Other critics saw his book as limited, abrupt, and lacking in artistry, but perhaps the most unusual notice was Brownson’s in Brownson’s Quarterly Review, where he used the novel as the occasion for a long essay on how “Protestantism Ends in Transcendentalism.” Admitting that he had not even read the book but had relied on a “Protestant lady’s” redaction (perhaps Margaret Fuller’s, in the Tribune), Brownson, now a Roman Catholic, classified the work “under the general head of Transcendentalism.” It was not just that Margaret was a “weak and silly book,” but that it counseled an excessive and dangerous self-reliance that led to solipsism. Brownson’s main point was that no Protestant, “as a Protestant,” had a right to censure the book, for though one might affect “a great contempt of Transcendentalism, and horror at its extravagance and blasphemy,” it was based on nothing less that that on which Protestantism was founded, the right of private judgment over external authority in matters of faith. To Brownson, Transcendentalism was not a simple “Yankee notion” peculiar to New England, but “the dominant error of our times.” In books like Judd’s, he concluded, it “reaches its termination, exhausts itself, and can go no farther; for there is no farther.” Transcendentalism, he declared, “is the last stage this side of NOWHERE.”54
Such criticism did not discourage Judd, who in 1850 published two other ambitious works. The first was Philo: An Evangeliad, a highly allegorical, long, blank-verse narrative, which he began in 1845. In a letter, Judd explained this poem’s purpose as an attempt to see if liberal and rational Christianity comprised epic and heroic elements. The poem also asks whether, “in this very sensible and sound age of ours, imagination must needs [sic] be inactive, and awed by philosophy, utility, and steam.” If Margaret was “a Christian consummation in a single neighborhood,” he continued, Philo “is the same for the land at large, and the whole world.”55 In its one major notice, in the North American Review, Andrew Preston Peabody noted such ambitions but repeated some of the criticisms of Margaret. Peabody also acknowledged that Judd was too familiar with the best in literature “not to have the canons of good taste at his easy command.” If he “will make himself their master, there are no laurels too high for his reach.”56
In his third literary effort, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, a Rus-Urban Tale (1850), Judd turned to the contemporary novel of manners, even as he again illustrated the redemptive potential of character. It narrates Edney’s move from the Maine countryside to the city of Woodlyn (Augusta, Maine), where he is challenged by the moral ambiguity incumbent on the Industrial Revolution, in this case, vast, recently constructed sawmills. In anticipation of the rags-to-riches tales soon popularized by Horatio Alger, Edney, by dint of moral and physical courage, finds favor with the governor’s family and eventually wins his daughter. The book champions the work ethic of the farmer and artisan against the shrewd manipulations of the new capitalists. Much indebted to Emerson’s notion of self-reliance and its frequent oversimplification into the platitude that a man is what he chooses to make of himself, Richard Edney acknowledges that liberal religion was entering a new phase, one defined more by attention to external character than to inward soul. In this novel there is no Mons Christi, only Richard’s pluck and timely visits from Lady Luck.
Literary and intellectual historians debate whether Judd should be numbered among the Transcendentalists, but anyone attentive to the degree to which nature and conscience influence his central characters has no trouble answering in the affirmative. Judd’s time spent among Channing, Emerson, and others pushed him beyond the conservative Unitarianism typified at Harvard. One cannot imagine, for example, someone saying of Andrews Norton, as they did of Judd, “Nature was to him the revelation and embodiment of Divinity itself.”57 Rusticated in northern New England, far from the city whose teachers had changed his life, he dedicated his ministry and career as an author to the lessons then—and continuously—learned from Transcendentalism.
Although now most often associated with New England Transcendentalism, through the 1840s Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) was only an apprentice in the movement. A native of Emerson’s Concord, he grew up in middling circumstances, his father a pencil maker, his mother taking in boarders to supplement the family’s meager income. He entered Harvard College at sixteen and graduated the year Emerson gave the Phi Beta Kappa address. At college he took four semesters of German, and one summer he enlisted Orestes Brownson to tutor him in the language; it remained a lifelong passion, but like Margaret Fuller, he gravitated more to Goethe than to the Idealist philosophers. Thoreau also excelled in classics, later completing and publishing translations from the Greek and Latin. After graduation, with his older brother John, he took up school teaching in his hometown.
Through this period Thoreau came more and more under Emerson’s influence and thus within Transcendentalism’s expanding orbit. In 1840 he attended one of the final meetings of the Transcendental Club, held at Emerson’s home, and his older friend solicited his writings for the projected Dial. “Aulus Persius Flaccus,” an essay on the Roman satirist, as well as examples of Thoreau’s own verse, appeared in the journal’s early issues, under Fuller’s editorship. In March 1841, Ripley, recognizing his friend’s strong practical bent, asked him to join the fledgling Brook Farm enterprise. Sympathetic to many of the group’s goals, Thoreau finally decided against it, declaring in the privacy of his journal that he would “rather keep bachelor’s hall in hell than go to board in heaven.”58 That summer, Thoreau moved into Emerson’s “Bush” as handyman and housekeeper to the now-increasingly absent Emerson, whose lecture career was taking off. Thoreau was an intimate of the household, Lydian’s confidant, and for all intents and purposes Emerson’s protégé.
The year 1842 held great personal losses for Thoreau and Emerson, with the death early in January of Thoreau’s beloved brother John from tetanus and of Emerson’s adored five-year-old son, Waldo, of scarlet fever within the same month. Grief tore at and changed both men. All that saved them was their renewed faith in the rightness of nature and their dedication to their work. For Thoreau this involved the pen, for he had decided to become a writer and lecturer, like his older friend, who the year before had published his first substantial book, Essays, and was traveling throughout New England and New York on the lyceum circuit.
Since his graduation, at Emerson’s instigation, Thoreau had kept a journal, a storehouse of his thoughts and observations, as well as where he worked out preliminary drafts of his essays. When in May 1843 Emerson convinced him to travel to Staten Island to live with his brother, William Emerson, and tutor William’s children, Thoreau took the opportunity to show some of his writing to the city’s many publishers and editors. He quickly found, however, that his Boston connections did not get him far in the nation’s publishing hub, which already was beginning to center on emergent literary celebrity. He also was disappointed to learn that, given the glut of writers, many of the journals, including the important Knickerbocker, paid contributors little or nothing. As he put it in a letter to his mother, “My bait will not tempt the rats,—they are too well fed.”59 Thoreau did, however, meet interesting people, most of them connected in some way to either Emerson or George Ripley and his socialist experiment at Brook Farm. These included William Henry Channing, about to commence his journal The Present; the Fourierist Albert Brisbane, whom Thoreau described as looking “like a man who has lived in a cellar, far gone in consumption”; Horace Greeley, two years into his editorship of the New-York Daily Tribune; and Henry James, Sr., deeply into Swedenborgianism. 60
At the suggestion of his friend Hawthorne, Thoreau paid a visit to John L. O’Sullivan at The United States Magazine and Democratic Review and showed him his review of German utopian John Adolphus Etzler’s recently reprinted tract, The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, which the editor wanted him to revise because, as Thoreau wrote Emerson, he objected “to my want of sympathy” with the Associationist movement, which O’Sullivan supported.61 Thoreau o
bviously felt encouraged, however, and he soon enough turned out “The Landlord,” a somewhat nostalgic piece about tavern keepers, given that the metropolis now was overrun with boardinghouses. O’Sullivan published it and, the next month, printed his revised review of Etzler as well.62
This was the extent of Thoreau’s fortune in the city. He hated urban life: “The pigs in the street,” he wrote Emerson, “are the most respectable part of the population.”63 After only six months—he had been prepared to stay in New York two years—he returned to Concord. From this period his “Natural History in Massachusetts”; two travelogues—“A Walk to Wachusett” and “A Winter Walk”; and his lengthy review of Etzler comprise his major accomplishment prior to the publication of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), a memorial to his brother recording a two-week boating trip they once had taken. These pieces indicate how his association with Emerson and other Transcendentalists affected his subsequent literary and philosophical development.
Thoreau’s review of Etzler’s The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to All Intelligent Men sheds light on the contemporary debate within Transcendentalism over the merits of Associationist-based reform. Indeed, Emerson’s suggestion that Thoreau review the work—originally printed in Pittsburgh in 1833 and reprinted in London in 1842, where his friend Alcott encountered it—no doubt related to Emerson’s own struggle over whether to join Brook Farm. Given Thoreau’s eminently practical bent—he had worked in the family pencil factory as well as being a carpenter and surveyor—Emerson considered his young friend ideal to assess Etzler’s scheme to harness nature on “scientific” principles, toward the reorganization of society.
Etzler was a German immigrant who had settled in the United States in 1831. Caught in the utopian fervor that swept Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as well as in the heady advances in technology that already had brought such remarkable inventions as steam power, electromagnetism, and daguerreotypy, he believed his mission was to develop new technology whose use would return Earth to a paradisiacal state. He sought financial backers—among them the prominent communitarian George Rapp, leader of the Harmonites in Ohio—for an experimental community near Cincinnati. When this effort failed, Etzler moved to Pittsburgh to edit a German-language newspaper, and he published The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, an odd tract that combined his interests in technological innovation and messianic speculation.
Because his ideas crossed Fourier’s at several points, particularly in his advocacy of social reform based in planned communities, in 1840 he attended the Fourier Society of New York’s celebration of their namesake’s birthday. There he met, among other Associationists, C. F. Stollmeyer, publisher of Albert Brisbane’s Social Destiny of Man, who thereupon boosted Etzler’s writings and inventions—including his “naval automaton,” a ship that was directed by wave power. By 1844, disappointed that nothing had come of his grand plans in the United States, Etzler moved to England, where Hugh Doherty and other Associationists took up his utopian ideas and extravagant inventions. There Etzler continued his ambitious brainstorming. He founded a Tropical Emigration Society to plant one of his projected communities in Venezuela; when this idea fell through after a breakdown in negotiations with the country’s leaders, he moved to the island of Trinidad, projecting colonies on floating tropical islands in the Caribbean. By this time, however, he had lost the interest of all but the most loyal of his American acolytes.
In addition to being enthralled by technology—he came to the United States with a group led by John A. Roebling, who later built the Brooklyn Bridge—Etzler had been inspired by Hegel’s deterministic philosophy, believing that there were reasons for all that had happened and would happen, explanations the rational man could anticipate and act on to hasten a secular millennium. Thus, in The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men he argued that if mankind properly harnessed nature, within ten years the vast, rude American wilderness would blossom into an immense garden. Leveling mountains, creating or draining lakes, constructing roads and canals, covering the ocean with floating islands bearing gardens and palaces: men would accomplish all this by the application of mind to matter. In this new world, because of the land’s limitless bounty, work would not be drudgery, and men and women would spend their time creating and living in the ideal community, labor-saving inventions restoring the lost paradise.64
Such millennial dreams were shared by a wide range of reformers and religious prophets, but Thoreau, eminently practical, would have nothing to do with them. He rightly compared Etzler’s vision to Fourier’s and found the German’s schemes one of “the signs of the times,” a veritable “transcendentalism in mechanics.” Certainly Etzler’s vision of a world liberated from the drudgery of labor resonated in Thoreau, who believed that humanity spent too much time getting a living rather than living life itself. “How meanly and grossly do we deal with nature!” he exclaimed. But Etzler did not have a full understanding of nature. The wind, the tides, the waves, sunshine—in Etzler’s fertile brain these were the keys to man’s transformation of the earth into a new Garden of Eden, with all labor now reduced, Thoreau wrote sarcastically, “to a short turn of some crank.” But what, Thoreau asked, about that “crank within,” the “prime mover in all machinery?” That is, how did one harness each person’s “divine energy”? Here Thoreau recurred to Emersonian Transcendentalism. We must “first succeed alone,” he maintained, before “we may enjoy our success together.” The chief fault of Etzler’s plan was the same as that at the heart of Fourier’s schemes, he sought “to secure the greatest degree of gross comfort and pleasure merely.” He “paint[ed] a Mahometan’s heaven,” a pleasure palace, and neglected the most important point, that internal “moral reform” must come before any millennium.65
While admiring Etzler’s desire to make nineteenth-century life something more than it was, Thoreau maintained that for all their supposed practicality, his schemes would do little to transform life unless men’s hearts first were changed. Sounding much like a Unitarian minister, Thoreau counseled men to stoke “the heat of love.” Love “can warm without fire, feed without meat, clothe without garments, and shelter without roof” and thus “make a paradise within which will dispense with a paradise without.”66 So much for Fourier’s and Etzler’s incessant calculation and ratiocination! Men had to discern and harness higher laws.
And Thoreau knew where to find them, something that Emerson had intuited when he gave his young friend his first major assignment. Thus, in his brief introduction to Thoreau’s “Natural History of Massachusetts” in The Dial, Emerson explained how he had begged his friend to “lay down the oar and fishing line, which none can handle better, to assume the pen.”67 The result, “Natural History of Massachusetts,” was indeed such a promise of his future achievement, and it exemplifies Thoreau’s gift of discerning the import of the natural world in ways that his contemporaries, even friends like Emerson or Hawthorne, rarely countenanced.
Taking as his occasion seemingly mundane scientific reports, Thoreau opened the essay with a moving meditation on the restorative powers of nature. “Surely,” he wrote, “joy is the condition of life,” for “the spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair.” “Think of the young fry that leap in ponds,” he reminded his readers, “the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla [tree frog] with which the woods ring in spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, [and] the brook minnow stoutly stemming the current.”68 Compared to these, the din about religion, literature, and philosophy heard in contemporary pulpits, lyceums, and parlors was unimportant. Close observation of nature mattered, Thoreau submitted, and if the reports under review (error-strewn though he found them) brought us closer to it, so much the better.
In this essay Thoreau also anticipated several powerful passages in hi
s masterpiece, Walden (1854). At one point, for example, in his discussion of the birds of Massachusetts, he comments on the “Great Northern Diver” (common loon), describing its “game” on a pond as it tries to escape being cornered by someone in a boat, a premonition of his lengthy passage on the same creature in “The Ponds” section of Walden. At another juncture he notes how “the foliate structure is common to the coral and the plumage of birds, and to how large a part of animate nature,” anticipating the famous “railroad-cut” passage in the “Spring” chapter of that book, when he sees in the thawing sandbank the same images of the life force, and he understands, as he puts it, that “vegetation has been made the type of all growth.”69 By this point, in other words, Thoreau already saw in the intricacy of nature the universal laws that underpin all life.
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact,” Thoreau wrote in his final paragraph. “It will one day flower in a truth.” The true “man of science,” he continued, did not learn “by inference and deduction, and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy” with nature.70 This discovery of universal law attendant on the quotidian facts of nature, and the ability to translate this knowledge into memorable prose, hereafter became Thoreau’s hallmarks.
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