What Hath God Wrought (92 page)

However, the principal and uniquely profound contribution of the Transcendentalists lay in their serious exploration of the second kind of issue. What should Americans do with their freedom? The Transcendentalists endorsed Alexis de Tocqueville’s warning against the danger of the tyranny of the majority. They urged Americans to introspection and integrity, to the exercise of independent judgment, to rejection of competitive display, to the realization of their full human potential, to lives in harmony with nature. The Transcendentalists saw themselves as liberating individuals from convention, conformity, and unexamined habit. Thoreau commented, “It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”
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As a formal religious philosophy, Transcendentalism proved evanescent; its intellectual appeal barely lasted for a single generation after Emerson’s announcement of it in 1836. Yet as a literary movement, it has retained interest, and rightly so. The writings of the Transcendentalists affirm some of the best qualities characteristic of American civilization: self-reliance, a willingness to question authority, a quest for spiritual nourishment. Their writings, even today, urge us to independent reflection in the face of fads, conformity, blind partisanship, and mindless consumerism.

III

The Mercantile Library of Philadelphia was founded in 1821 by an association of the city’s leading businessmen. A private lending library, it testified to its members’ aspirations toward self-improvement and general culture while also catering to their tastes for recreational reading. In 1826, they incorporated their library and began to expand its membership; by 1844–45, they could raise enough money to construct a special building for it. Meanwhile, similar mercantile libraries had been organized in other American cities. From 1828 on, the Mercantile Library of Philadelphia sponsored lectures by prominent people.
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In May 1841, William Ellery Channing came to give one.

Suiting his topic to his practical, worldly audience, the clerical visitor spoke on “The Present Age”—and, more particularly, on its tendency “to expansion, to diffusion, to universality.” “This tendency is directly opposed to the spirit of exclusiveness, restriction, narrowness, monopoly, which has prevailed in past ages.” Channing began with comments on the sciences. What struck him was not so much the new discoveries as their popularization. “Lyceums spring up in almost every village for the purpose of mutual aid in the study of natural science,” he noted; “a lady gives us Conversations on Chemistry, revealing to the minds of our youth vast laws of the universe.” The democratization of science fostered its practical application, “bestowing on millions, not only comforts, but luxuries which were once the distinction of a few.”
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To Channing, the gradual democratization of politics in the United States and the rest of the world represented a consequence of the democratization of information and culture. “What is true of science is still more true of Literature. Books are now placed within reach of all.” To be sure, people sometimes read for amusement (indeed, two-thirds of the books checked out in the Mercantile Library itself were novels), but Channing rejoiced that the improved printing press also provided texts for schools and Sunday schools, tracts for missions, and publications promoting international benevolence and reform. All understood that the venue and auspices within which Channing spoke illustrated his points. The livelihood of the members of his audience manifested analogous tendencies, he commented. Commerce too was expanding in volume, overcoming traditional trade barriers, and (illustrating the tendency to universality) reaching to farther and farther points of the globe, integrating all into one economic system and facilitating the spread of Christianity. A fearful responsibility rested with the merchants in his audience, the speaker warned, to make sure that they conveyed the virtues of Western civilization rather than its vices (exemplified at their worst in the slave trade).

Channing’s observations on his age still provide useful categories for understanding it. The revolutions in communications and transportation clearly lay at the heart of his analysis, though he did not give them those modern names. Besides the transforming impact these revolutions had on political, economic, and academic life, they dramatically affected literature, the arts, and social reform as well. The improvements and economies in printing, papermaking, and distribution that multiplied newspapers, magazines, and books also had their effects on the substance of what was written. Books became not only more numerous and widely marketed but also longer, facilitating the rise of the novel as a new literary genre. Novels often appeared serialized in newspapers or magazines prior to their publication between hard covers—thus taking advantage of the low postal rates charged periodicals. Serialization especially helped rural people far from libraries or bookstores. By 1827, the
North American Review
could announce “the age of novel writing.” The rise of the novel responded not only to improved efficiency in supply but also to expansion in demand. The audience for reading matter grew as population increased and popular education promoted literacy. By the 1840s, perhaps sooner, the United States possessed the largest literate public of any nation in world history. The reading public extended well beyond the urban middle class: Many farmers and mechanics found time to read; even some factory operatives did. It helped that people spent more time indoors, where whale oil and gas lamps shed more light than candles had. The mass production of eyeglasses, beginning in the 1830s, certainly helped. Those riding the newly built trains loved to read. Families often read aloud to each other, sitting around the fireplace, so even family members who could not read for themselves gained exposure to the printed word.
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Just as Christianity responded to modern popular taste with revivalism, literature responded with the novel. In each case a popular “awakening” or “renaissance” ensued. Novels addressed the newly literate mass audience very effectively. Although fictional, they told about people with whom readers could identify in situations at least purportedly realistic. Novels did not presuppose knowledge of classical languages, ancient traditions, or epic poetry. They ranged in content from serious art to pure recreation to titillating fantasy, thus appealing to just about everyone literate who could make a little time to read. During the decade of the 1820s, U.S. publishers brought out 109 books of fiction by Americans; by the 1840s, almost a thousand. Frequently written by women, these books often dealt with women’s lives and problems. Catharine Maria Sedgwick was followed by a whole school of “domestic” authors including Caroline Gilman, Susan Warner, Fanny Fern (pseudonym of Sarah Willis Farrington), and E.D.E.N. Southworth. Women wrote not only novels but history, biography, poetry, humor, drama, and melodrama. In these genres too they often dealt with domestic or moral themes, by no means necessarily accepting women’s subordination to men. Literature, like religion, expressed female energy and experience sooner than politics did.
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In the nineteenth century, many writers and tastemakers worried about the quality of the literature (especially novels) available for public consumption—just as they would worry in more recent times about the quality of television. The same print culture that produced books produced reviews of books. Then as now, reviewers tried to encourage what they considered “serious” writing; in those days this often meant explicit didacticism. Many in the audience too shared the view that their reading habits should make them better people, not simply more cultured but more earnest and hardworking, more highly skilled, better informed citizens. The popularization of science that Channing noticed reflected a widespread attitude that all reading, fiction or nonfiction, should be “elevating” or “improving.” Countless ordinary people, on farms as well as in the city, made reading a tool of self-construction. But of course, there always remained those who read for excitement, escape, and vicarious thrills.
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Homer Franklin ran a bookstore in New York City. In September 1840, he took an inventory that has survived. Of his 8,751 books in stock, 2,526 were Bibles or religious books, and 3,008 were educational or children’s books. Both categories reflect the importance of “self-improvement” as a motive to read. The remainder included 867 professional and scientific books, 287 reference books, and 2,063 classified as “belles lettres,” which included novels, poetry, and music.
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Channing’s denomination, the Unitarians, played a distinctive and important role in the development of American literature. They had been among the first to recognize the potential of print as a means to shape public taste and morals. For centuries, Protestants had read the Bible in hope of salvation. Now, the Unitarians encouraged the reading of other “elevating” literature to foster the development of a virtuous character, which they believed more important than the sudden, all-transforming conversion experience of traditional New England Calvinism. Eager to break out of what they saw as the tyranny of Calvinist theology over American cultural life, they had created a succession of Boston literary magazines of which the most important was the
North American Review
. Founded in 1815, it became the most influential intellectual periodical in the United States for most of the nineteenth century. The Unitarian denomination would contribute a remarkably large number of prominent American writers of the mid-nineteenth century, including—besides the Transcendentalists—the novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Lydia Maria Child, the narrative historians George Bancroft, William H. Prescott, and John L. Motley, and the poets William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes the elder (also a distinguished professor of medicine). The Unitarian denomination remained small; along with Congregationalism it underwent disestablishment in Massachusetts in 1833. Meanwhile, the political power of New England waned with the growth of the Middle Atlantic states and the trans-Appalachian West. Nevertheless, New England Unitarians could take consolation in their importance for the world of print; through it, they had found a means to exert a more subtle influence across the broad republic.
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American Calvinism had long remained suspicious of novels as a waste of time and worse, encouraging the wrong kind of fantasy life, particularly among the young. But beginning in the eighteenth century, moral philosophers called the Calvinist suppositions into question. This newer psychology of art, pioneered by the Scottish moralists Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith (the same one who also wrote on economics), taught that art could stimulate sentiments that could then be applied to real life, making the reader or viewer of sentimental art into a more morally sensitive person. Novels could serve this function, as could other artistic genres.

Responding to these ideas as the nineteenth century went by, evangelicals, Calvinist and Arminian alike, not only exploited poetry, biography, and magazine articles, but also, more cautiously, enlisted novels in the service of Christian moral sensibility. A market developed for imaginative literature that affirmed religious and moral values and thereby rebutted traditional Calvinist disapproval. Such works, demonstrating social responsibility, helped both writers and publishers legitimate their activities in the public eye. As early as 1824 the Connecticut evangelical Lydia Sigourney could comment (with some misgiving) that novels had taken over “Sunday reading” from theological works.
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The Episcopalian Susanna Rowson and the Unitarian William Ware pioneered the biblical fiction that would reach a climax after the Civil War in Lew Wallace’s
Ben-Hur
. Sigourney herself published fifty-six volumes of didactic and devout poetry and prose. Often she chose historical settings and wrote sympathetically about the American Indians. Her husband complained that she put her career ahead of her duty to him: “Were you
less of a poet
,” he told her bitterly, “how much
more valuable
you would
be as a wife
.” But when Charles’s hardware business went bankrupt in the depression that began in 1837, Lydia’s commercially successful writing supported the Sigourney family.
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Literature affirming the values of middle-class Christian morality reflected the aspirations of many, probably most, American readers. It provided the clearest route for a writer to combine a literary reputation with commercial success. A fine example is provided by the enormously popular poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow made it his task as a poet to remind people of cultural and moral values, to show that there was more to life than material pursuits. He sought to bring history to life with “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” He evoked sympathy for victims of injustice with his “Poems on Slavery,” “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” “The Song of Hiawatha” (which Longfellow pronounced “Hee-awatha”), and “Evangeline,” treating the eighteenth-century expulsion of the French Acadians from Nova Scotia. As professor of Romance languages at Harvard, he introduced Americans to Dante by translating
The Divine Comedy
. The values Longfellow celebrated resonated with his readership. To the Victorian middle classes of America and Britain, his poetic exhortations to self-improvement seemed both relevant and inspirational. His “Psalm of Life” (1838), after rejecting a pessimistic outlook, endorses conscientious striving: