CHAPTER VIII.

AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM.

LEAVING Cambridge, and taking the train on the other side of Boston, twenty minutes bring us to Concord, in Massachusetts. On one side of this "haunt of ancient peace" there lies, half buried in an orchard, a house whose attraction has been likened to that of the Arabian Mecca-the home of the most incisive writer, the most original thinker of the West. Unlike Longfellow, Emerson is an American of the Americans, nor does the contrast end here. The works of the one are finished wholes; of the other, fragments, rude though rich the one soothes, the other excites us the one loves to adorn the incidents of daily life, the other sees only general laws: the one runs history and biography into his verse, the other is an abstract moralist and metaphysician: the one maintains the connection between his country and the Past, the other is the moving spirit of a still recent revolution in the world of letters. An American writer finds his country well represented in the Paris Exhibition by the portrait of Emerson in its picture gallery; a sentiment which, giving a but slightly exaggerated expression to the feeling of a large section of educated Americans, calls for an examination of the sources and claims of an influence so widely extended. In comparing Mr. Emerson's English with his home reputation, we must deduct from the former his prestige as a brilliant conversa

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tionalist, and the power exerted by the "controlling sincerity" of his character. His name is to us the sign-post of an interesting stage in the progress of Transatlantic thought, and of a curious chapter in the history of Mysticism.

When the solitudes of the New World began to give place to noisy cities, the brains of her people were expended on the Farm or the Exchange, with a zeal only modified by the spirit and formulæ of the Faith that led the founders of the Northern States across the sea, and continued to infuse a religious element into their enterprises. We have seen that this element which elevated the settlers of New England above ordinary emigrants, adding to their strength, and giving a faster dye to their morality, was yet, in its original form, no more favourable to freedom or variety of thought than the Industrialism by which it was surrounded. The attitude assumed by the early Puritans toward the Quakers across the sea was that of men who had been taught by persecution how to persecute; and while the more elastic Mysticism of Fox took on new shapes in Philadelphia, the Calvinism of Edwards remained rigid in Connecticut. Meanwhile the storm of the Revolutionary war had diverted the majority of active minds into channels of activity hostile alike to poetry and metaphysics, and when the nation began to breathe leisurely in the first years of the century, that tide of imitation had set in which is only now beginning to ebb. European fashions reigned at New York, French political ideas at Washington. The mental philosophy of the West was limited to commentaries on Locke and Brown, and the eclecticism of Cousin, when suddenly the floodgates of German thought were opened on the land. To the republication of Sartor Resartus has been attributed the origin of a movement that really came because the time was ripe for it. It was a revolt against the reign of Commerce in practice, Calvinism in theory, and Precedent in Art, that gave birth to what has been called Transcendentalism.

Ideas, which filter slowly through English soil and abide there for a generation, flash like comets over the electric atmosphere of America. Coleridge and Carlyle were prophets in Boston, while their own countrymen were still examining their credentials, and suddenly the New England of letters exclaimed, “Go to, let us be metaphysical." The converts soon put their teachers to the blush: from Materialism and solid Scotch Psychology they rushed to the outer verges of Idealism or Mysticism, and manifested in a new direction the same disregard of limit and degree which had been wont to mark the financial transactions of Wall Street. "Every form of intellectual or physical dyspepsia," says a Transatlantic reviewer, "brought forth its gospel. . . . Communities were established where everything was to be common but common-sense. Men renounced their old gods, and hesitated only whether to bestow their allegiance on Thor or on Buddha. A gift of tongues spread like a contagion, rendering its victims incomprehensible. It was the Pentecost of Shinar." This, and more, he says regarding the ludicrous phase of the movement, characteristically caricaturing ideas which his countrymen had pushed to a characteristic extreme; but the fullest representation of the Transcendentalists as a group is to be found in the pages of the Dial, a magazine which, during four years, upheld their views in four volumes of miscellaneous merit. The Dial is a Pantheon-from which only Utilitarians are excluded-where the worshippers meet and sing hymns to Confucius and Zoroaster, to Kant, Plato, Goethe, and Richter, all set to German music. They pass from world-old praise of Homer and Shakespeare to friendly recognition of new heresies, from thoughts of the divinity of labour to puffs of poetasters, from Hindoo Mythology and Chinese Ethics to nineteenth century truisms about Progress, and Union, and Humanity; from soaring among the cloud-capped heights of a modern Religion of Beauty to raking among "the tangled

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roots and dead leaves of a second-hand Orientalism." This magazine, which abounds in criticisms, mostly panegyrical, has several verses seldom remarkable for anything save obscurity-verses that often anticipate almost verbatim those of the New Oxford, or revived Della-Cruscan school; vigorous sermons, spoilt by violences, of Theodore Parker; the Orphic Sayings of Alcott, the Socratic sage, divining or dreaming in his garden; four or five essays of Emerson; with the tales and allegories of Margaret Fuller, afterwards D'Ossoli. This remarkable woman, whose powers are imperfectly reflected in her writings, has been called the Sibyl, the Circe, and the Hypatia of the Western intellectual world. Her true genius

1

1 That I may not be accused of disrespect to one of the most estimable of men, I give, as types alike of his wise musing and his wild maundering, four Orphic Sayings; some passages exemplify the matter and manner of the Dialists, when they cut the cables of common-sense.

XLIII.-GENESIS.

The popular Genesis is historical. It is written to sense not to the soul. Two principles, diverse and alien, interchange the Godhead, and sway the world by turns. God is dual. Spirit is derivative. Identity halts in diversity. Unity is actual merely. The poles of things are not integrated; creation globed and orbed. Yet in the true Genesis nature is globed in the material, souls orbed in the spiritual, firmament. Love globes, wisdom orbs all things. As magnet the steel, so spirit attracts matter, which trembles to traverse the poles of diversity, and rest in the bosom of unity. All Genesis is of love. Wisdom is her form, beauty her costume.

LXI. TEMPTATION.

The man of sublime gifts has his temptation amidst the solitudes to which he is driven by his age as proof of his integrity. Yet nobly he withstands this trial, conquering both Satan and the world by overcoming himself. He bows not down before the idols of time, but is constant to the divine ideal that haunts his heart, a spirit of serene and perpetual peace.

LXXIII.-SCRIPTURE.

All Scripture is the record of life, and is sacred or profane as the life it records is holy and profane. Every noble life is a revelation from Heaven, which the joy and hope of mankind preserve to the world. Nor while the soul endures shall the Book of Revelation be sealed. Her scriptures, like herself, are inexhaustible, without beginning or end.

C.-SILENCE.

Silence is the initiative to wisdom. Prudence is the footprint of wisdom. Wit is silent, and justifies her children by their reverence of the voiceless oracles of the breast. Inspiration is dumb, a listener to the oracles during her nonage. Suddenly she speaks, to mock the emptiness of all speech. Silence is the dialect of heaven, the utterance of gods.

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seems to have been that of a conversationalist: the subtle analysis of her prose, and the fine feeling of her sonnets, was muffled in the gold-mists of rhapsody, and marred by a conceit whose candour is its main excuse. Thought and passion. brandish their Thyrses, in a Mænad dance; while she pours forth her half knowledge of half the philosophers, musicians, and poets of the world, in page on page of hot but disorderly eloquence. Her "æsthetic teas" rivalled those of the Hotel Rambouillet, or the receptions of our more modern "Utters :" her influence was as striking and as fleeting as that of a halfinspired, half-demented, actor on a temporary stage.

Even the most apparently affected forms of the new doctrine were valuable counteractives to the mere materialism round which they grew. Its votaries had laid hold of a faith, sincere though obscure, in something beyond tariffs and wharfs and exchanges: they believed in a wealth of ideas, transcending the wealth of millionaires, and reasserted the principle that the formulæ of one age are inadequate to meet the wants or express the feelings of another; but their "fine frenzy" might have soon faded into common day, or, like the Art-worship of Frederick Schlegel, ended by subsiding in the Church, had not their best aspirations been concentrated and vitalised by an original thinker, who took upon himself the task of nationalising and giving a fresh practical turn to the old idealisms. English "Hero-worship" would have been vague without Carlyle; American "Transcendentalism" vapid without Emerson. Their relation as leaders of the later Romantic reaction is thus well expressed by the reviewer to which we have already referred:

"Both represented the old battle against Philistinism. It was again, as in the times of Erasmus, of Lessing, of Wordsworth, a struggle for fresh air, in which, if the windows could not be opened, there was danger that panes would be broken, though painted with effigies of saints and martyrs. . . . When Emerson wrote, New England Puritanism, as a motive of spiritual progress was dead, and in him, the herald of its