CHAPTER XIII

SIGNS OF THE TIMES IN NEW ENGLAND

No reading list is supplied with this chapter, as no special reading for it could profitably be done in a school course. It is presented as a historical link between the chapters on the literature, and should be studied as such.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

New York's loss of the literary leadership

The New England group

Contrast between the men of Concord and the New Yorkers
Concord as a community

The Transcendentalists

Their belief

Two undertakings of the Transcendentalists

The Dial

Brook Farm

The scholars

The historians

The orators

New York's loss of the literary leadership. With the passing. of Irving and Cooper, the leadership in American letters was lost to New York. Indeed, by 1850, before the death of either, four men in eastern Massachusetts were in full career-Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier; and before the death of Irving, in 1859, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Holmes came into their full powers. The New Yorkers had done a very distinguished work. The two prose writers in particular had shown talents of which their countrymen could be proud, and had introduced the New World to the Old. Yet, though their fame was destined to live, their influence on other authors was bound to die with them because they both were looking backward. The roots of these men were struck deep in the

eighteenth century. Cooper's strength lay in his ability to write stories of the romantic past. Even when he brought them up to date, as in "The Pioneers" and "The Prairie," he presented the decline of a passing type of American life. When he wrote of the present pointing to the future, as in "Homeward Bound" and "Home as Found," he was filled with distress and alarm. He was bred in the traditions of aristocracy; he believed in the theories of democracy, but he was very much afraid that they would not turn out well in practice. Irving was a gentleman of the old school. He was loyal to the ideals of his country and confident of its future, but he was fascinated by the traditions of England and Europe. When he wrote of the weaknesses of his city and his fellow citizens, he cast his gentle satires into the form made popular by two Englishmen of a bygone day, and limited himself, as they had done, to commenting on customs, manners, recreations-the external habits of daily life. Bryant, in contrast, was a more modern man. His later life (in which he survived Irving and Cooper by two decades) was finely admirable; but, though his thinking was wise and just, he influenced men less as a thinker than as a stalwart citizen. The New Yorkers, in a word, all wrote as men who were educated in the world of action; they were almost untouched by the deeper currents of human thought which in the nineteenth century were to make great changes in the world.

The New England group. By 1821, when the "Sketch Book" and "The Spy" and "Thanatopsis" had all appeared, there was growing up in the quieter surroundings of Boston a generation of New England boys with a different sort of training. They all went to and through college, most of them to Harvard, and after college they set to reading philosophy. Many of them came from a long line of Puritan ancestry, as Bryant did. Unlike Bryant, several of them felt a distrust and dislike for the sternness of the old creeds. Yet they had the strength of Puritan character in them and the born habit of thinking deeply on the things that are not seen and eternal. What was new in

them was that they were prepared to think independently and to come to their own conclusions. The reading of these boys was no longer chiefly in Pope, Addison, and Goldsmith. It was in the great English writers who were just arriving at fameWordsworth, Coleridge,

and Carlyle-or in the French and German philosophers.

Contrast between the men of Concord and the New Yorkers. In the Concord groupEmerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne-the contrast with the New Yorkers is particularly striking. They were anything but men of the world. When they began to write they stayed in the seclusion of little villages and waited patiently. They matured slowly. Emerson was past middle life before America heeded him; Hawthorne was forty-six at the time of his first marked success; Thoreau's fame did not come till after his death. They were not "teamworkers." Emerson was a clergyman for a short while, but retired in the very year when Bryant began his long service with the Evening Post; Hawthorne was a recluse for fourteen years after college and then held positions reluctantly for only half of his remaining life; Thoreau never put on the harness. They were not swept into the current of city life,-"warped out of their own orbits,"-but, instead, they made Concord,

OLD CHURCH, CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS

whose "chief product" was literature, more famous than any center of shipping or banking or manufacture.

Concord as a community. "Concord is a little town," Emerson wrote in his Journal, "and yet has its honors. We get our handful of every ton that comes to the city." In his address at the two hundredth anniversary in 1835 he dwelt on his pride in its history and character. He traced the earliest settlement, the dividing up of the land, the events leading up to the Revolution, and, in the presence of some of the aged survivors, the firing by the embattled farmers of "the shot heard round the world" in 1775. The institution in Concord that most appealed to him was the town meeting, where the whole body of voters met to transact the public business. The meetings of those two hundred years had witnessed much that was petty, but on the whole they had made for good.

It is the consequence of this institution that not a school-house, a public pew, a bridge, a pound, a mill-dam hath been set up, or pulled down, or altered, or bought, or, sold, without the whole population of this town having a voice in the affair. A general contentment is the result. And the people truly feel that they are lords of the soil. In every winding road, in every stone fence, in the smokes of the poor-house chimney, in the clock on the church, they read their own power, and consider at leisure the wisdom and error of their judgments.

Emerson noted that the English government had recently given to certain American libraries copies of a splendid edition of the "Domesday Book" and other ancient public records of England. A suitable return gift, he thought, would be the printed records of Concord, not simply because Concord was Concord, but because Concord was America. "Tell them the Union has twenty-four states, and Massachusetts is one. Tell them that Massachusetts has three hundred towns, and Concord is one; that in Concord are five hundred rateable polls [that is, taxable voters] and every one has an equal vote." In closing his address Emerson gave his reason for choosing,

when thirty-one years old, to come back to "the fields of his fathers" and spend his life there.

I believe this town to have been the dwelling place at all times since its planting of pious and excellent persons, who walked meekly through the paths of common life, who served God, and loved man, and never let go the hope of immortality. The benediction of their prayers, and of their principles lingers around us.

In the Journal he carries this general indorsement down to particulars that would have been out of place in a public memorial address.

Perhaps in the village we have manners to paint which the city life does not know. Here we have Mr. S., who is man enough to turn away the butcher, who cheats in weight, and introduces another into town. The other neighbors couldn't take such a step. . . . There is the hero who will not subscribe to the flag-staff, or the engine, though all say it is mean. There is the man who gives his dollar, but refuses to give his name, though all other contributors are set down. There is Mr. H., who never loses his spirits, though always in the minority. . Here is Mr. C., who says "honor bright," and keeps it so. Here is Mr. S., who warmly assents to whatever proposition you please to make, and Mr. M., who roundly tells you he will have nothing to do with the thing. Here, too, are not to be forgotten our two companies, the Light Infantry and the Artillery, who brought up one the Brigade Band and one the Brass Band from Boston, set the musicians side by side under the great tree on the Common, and let them play two tunes and jangle and drown each other, and presently got the companies into active hustling and kicking.

Thus Concord was a little community with a noble and dignified past and at the same time with the homely virtues, oddities, and weaknesses of a New England village. In these respects it was a fit dwelling place for the men who made it famous, for they were like the town in being both finely idealistic and very human. The contrast with the New York of these same years is a vivid one.