “unsanctified literature,” and the frivolity of novels in particular; some of Theodore Parker’s sarcasms rival Beecher’s.12 But Unitarians tended to be much more permissive and positive in their criticism. “When we speak of a distinct moral aim as indispensable to the novelist,” F. D. Huntington explained, “we do not mean that he should be constantly thrusting his moral into the reader’s face,—one of the weakest pieces of folly an author can commit.”13 Some liberal ministers even conceded that “the mind may be elevated and put in harmony with truth, even where no definite truth is conveyed.” Specific moral or religious content is not necessary, as long as the work has an ennobling tendency, for “whatever inculcates pure sentiment, whatever touches the heart with the beauty of virtue and the blessedness of piety, is in accordance with religion.”14

Such statements hardly sound revolutionary to our ears, but for their day they were avant-garde. As William Charvat observes in his study of early American periodical criticism, one of the most important developments that took place between 1810 and 1835 was the displacement of “the negative principle of religious restraint” by “the positive principle of moral idealism.” The reviewer’s question changed from “Does this book make vice attractive?” to “Does it make virtue beautiful?”15 Although popular taste undoubtedly began to shift in advance of the reviewers, the Unitarian critics were the first group of intellectuals in New England to endorse the shift in significant numbers. They were quick to claim credit for their contribution too. One Unitarian scholar even claimed that nearly every eminent literary figure in nineteenth...