The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880, Vol. III, Part 84

Author: Jewett, Clarence F; Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897
Publication date: 1880-1881
Publisher: Boston : J.R. Osgood
Number of Pages: 770

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The literature of Germany was now beginning to exert a manifest influence on studious minds in New England. Among the scholars of a generation before, a knowledge of Latin and Greek was far more common than a knowledge of French and German. And long after French became a matter of course, the great German writers remained practically unknown

+ 1 First Report, 1838.

2 [See Mr. Dillaway's chapter in Vol. IV. - ED.]

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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.

on these shores. As early as 1824, indeed, George Bancroft, newly re- turned from the schools and the scholars of Germany, had published in the North American Review translations of the minor poems of Schiller and Goethe. But we find no further indication of interest in this direction until 1831, when a professorship of German language and literature was created at Harvard College. The place was fortunately filled by the appointment of Charles Follen, who, upon assuming the duties of his office, delivered an inaugural address, setting forth the high and varied character of the litera- ture of Germany, as well as its strong claims on the attention of readers in America. During the next year Professor Follen delivered a course of public lectures in Boston on Schiller. In 1833 Andrews Norton and Charles Folsom established the Select Journal of Foreign Periodical Literature, in which papers appeared on Goethe, Fichte, Jean Paul, and Heine. Papers began to appear also, from time to time, in the Christian Examiner, by F. H. Hedge, George Ripley, Theodore Parker, and others, on Schiller, Swedenborg, Herder, Strauss, Schelling, and Kant.

Such articles of Carlyle and Coleridge as found their way to this country greatly helped on the growing appreciation of German writers, until it seemed for a time as if the long-cherished English models, upon which the early literature of the country had been exclusively fashioned, were to be superseded by this new and strong Teutonic influence. " What work nobler," said many enthusiastic students in the words of Carlyle, " than transplant- ing foreign thought into the barren domestic soil?"

It was under such conditions that there grew up in Boston a little coterie of literary persons, not all producers of literature, in whom a lively dissatis- faction with the too practical and unimaginative life of the little New England city, not yet quite emancipated from the joyless traditions of its founders, was mingled with a somewhat indefinite notion of the processes by which the better life might be achieved. They have left plentiful testi- mony concerning their attitude towards the prevailing conditions, and their desires and hopes of amelioration.

" Transcendentalism," says W. H. Channing, " was an assertion of the inalienable integrity of man, of the immanence of divinity in instinct. On the somewhat stunted stock of Unitarianism, whose characteristic dogma was trust in individual reason as correlative to supreme wisdom, had been grafted German idealism as taught by masters of most different schools, - by Kant and Jacobi, Fichte and Novalis, Schelling and Hegel, Schleier- macher and DeWette; by Madame de Stael, Cousin, Coleridge, and Carlyle ; and the result was a vague, yet exalting conception of the godlike nature of the human spirit." 1

" They see," said Margaret Fuller, " that political freedom does not necessarily produce liberality of mind; nor freedom in church institutions, vital religion. And seeing that these changes cannot be wrought from with- out inward, they are trying to quicken the soul, that they may work from

1 Memoir of Margaret Fuller, vol. ii. p. 12.

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THE PRESS, ETC., OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.

within outward. Disgusted with the vulgarity of a commercial aristocracy, they become radicals; disgusted with the materialistic working of rational religion, they become mystics. They quarrel with all that is, because it is not spiritual enough."

The first public utterances of the new faith were in three remarkable addresses by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Two of these- read, the one before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, in July, 1837; the other a year later, before the literary societies of Dartmouth College-arc substantially identical in subject ; both treating of the opportunities, the resources, priv- ileges, and duties of the American scholar; summoning, as with the blast of a trumpet, the thinking man of the New World to come out from the empty ways of classic and European tradition, and take his rightful place at the head of the tumultuous army of workers. The scholar must live not alone in the world of books, but in the world of men. " Inaction is cowardice, . and there can be no scholar without the heroic mind." He must study and guide the life of to-day, not overvaluing the methods of the past. "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a closc. Neither Greece nor Rome, nor the three unities of Aristotle, nor the three kings of Cologne, nor the College of the Sorbonne, nor the Edinburgh Review, is to command any longer." He must trust his own intuitions, his own insight. "Let him not quit his belief that a pop-gun is a pop-gun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom!" He must be frec and brave. "Fcar is a thing which the scholar, by his very function, puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance." He must respect himself and his calling, despising alike the praise and the blame of men. " How mean to go blaz- ing, a gaudy butterfly, in fashionable or political saloons, the fool of society, the fool of notoricty, a topic for newspapers, a piece of the street, and forfeiting the real prerogative of the russet coat, the privacy and the true and warm heart of the citizen !" " Fatal to the man of letters, fatal to man, is the lust of display, the seeming that unmakes our being."

This was high teaching, unexampled in quality and force in the litera- ture of college festivals. The third address applied the same principles to the test, not of the scholar, but of the preacher. This was the memorable address to the graduating class of the Divinity School at Cambridge, in the midsummer of 1838, of which the accents still linger in the ears that listened to it. The principles insisted on in the two discourses above spoken of, as necessary to the true scholar, are here insisted on with even loftier clo- quence as vital to the true preacher, - sincerity, truth, courage, and a serene faith in the divine order of creation which provides that all the forces of Nature work with him who honestly endeavors. "Whilst a man secks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of Nature." "Character is always known; thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lic - for example, the taint of vanity, any attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appear-

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ance - will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all Nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things, alive or brute, are vouchers; and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear you witness."

These noble discourses, in which the elevation of thought is matched by the vigor and picturesqueness of style, determined the position of Mr. Emerson, not only as the leader of the Transcendentalists, but as the head of the literary class in this country. How steadily he has maintained that position through all the mental growth and development of forty years need not here be told. The first series of his collected essays was published in 1841; the second series in 1844. A volume of poems appeared in 1847. More than any other writer who has permanently enriched our literaturc, Mr. Emerson's relations with the public have been those of personal teach- ing. By far the greater portion of his writings have been first read from the lyceum platform; but the lecture - which more than any other form of literary work, if we except the sermon, tempts to diffuseness, to inaccu- racy, to commonplace - has never carried him beyond the temperance'and concentration of his earlier academic addresses.

Among the earnest men and women who welcomed the " new views," perhaps there was no one who did more to stimulate their growth and, however indirectly, to promote their diffusion than Margaret Fuller. She wrote little for the printer, but the testimony to her in- spiring influence in teach- ing, in correspondence, and in conversation above all, is abundant and unanimous. Her studies of German literature had begun in 1832, or thereabout, under the influence of Carlyle's papers in Fraser's Magazine, and elsewhere. In 1839 she pub- lished a translation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe; and, two years later, a portion of the letters of Gunderode and Bettine.1 When, in 1840, the Transcendentalists had got so far as to desire an organ through which they could give a readier and wider publicity to their views than they were likely to attain through any of the established and more conser- vative periodicals, Miss Fuller was looked to on all sides to become the editor of the new journal. Mr. Emerson's account of the origin and career of the Dial is at once so concise and so comprehensive that I cannot do better than cite it here : -

" This work, which when it began concentrated a good deal of hope and affection, had its origin in a club of speculative students, who found the air in America getting a little close and stagnant ; and the agitation had perhaps the fault of being too secondary or bookish in its origin, or caught, not from primary instincts, but from English and still more from German books. The journal was commenced with much hope and liberal promises of many co-operators ; but the workmen of sufficient culture for a political and philosophical magazine were too few; and as the pages were filled by unpaid

1 [See chapters by Mr. Bradford and Mrs. Cheney in Vol. IV. - ED.]

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THE PRESS, ETC., OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.

contributors, each of whom had, according to the usage and necessity of this country, some paying employment, the journal did not get his best work, but his second-best. . . . For these reasons it never had a large circulation, and was discontinued after four years. But the Dial betrayed, through all its juvenility, timidity, and conven- tional rubbish, some sparks of the true love and hope, and of the piety and spiritual law which had moved its friends and founders ; and it was received by its early sub- scribers with almost a religious welcome. Many years after it was brought to a close, Margaret was surprised in England by very warm testimony to its merits ; and in 1848 the writer of these pages found it holding the same affectionate place in many a private book-shelf in England and Scotland which it had secured at home. Good or bad, it cost a good deal of precious labor from those who served it, and from Margaret most of all." 1

The contents of the first number of the Dial for January, 1841, are hardly less interesting to-day than they were forty years ago. The address " from the Editors to the Reader," with which it opened, was by Mr. Emerson, and was a strong and stirring statement of the motives which urged the founders of the new journal. "They have obeyed with great joy the strong current of thought and feeling which for a few years past has led many sincere per- sons in New England to make new demands upon literature, and to repro- bate that rigor of our conventions of literature and education which is turning us to stone, which renounces hope, which looks only backward, which asks only such a future as the past, which suspects improvement, and holds nothing in so much horror as new views and the dreams of youth." Margaret Fuller contributed " A short essay on Critics " and an account of a recent exhibition of Allston's pictures; Theodore Parker, a paper on " The Divine Presence in Nature and the Soul; " George Ripley, a review of Brownson's writings; W. H. Channing, a psychological study called " Ernest the Seeker; " Bronson Alcott, a heterogeneous collection of " Orphic Sayings; " J. S. Dwight, a paper on "The Religion of Beauty" and a brief review of " The Concerts of the past Winter; " and Mr. William D. Wilson, a notice of Channing's translation of Jouffroy. The poetry of the number included "The Problem," by Mr. Emerson, and lesser poems by Thoreau, C. P. Cranch, and Charles Emerson. Few magazines, we imagine, have set out for their readers a more inviting table.

Of the Dial writers, the greater part were little given to frequent pub- lishing. Mr. Emerson, writing slowly, has in the course of a generation happily accumulated a considerable body of enduring literature. Mr. Alcott, after his Conversations with Children, published in 1836, and the little volume on Spiritual Culture, printed little or nothing until the Atlantic offered him, twenty years later, the opportunity of publishing such fragmentary and miscellaneous reflections as he was fond of putting forth. * Margaret Fuller's fame rests not so much on her books, Summer on the Lakes, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, or her letters to the Tribune, as on the traditions of her extraordinary conversation, her insatiable appetite

1 Memoir of Margaret Fuller, i. 323-

VOL. 111 .- 83.

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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.

for knowledge and study, and her personal influence over all who were brought into her society. Thoreau, indecd, did not disdain, in spite of his small opinion of his fellow-men, to set down his impressions of Nature for their edification ; and his books are characteristic of his most eccentric and non-conforming disposition. His Record of a Weck on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, or Life in the Woods, both published eight or ten years after the experiences which they describe, were all that he hin- self sent to the press; but from his manuscripts his friends were able to prepare and publish after his death several volumes, to the first of which, Excursions in Field and Forcst, Mr. Emerson prefixed a tender and enthusi- astic memoir of his friend. The Mainc Woods and Cape Cod are interesting additions to a list of writings which only partially reveal a soul of singular and fascinating individuality.

Transcendentalism had its day and passed. Ardently believed in and upheld by the little band of the faithful, a target for much good-natured raillery from the unregenerate, in no great time it ceased to be proclaimed. Perhaps its atmosphere was a little thin and chill for the sustenance of a hard-working New England community; but the ideas and sentiments of the Transcendentalists were neither abandoned nor lost sight of, and their mark was long visible in the literature, the theology, the politics, and the art of New England.1

Literary production was now visibly increasing, and the distribution of books was accomplished to an extent not before known through the medium of circulating libraries. Another important medium of communi- cation between the writer and the public now comes into prominence. The lecture system, instantly successful in the cities, was swiftly extended through the country, until no considerable town could afford to be without its annual course of lectures extending more or less through the winter months, and enlisting the aid of writers more or less famous according to the resources of the place. The Lowell Institute of Boston, inaugurated on the first of December, 1839, by an address from Edward Everett, has main- tained to this day from six to ten courses of lectures every year, in which many of the most eminent men of this country and England, in literature, science, and theology, have read careful essays on almost every conceivable topic related to those departments.2 " It has been ascertained," said Mr. Everett in the opening address above alluded to, " that twenty-six courses were delivered in Boston during the last season, not including those which consisted of less than eight lectures. . . . These lectures were attended in the aggregate by about thirteen thousand five hundred persons, at an ex- pense of less than twelve thousand dollars. This is probably a greater

1 [The reader may compare a parallel view of the rise and decline of Transcendentalism in Mr. George P. Bradford's continuation of Dr. Ripley's chapter on " Philosophic Thought in Boston," in Vol. IV., treated in its relation to

living and believing, and so a good counterpa? to the present sketch. - ED.]

2 [Sce an account of the Institute in Mr. Dill- away's chapter on "Education," etc., in Boston, in Vol. IV. - ED.]

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THE PRESS, ETC., OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.

number of lectures than was ever delivered in any previous year, but the number of courses has been steadily increasing from the time of their first commencement on the present footing, about twenty years ago." 1

The lecture system, in its best estate an admirable educational instrument, has been subject to dreadful abuse. The unbounded appetite of the New England communities for this form of intellectual nourishment has tempted vast hordes of charlatans and pretenders to try their fortunes in this profit- able field. "The hungry sheep look up and are not fed." The pay of the lecturer has grown more exorbitant in proportion to the dilution of his mixture, until professional jokers have usurped the places once graced by philosophers and poets ; and to-day the lyceums are served by a new species of broker, who ekes out the failing literary material with the better enter- tainment of music and play-acting.

But the lecture has been, and perhaps will yet be again, of immense value in the education of the people, - less perhaps by the actual communication of knowledge, which is too easily taken in to be long remembered, than by cultivating a general taste for it, and by pointing out the avenues to it. The extent of the influence exerted year after year by the popular lectures of Agassiz, in diffusing among the people not only a knowledge and com- prehension of the elementary facts of those branches of natural science which he had made his own, but a taste and inclination for serious study in them, cannot be estimated. The extent of the influence of Mr. Emerson on the tone of public opinion and sentiment in New England is to be best conceived when we remember that his delightful and ennobling lectures were read, winter after winter, to audiences composed by no means chiefly of scholars and highly cultivated persons, but of earnest people in the common walks of life, who loved to sweeten their unromantic lives with such enter- tainment. For ten years the lectures of Theodore Parker varied in number from, forty to eighty during the season.2

I These figures were taken from Horace Mann's third report as secretary of the Massa- chusetts Board of Education, which further adds, " that in the State of Massachusetts, outside of Suffolk County, there were found in operation one hundred and thirty-seven lyccums, etc., maintaining annual courses, at which the aver- age attendance for the year had been thirty-two thousand six hundred and ninety-eight." Mr. Mann adds this remark : " It has often been re- peated by numerous and accurate observers that in the city of Boston the general topics of con- versation, and the mode of treating them, have been greatly improved since what may be called the reign of popular lectures."- Report of Secre- tary of Board of Education, 1839, P. 74.

2 Mr. Parker has left us the most emphatic · judgment as to the value of the lecture system to the mental development of the people. In a letter dated " Northern New York, railroad cars, March 12, 1857," during the last of his great

western lecture tours, he writes thus : " This business of lecturing is an original contrivance for educating the people. The world has noth- ing like it. In it arc combined the best things of the church (i. e., the preaching) and of the col- lege (i. e., the informing thought) with some of the fun of the theatre. Besides, it gives the 'rural districts' a chance to see the men they read about ; to see the lions, - for the lecture is also a show to the eyes. Now I think this one of the most admirable means of educat- ing the people. For ten years past, six or eight of the most progressive and powerful minds in America have been lecturing fifty to a hundred times in the year. Surely some must dance after so much piping, and that of so mov- ing a sort !" Feb. 11, 1858, Mr. Parker writes to S. J. May : " This has been a stupid winter to me. I have less than half my old joyous power of work. I have lectured seventy-three times, always close at hand, and have done for

660

THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON. .

A curious instance of the mental activity which was generated in the days of the Transcendental movement is furnished by the erratic career of Orestes A. Brownson, who, having been reared among the influences of a rigid Presbyterianism, had freed himself from them when he came to man's estate, and had gone, as so often happens, to the other extreme of general negation. From this dismal condition he shortly emerged as a Unitarian, taking, some years later, the charge of an independent religious society in Boston. He had the restless energy, the personal independence, and dis- like of personal accountability which belong to the free-lance in literature ; and he added to this a mind unusually · well equipped for polemical dis- cussion and philosophie inquiry. He had been a frequent writer in the Christian Examiner, but he chafed under the mildest editorial control; and in 1838 established, with characteristic confidence, a review of his own, the Boston Quarterly Review, which he maintained almost single-handed for five years.1 In 1842 Mr. Brownson united his Quarterly with the Democratic Review of New York, of which he became an editor; but the connection proved to be neither congenial nor profitable, and in less than two years he returned to Boston and established a new personal organ under the title of Brownson's Quarterly Review. The philosophic radicalism of the old organ had now yielded to a reactionary influence which had carried Mr. Brownson at a bound all the way from rationalism to Romanism, and the old allies were now targets for the sharpest arrows of the new and zealous convert. The Quarterly was maintained with unabated vigor, and still with scarcely any assistance from other writers, until 1864, and was so far from exhaust- ing the productive ability of its extraordinary conductor that he found time to write and publish a succession of books on various subjects of a philo- sophie character, of which some were in the form of novels, and others in the more usual guise of a learned treatise, but all displaying in full measure the vivacity and mental resource which had marked his earlier writings. In 1873 he recommenced the Review, but his death, two years later, put a final stop to it.

The study of German literature, once effectively introduced among us, became rapidly, as a matter of course, a part of every educational scheme which pretended to comprehensiveness. For some years, however, the reading in this language was mostly confined to the poets. In 1848 Fred- erick H. Hedge published in an octavo volume a collection of extracts from the Prose Writers of Germany, including, besides Goethe and Schiller, many writers now familiar enough in this country, but of whom at that time little more was known than the names. Kant, Lessing, Wieland, Jean Paul,

the season. Last year I lectured eighty times, all the way from the Mississippi to the Penob- SCOL."

1 Of this work Mr. Ripley said in the Dial : " This journal stands alone in the history of periodical works. It was undertaken by a single individual, without the co-operation of friends, with no external patronage, supported by no

sectarian interests, and called for by no motives but the inward promptings of the anthor's own soul. .. . The best indication of the culture of philosophy in this country, and the application of its speculative results to the theory of relig- ion, the criticism of literary productions, and the institutions of society, we presume no one will dispute, is to be found in this journal."

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THE PRESS, ETC., OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.

Hegel, Fichte, Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis, Hoffman, and others were repre- sented by selections more or less ample, accompanied with brief biograph- ical notices ; and the work was not only an interesting and valuable addition to the libraries of readers, but had a sensible influence in widening the range and confirming the taste for German studies.

Geo: Ficknor!

The next year after the publication of Dr. Hedge's German selections appeared the History of Spanish Literature, by Mr. George Ticknor, - a scholarly and conscientious work, and a monument of persistent and long continued labor, but dealing with a literature for the most part not only

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The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880, Vol. III, Part 84

Author: Jewett, Clarence F; Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897 Publication date: 1880-1881 Publisher: Boston : J.R. Osgood Number of Pages: 770

Author: Jewett, Clarence F; Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897
Publication date: 1880-1881
Publisher: Boston : J.R. Osgood
Number of Pages: 770