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tunities and employment, in marriage and property ownership; and they were a vigorous auxiliary to the temperance movement and to the campaigns for factory reforms affecting women and child workers, especially in the New England cotton mills.

TRANSCENDENTALISM

The many important modifications in religious doctrine and in sectarian organizations, especially among Protestant denominations, were of importance for literature principally in New England, where a strong intellectualist mysticism among Unitarian thinkers stimulated the transcendental movement. Even so, Unitarianism and transcendentalism became a concern of our major literature only because of the great stature of Emerson and Thoreau. All other transcendental writers, for example, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, the Channings, and Orestes Brownson, were at most of secondary importance.

Yet for the history of ideas in the United States, transcendentalism wrote an important chapter. It was the expression for one age of an intuitional idealism which has taken various forms in American thought as a countercurrent to rationalistic and authoritarian orthodoxies from early times; whether among dissenters from Puritanism, or Puritan and Quaker mystics, or, as late as 1897, in William James's hypothesis of a "Will to Believe."

Transcendentalism was a philosophical dissent from Unitarianism, which represented the compromise of rational Deism

with Calvinism, retaining the rationalists' acceptance of liberal scientific thought, and rejecting extreme concepts concerning the original depravity and the inherited guilt of man. In Unitarianism the Godhead was conceived as Unity, not Trinity; it was the human potential in the acts and words of Jesus that gave them sublime importance; and the Holy Ghost was the divine spark in every man. The rising young transcendentalists asserted that the Unitarian creed had become conventional and complacent in its orthodox fidelity to Christian dogmas of supernaturalism. Transcendentalists rejected Locke's materialistic psychology in favor of the idealism of the German thinker Immanuel Kant (The Critique of Pure Reason, 1781), who declared that the "transcendental" knowledge in the mind of man was innate, or a priori; the transcendentalists interpreted this view as supporting the belief that intuition surpassed reason as a guide to the truth. Thus they evolved a theological monism, in which the divine immanence of God coexisted with the universe and the individual; they asserted the doctrine of correspondence between the microcosm of the individual mind and the macrocosmic Oversoul of the universe; and hence they derived an enlarged conception of the sanctity of the individual and his freedom to follow his intuitional knowledge.

American transcendentalists were influenced by such British writers as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle; they drew on such German idealistic philoso

phers as Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling, and on the writings of Goethe, Richter, Herder, and others; they sought confirmation among the ancients: the Greek philosophers, especially Plato, the Neoplatonists, and the Hindu wisdom of the age-old Vedas. They read the Christian mystics from the Middle Ages to Swedenborg.

The Transcendental Club, an informal group, met oftenest at Emerson's Concord home, and its members were chiefly responsible for The Dial (18401844), the famous little magazine that Emerson edited for two of its four years. One group of transcendentalists concerned themselves with reform movements and social revolt; Thoreau is the most noteworthy of these in respect to literary values. Brook Farm (1841) and Fruitlands (1842) were agrarian experiments in communal living supported briefly by transcendentalists concerned with the social order.

INEVITABLE CONFLICT

From colonial days, antislavery leaders had preached gradual emancipation; but in 1831, a group led by William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the newly founded abolition magazine, The Liberator, had formed the militant New England AntiSlavery Society. Two years later, all such organizations met to

gether in Philadelphia to found the American Anti-Slavery Society. Among the many who attended was Whittier, who thereafter gave the bulk of his limited strength to the cause. The crusade for abolition was carried on in press and pulpit, and on the lecture platform. The succeeding events are too well-known to require formal discussion.

When the Mexican War threatened, Lowell abandoned the dream world of Sir Launfal and lighted the caustic flame of the Biglow Papers. Longfellow's "Building of the Ship," like Whittier's "Ichabod," reveals the varied emotional reactions of the period. Thoreau's resistance to the Mexican War involved an act of civil disobedience, and he then published the famous essay of that title, initiating a philosophy of pacific resistance. Upon the enactment of the strengthened Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, even the pacifistic Emerson wrote firmly in his Journal, "I will not obey it, by God." Act by act, as the following texts reveal, our literature reflects the later events of the drama: the KansasNebraska Bill, the Kansas insurrections, John Brown's life and death, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the disruption of the Democrats, the new Republican party, the election of Lincoln, and the war itself.

Romantic Rediscovery: Nature, Man, Society

WASHINGTON IRVING

(1783-1859)

As a writer, Washington Irving was so naturally endowed that he seemed to drift into his career at the whim of circumstances and his own inclinations. Humorists are always likely to be taken for granted, and there has been no searching revaluation of Irving such as should have been provoked by the perceptive biography by Stanley T. Williams (1935). Actually, with Poe and Hawthorne, Irving has survived all other American writers of fiction before Melville, and he still finds new readers with every passing generation. He was the first great prose stylist of American romanticism, and his familiar style was destined to outlive the formal prose of such contemporaries as Scott and Cooper, and to provide a model for the prevailing prose narrative of the future.

The apparent ease of his writing is not simply that of the gifted amateur; it results from his purposeful identification of his whole personality with what he wrote. He was urbane and

worldly, yet humorous and gentle; a robust connoisseur, yet innately reserved; a patrician, yet sympathetic toward the people. His vast reading, following only the impulse of his own enthusiasms, resulted in a rich if random literary inheritance, revealed in all that he wrote. His response to the period of Addison, Swift, and Johnson, with its great and graceful style, and his enthusiasm for the current European romanticism, enabled him to combine these with his independent literary personality and American roots.

It is instructive to consider the number of his literary innovations. He was our first great belletrist, writing always for pleasure, and to produce pleasure; yet readers of all classes responded to him in a country in which the didactic and utilitarian had formerly prevailed. He gave an impetus both to the extravagant American humor of which Mark Twain became the classic, and to the urbane wit that has survived in writers rang

ing from Holmes and Lowell to the New Yorker wits of the present century. In his Sketch Book appeared the first modern short stories and the first great American juvenile literature. He was among the first of the moderns to write good history and biography as literary entertainment. He introduced the familiar essay to America. On his own whimsical terms, Irving restored the waning Gothic romances which Poe soon infused with psychological subtleties. subtleties. The scope of his life and his writing was international, and produced a certain breadth of view in his readers; yet his best-known stories awakened an interest in the life of American regions from the Hudson valley to the prairies of the West. His influence abroad, as writer, as visitor, and as diplomat, was that of a gifted cultural ambassador, at home on both continents, at a time when his young country badly needed such representation. He was the only American writer of his generation who could chide the British in an atmosphere of good humor.

The events of Irving's life are characterized by the same casual approach and distinguished results. Gently born and well educated, the youngest of eleven children of a prosperous New York merchant, he began a genteel reading for the law at sixteen, but preferred a literary Bohemianism. At nineteen he published, in his brother's newspaper, his "Jonathan Oldstyle" satires of New York life. By the age of twenty-three, when he was admitted to the New York bar,

he had roamed the Hudson valley and been a literary vagabond in England, Holland, France, and Italy, reading and studying studying what pleased him, which was a great deal, and reveling in the gay world of the theater. Back in New York, he joined with his brother, William, and James Kirke Paulding, in 1807, in producing the Salmagundi papers, Addisonian commentaries on New York society and frivolities. A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), a rollicking burlesque of a current serious history of the early Dutch settlers, has become a classic of humor, and might have launched an immediate career for its author.

A personal tragedy, however, changed his course for a time; the death of his fiancée, Matilda Hoffman, coincided with the demands of the family cutlery firm, and in 1810 he went to Washington as representative of the business. In 1815 he again turned restlessly to his European roving, with headquarters in England during the next seventeen years, but his literary career was soon to catch up with him again. In 1818 the failure of the Irving firm, which had bountifully supported his leisure, threw family responsibilities upon him, and he loyally plunged into the authorship for which he had almost unconsciously prepared himself. The Sketch Book appeared serially in 1819-1820, and in volume form shortly thereafter it at once had an international success. Bracebridge Hall followed in 1822; then he first went to Germany in pursuit

of an interest in German romanticism, which flavored the Tales of a Traveller (1824) and other later writings. Meanwhile in Paris he had met John Howard Payne, the American dramatist and actor, with whom he wrote the brilliant social comedy Charles the Second, or The Merry Monarch.

From 1826 to 1829 he was in Spain on diplomatic business, residing for a time in the Alhambra. His reading at that period, including the study of Spanish historical sources, resulted in a number of important works: A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829), Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1831), a famous volume of stories and sketches-The Alhambra (1832), and "Legends of the Conquest of Spain" (in The Crayon Miscellany, 1835).

Before The Alhambra appeared, he was on his way back to the United States after two years as secretary of the American legation in London (18291831). American reviewers had commented, often with irritation, on his seeming preference for Europe, but the charges were exaggerated. After seventeen years abroad he returned with the desire to portray his own country again, and although such western adventures as A Tour of the Prairies (1835), Astoria (history of Astor's fur trade, 1836), and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (explorations in the Rocky Mountains, 1837), are not among his best work, they

broke new trails in our literature. In 1836 he made his home at Sunnyside, near Tarrytown, so lovingly described years before as "Sleepy Hollow." He had already declined a nomination to Congress; now he declined to run for mayor of New York, or to become Van Buren's secretary of the navy. Instead he wrote a good Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1840), and began the Life of George Washington (published 1855-1859), long a standard work. From 1842 to 1845 he served as minister to Spain, then settled at Sunnyside, which he remodeled and enlarged, while preparing the revised edition of his works, and completing his Washington. The fifth and last volume of the latter appeared just before his death in 1859.

The standard edition of Irving's work is The Works of Washington Irving, Author's Uniform Revised Edition, 21 vols., 1860-1861, reissued in 12 vols., 1881, the source of the texts here reprinted. The Journals of Washington Irving, 3 vols., 1919, were edited by W. P. Trent and G. S. Hellman, and a number of volumes of the letters have

been published. Several later editions, individual volumes, are easily available; note especially Knickerbocker's History of New York, edited by Stanley T. Williams and Tremaine McDowell, 1927, and Edwin T. Bowden, ed., A History of New York, 1964. Washington Irving: Representative Selections, edited by Henry A. Pochmann, American Writers Series, 1934, has a useful introduction and bibliography.

Pierre M. Irving published the first standard Life and Letters ***, 4 vols., 1862-1864; other good lives are those by Charles Dudley Warner, 1890,

and G. S. Hellman, 1925. However, the

definitive biographical and critical study is that by Stanley T. Williams: The Life

of Washington Irving, 2 vols., 1935. See

also Edward Wagenknecht, Washington Irving: Moderation Displayed, 1962, and William L. Hedges, Washington Irving, An American Study, 1965.

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