American Transcendentalism

by Philip F Gura

  During its four years of publication The Dial comprised an unusual potpourri. Always at the mercy of what came over the transom, Fuller and, after she stepped down in 1842, Emerson assembled the journal’s issues by continuing to solicit—indeed, sometimes strong-arming—friends sympathetic to some aspect of the New Thought. The editors themselves supplied much copy, including such seminal pieces as Emerson’s “The Transcendentalist” and Fuller’s landmark of feminist thought, “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men, Woman versus Women.” Other significant contributions came from Parker, from the poets Christopher Pearse Cranch and William Ellery Channing, and from Henry David Thoreau, who got his boost as a published writer from his appearance in The Dial. Surprising for the paucity of their contributions were Ripley, who became increasingly preoccupied with plans for a utopian community, and Hedge, who continued to cultivate his connection to Unitarianism. Not unexpectedly, from Brownson, The Dial received nothing.15

  The journal, however, never had as large a circulation as Brownson’s Boston Quarterly Review. When Peabody, acting as business manager for the journal, reviewed the accounts early in 1843, for example, she realized that income was not meeting the costs of printing, a deficit attributable to a decrease in subscriptions, then at little more than two hundred. Outside reviews of The Dial continued to be mixed, but encouraged by the response to his call for assistance in the form of contributions and subscriptions, Emerson continued to put out the journal until April of the following year. Its demise was reported in the popular press. On May 25, for example, Horace Greeley’s New-York Weekly Tribune reported that the “most original and thoughtful periodical ever published in this country” had suspended its issues. 16 Others thought differently. Writing to his friend Convers Francis, even when the journal was still solvent, someone as sympathetic as Parker had a more measured assessment, particularly when he considered the contents of Brownson’s journal. The Dial, he wrote, “bears about the same relation to the Boston Q[uarterly Review], that Antimachus does to Hercules, Alcott to Brownson, or a band of men’s maidens, daintily arrayed in finery … to a body of stout men.” 17 Over its four years, however, The Dial recorded the Transcendentalists’ remarkable range of interests, even if any one issue did not contain enough to make its varied constituencies think it worth the price of subscription. And, like the Boston Quarterly Review, for its short life The Dial offered a rallying point for disgruntled Unitarians who in various ways sought to turn the world upside down.

  Later in the 1840s the Transcendentalists issued other publications. In 1847, Parker, now installed in his own large, independent church in Boston, began the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, which he memorably described as “The Dial with a beard” and in which he wished to center the various social reforms that preoccupied him.18 The journal lasted only three years, failing when its publisher went bankrupt. The Harbinger was more significant because of its large subscription base. Ripley began this weekly in 1845 at his utopian community, Brook Farm. Devoted to the ideas of the French social reformer Charles Fourier, in 1847 this periodical officially became the mouthpiece of the American Union of Associationists and was relocated to New York City. Although many of its pages were redactions of Fourier’s complex reformist schemes, much space also was given to book reviews, poetry, the pioneering music criticism of Brook Farm member John Sullivan Dwight, and even the translation of one of George Sand’s novels, Consuelo. Similarly committed to social reform (if not so doctrinaire in its socialism) but shorter-lived were William Henry Channing’s The Present (1843–44) and The Spirit of the Age (1848–49). In different ways these journals served the interests of New England’s disgruntled and idealistic Unitarians and offered forums where lively debate raged over a range of religious, philosophical, and social concerns.

  Other social activities such as public lectures and less formal dialogues or “conversations” also bound together incipient reformers. The most famous of these were Emerson’s lectures delivered in Boston in the mid- and late 1830s, and Fuller’s Conversations, usually held at Peabody’s West Street bookstore. By decade’s end, Emerson, gaining more confidence each year, with sufficient success to select his own topics and, finally, entire lecture series, had established enough of a reputation as a public speaker to consider this his main occupation. The notoriety of his Divinity School address only increased his visibility, and soon his lectures became topics of wide public interest and debate.

  At this point in his career Emerson was not so much imposing as magnetic. Six feet tall, long-necked, with sloping shoulders, he had dark brown hair, blue eyes, and a Roman nose which was his most prominent feature. At the podium he appeared oracular, revealing truth in finely chiseled sentences, each of which might be infinitely expanded but which he instead treated like the pieces of an artfully constructed mosaic that comprised his topic. One went to listen to Emerson, not to be entertained. If not all in attendance captured his full meaning, they still believed that they were in the presence of genius.

  Between 1836 and 1838 he gave two series in Boston, a total of twenty-two lectures, on “The Philosophy of History.” Late in 1838 he followed these successful offerings with another, on “Human Life,” and the following season he discussed “The Present Age,” an assessment of the state of social and cultural reform. Often repeated at least in part in other New England communities, these talks afforded Emerson a substantial income. Particularly in Boston, the interested public vied for tickets and for invitations to the convivial receptions that often closed the evening’s entertainment. Late in his life Ripley recalled that these lectures constituted nothing less than “an era in the social and literary history of Boston, as well as in the life and culture of many individuals.”19

  Emerson was not the only Transcendentalist to venture onto the lyceum boards. His young protégé Thoreau, for example, sought to emulate him but never achieved anything like his friend’s success. In 1841, Theodore Parker packed Boston’s Masonic Hall and was the talk of the season. But neither Thoreau nor Parker made a living from such public appearances. Emerson, however, continued such work throughout his career, often delivering more than fifty and occasionally as many as eighty lectures a year, for a total of close to fifteen hundred over his lifetime. With such a record, he joined an elite cadre of professional speakers that included the Swiss naturalist and Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, the abolitionist and fugitive slave Frederick Douglass, and the world traveler and writer Bayard Taylor, to name only a few of the most prominent.

  In the 1850s Emerson extended his itinerary, including frequent trips through New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and traveling as far west as St. Louis, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and, eventually, California. Requiring him to make his own arrangements for train travel and hotel accommodations while local committees procured the halls and ensured good audiences, the work was not always easy or comfortable. In 1835, in a scene anticipating Melville’s at the beginning of Moby-Dick when he describes the encounter of Ishmael with Queequeg at the Spouter Inn, Emerson recalled the stranger who had broken into his boardinghouse room after midnight, “claiming to share it.” “But after his lamp had smoked the chamber full” and Emerson had “turned round to the wall in despair,” the man “knelt down at his bedside & made in a low whisper a very long earnest prayer,” which “entirely changed” the relation between the two men. “I fretted no more but respected & liked him,” Emerson concluded.20 He put up with such inconvenience because by all accounts people were eager to hear him even if they were unsympathetic to his beliefs, and he seemed genuinely to enjoy the circuit, despite its hardships. He gave much thought to his delivery, in terms of pacing as well as content; and particularly before the appearance of his first full-length book, Essays (1841), lectures were his primary mode of “publication.” Not surprisingly, he drew this volume’s contents from several of his lecture series.

  At Ripley’s Brook Farm, talks by community members as well as frequent and curious visitors were staple intellectual f
are. Transcendentalists like Parker or Peabody offered some, but more often, particularly in the community’s later years, such social reformers as Albert Brisbane and Parke Godwin, New Yorkers who represented the “associationist” community, often were heard. Another of Brook Farm’s lecturers was Margaret Fuller, but she was less well known for such formal efforts than for her scintillating public Conversations, offered for several years beginning in the late fall of 1839. Conversation always had been of interest to the emergent Transcendentalist group, the most prominent examples being the periodic meetings of their “club” and Alcott’s dialogues on the Gospels with his students.21 But Fuller had something different in mind, a consciousness-raising seminar for educated women who sought to continue their education in paths trod most often by their fathers and brothers.

  Fuller’s father had given her the same intellectual encouragement that he provided his sons; and by the time, in her teens, that she began to circulate in Transcendentalist circles—her first and closest friend among the group was Clarke—she already was an intellectual prodigy. Her ambition and ego were large, and she quickly recognized how unusual she was. “I wish to arrive,” she wrote to Clarke in 1833, “at that point where I can trust myself, and leave off saying, ‘it seems to me,’ and boldly feel, ‘It is so to me.’”22 In an attempt to engender that confidence in other women, she planned her “Conversations.”

  Fuller first broached her idea in August 1839 in a letter to Ripley’s wife, Sophia. She envisioned a meeting each week in which attendees were repaid for the trouble of attendance by her supplying a venue where suggested topics would lead “to conversation of a better order than is usual at social meetings” where banter or gossip was the rule.23 At Fuller’s gatherings, ideas were the topics of conversation, and women gained confidence in the strength of their intellect. Her topics were ambitious: External Nature; The Life of Man; Literature; The Fine Arts; The History of a Nation, to Be Studied in Its Religious and Civil Institutions, Its Literature and Arts, and the Characters of Its Great Men.

  On November 6, 1839, Fuller initiated these meetings with no fewer than twenty-five women who had subscribed to a thirteen-week series of dialogues, held on Thursday afternoons from noon until two. The group focused on Greek mythology, and Fuller’s success therewith convinced her to offer a second series in the spring, on the fine arts, and another, on the same topic, in November, this time at the Ripleys’ home. Peabody, who recorded abstracts of the meetings, recalled that Fuller’s thoughts “were much illustrated, and all was said with the most captivating address and grace, and with beautiful modesty.”24 Not all were as entranced. Elizabeth Hoar admitted to Emerson that she liked the social dimension, adding that Caroline Sturgis, another emergent luminary among the group, became so bored at one meeting that she “quietly disposed herself to sleep on the arm of the sofa.”25

  Nineteen-year-old Caroline Healey never dozed off. Soon to emerge as one of the group’s formidable intellects, at this point she was Peabody’s protégée. At her urging, Healey attended Fuller’s series on mythology in 1841 and remembered that she never had enjoyed anything as much. Surprised by Fuller’s talking “more like a woman” than she had anticipated, as well as by her “want of grammar” when she indulged a monologue, Healey still found her more agreeable and modest than she had been led to believe. Fuller was “of an under size,” the young woman recalled, and “delicately framed—with rather sharp features and light hair.” Her head was small “but thrown almost wholly in front of the ears,” and her forehead “of good height, her nose inclining to the Roman, and her mouth thin—and ungraceful.” She also remembered Fuller’s eyes as “small and gray” but with “a vivid flash,” her laugh “almost child-like.”26 Others remembered her long, swanlike neck, her flowing robelike gowns, and an overall opulence that made her appear an oracle. From this point, Fuller replaced Peabody as Healey’s role model, and after Fuller’s premature death, in 1850, in good measure her torch for women’s rights passed to this acolyte.

  Positive reports of Fuller’s Conversations caught the attention of men associated with the Transcendentalist group, who, always interested in more talk, enjoined her to include them. Flushed with her success, Fuller consented. The results were disappointing. Emerson recalled that on these occasions Fuller spoke well but “seemed encumbered, or interrupted, by the headiness or incapacity of the men, whom she had not had the advantage of training, and who fancied, no doubt, that, on such a question [as mythology], they, too, must assert and dogmatize.”27 Fuller did not repeat this experiment but continued her women-only classes until she moved to New York in 1844.

  Fuller was not the only Transcendentalist to try her hand at this novel form of instruction. Bronson Alcott, an inveterate talker, had held such public conversations in the early 1830s and continued to do so as finances demanded. As late as 1849, recently moved back to Boston from Concord, he rented a room next to Peabody’s bookstore and announced his own series—“a Course of Conversations on Man—his History, Resources, and Expectations.” A ticket for all seven lectures cost five dollars, and admission to individual offerings were available at three dollars, the tickets purchasable at Peabody’s bookstore next door.28 He had enough success to offer these for a few years, and the dutiful Healey, now married to Charles Dall, attended the 1851 series, on seven contemporary New Englanders (Fuller and Emerson among the topics), sessions open to women as well as men.29 Admittedly, these drew nothing near the attention that Fuller’s efforts had a decade earlier. Both Alcott’s and Fuller’s discussion groups, however, served as important occasions for the emergent Transcendentalist cohort to debate timely issues.

  Fuller peppered her Conversations with wide-ranging allusions to classical and foreign literature, believing such knowledge essential to a well-educated American. Ripley was of the same mind but attacked the problem differently. Beginning in 1838 he published a series of books, Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, another project that bound Transcendentalists in a common purpose, in this case, of knowing the most important work of contemporary European thinkers and writers. Whom did he finally enlist as translators, and what precisely did he publish?

  Ripley took the lead in the first two volumes, devoted to selections from French philosophers, Philosophical Miscellanies, Translated from the Works of Cousin, Jouffroy, and B. Constant (1838), which provided a solid introduction to Eclecticism. He, Brownson, and other dissident Unitarians had been much influenced by these thinkers, and in these volumes Ripley offered selections from them that he considered most significant. In his preface he also spoke to his larger ambitions for the series. He made clear that he had conceived his project with “special reference to the three leading divisions of Philosophy, History, and Theology,” as well as to writings “of a popular character,” including “finished specimens of elegant literature.” Hitherto, the American public had been confined “too much to English books, and especially to the more recent publications of Great Britain.”30 Ripley wanted his countrymen to have a broader view; hence, his efforts on behalf of French and German writers.

  Although not one of the fourteen-volume series was a runaway bestseller, the books had a respectable sale; several were reprinted, in the United States and in England, into the 1860s—James Freeman Clarke’s edition of de Wette’s autobiographical novel, Theodore, even later. As odd a potpourri as the series comprised, it typified emergent interests among not only younger and older Unitarians but among Transcendentalists themselves, split as they were into those who remained primarily interested in theological and social reform, and others who gravitated toward belles lettres. These divisions were mirrored in what, by the early 1840s, were two centers of Transcendentalist activity: one in Boston, in its churches and lecture halls; the other in suburban Concord, now easily accessible from the city by train, where Alcott, Fuller, Thoreau, Ellery Channing, and other writers (including Nathaniel Hawthorne) lived, and whose social and intellectual center was “Bush,” as Emerson called his sp
acious home on the Lexington road. The movement that these reformers had spawned was entering a new phase, one of centrifugal expansion most evident in the proliferation of the cohort’s activities along a wide spectrum of reform.

  Through the 1840s, such deepening divisions among Transcendentalists became more visible. The distance between the leadership of The Dial—Emerson and Fuller—who valued individual spiritual growth and self-expression, and social reformers like Brownson, Ripley, and, increasingly, Parker, continued to grow. Brownson, whose mind seemed in constant evolution, had come to his radical social views by a circuitous route. The Working Men’s Party and the Christian socialism of the Saint-Simonians continued to influence him. In the aftermath of the severe economic upheavals of the late 1830s and early 1840s, however, he grew more disappointed in many of his fellow Transcendentalists’ seeming apathy toward the plight of the downtrodden, and found new inspiration from another group of French thinkers, particularly the social reformer Pierre Leroux.

  The national economic downturn initiated by the Panic of 1837 pushed Brownson to more and more radical pronouncements. His fellow Unitarian Samuel K. Lothrop captured the shock of this upheaval of the nation’s economy. “We were in the midst of peace, apparent prosperity, and progress,” he observed, “when, after extensive individual failures, the astounding truth burst upon us like a thunderbolt … that we were a nation of bankrupts, and a bankrupt nation.”31 Brownson’s analysis of the ensuing confrontation between capital and labor already was prominent in his sermon Babylon Is Falling, preached to his Boston congregation in 1837 and published shortly thereafter. In this powerful piece, Brownson located his contemporaries’ greed and lack of charity in a cosmic drama in which divine retribution for their worship of Mammon was only a matter of time. But his lengthy piece on “The Laboring Classes,” ostensibly a review of Thomas Carlyle’s recent Chartism (1840), in the July 1840 issue of his Boston Quarterly Review was of another magnitude. As powerful a piece of economic and social analysis as had appeared in the United States, it was followed by an even longer essay in the next issue of the periodical. In that piece, “The Laboring Classes—Responsibility to Party,” he attempted not only to convince Americans to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate Martin Van Buren over the Whig William Henry Harrison, but also to force the Democratic Party to adopt Brownson’s own radical program.32