Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/773

Rh AMERICAN LITERATURE 729 conflicts is remarkable. Though at variance with the older creeds of Christendom, Channing s writings are everywhere marked by a reverential spirit, and not un- frequently by a touch of asceticism inherited from the Puritan days, whose abstract doctrines alone he proposed to modify. On the other hand, he admired the higher forms of Art, and in his eloquent essays on Self-culture anticipated much that has been said more recently by Emerson. He loved beauty as well as virtue for itself, and his style, except on rare occasions, is free from the defects of taste so frequent in the writings of his con temporaries. His reviews of Milton and Fenelon abound in passages as the picture of religious peace in the latter which exhibit the delicacy and the breadth of his rker. sympathies. Theodore Parker unlike Channing assails the whole basis of the old theology, and frequently errs from arrogance and impetuosity. He had, perhaps, a more powerful- but a less highly cultivated mind. He was a pupil of the transcendental movement of New England, to which, because of its influence on literature and its association with the most original thinker of the New World, we must accord some space. auseen- In the early years of this century the mental philosophy atalism. O f the West, beyond that which was a handmaid to the Calvinistic theology, was limited to commentaries on Locke and Brown and the eclecticism of Cousin, when the repub- lication of Sartor Resartus, and the works of the German idealists which it introduced, gave life and voice to a new intellectual world. Ideas which filter slowly into English soil and abide there for a generation, flash like comets through the electric atmosphere of America. Coleridge and Carlyle were hailed as prophets in Boston while their own countrymen were still examining their credentials. The rate of this transformation was surpassed by its thoroughness. The converts put their teachers to the blush ; and in recoil from solid Scotch psychology and practical materialism, rushed to the outer verges of idealism, mysticism, and pan theism. Their quarterly magazine, the Dial, during the space of four years represented their views throughout four volumes of miscellaneous merit. The Dial is a pantheon from which only Calvinists and Utilitarians are excluded, where the worshippers, Parker, Fuller, Alcott, and a host, meet and sing hymns to Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, Goethe, Tieck, and Richter, set to German music; and pass from antiquated laudations of Homer and Shakespeare to friendly recognitions of new heresies ; from thoughts on labour to puffs of poetasters; from Hindoo mythology and Chinese ethics to 19th century truisms about progress and union, prudence and humanity; from soaring among the heights of a modern religion of beauty to raking among the tangled roots and dead leaves of a second-hand Orientalism. But those vapours of ideal ism might have soon faded into the light of common day, had not all their best aspirations been concentrated and nerson. vitalised by Mr R. W. Emerson. His first oration, delivered at Cambridge thirty-five years ago the refrain of which is the independence of American literature is referred to by recent critics as a landmark in the annals of their country. In this discourse as in the six volumes through which the author enforces the same conceptions there is scarce any thing of which, taken separately, we need fail to trace the pedigree. Fichte had many years before spoken in the same strain of the vocation and nature of the scholar; the view of science comes from Swedenborg and Schelling; and the dignity of labour from Carlyle. The originality, as is the case with the author s whole system of thought, is in the combination which, it may be, is the only kind of origin ality now possible. His position, as far as it is tenable, illustrates the fact that the divisions of philosophy are being continually altered as old systems form affinities with new beliefs and historical conditions. Mysticism in the iNew World has been combined with the opposite extravagances of Mount Lebanon and Oneida Creek, but it has been dis tinguished from idealism proper by its exaltation of emotion above reasoning. Mr Emerson, defining transcendentalism as &quot; the saturnalia of faith,&quot; differs from the older mystics in his absolute rejection of all external authority, his almost arrogant confidence in the sufficiency of the inner light, and his new American preference for the active to the passive sides of life. He has an historical sympathy with the un satisfied aspirations of all ages, with the day-dreams of restlessness in search of rest that inspired the quest of the Sangreal, and led the monks to Christianise the eastern Nirvana; that laid out Brook Farm in Massachusetts, and gave Novalis and Newman back to the fold of Rome : but he will not be drawn by them into any church with walls. All religions are to him &quot; the same wine poured into dif ferent glasses.&quot; He drinks the wine, and tries to shatter the glasses. His unflinching scepticism pierces the armour of all definite dogmas, while he entrenches himself behind an optimism like that of Spinoza. Mysticism has in the main been fatalistic. As a developed system, its natural home is in the East; where the influence of great uniform ities of soil and climate have only in recent years been partially counteracted by the conquering activities of an energetic race. Beneath her burning sun and surrounded by her tropic vegetation, the mass of men were overwhelmed by a sense of their insignificance, and this feeling of sub jugation was intensified by absolute forms of government. The same listlessness which permitted a secular and priestly despotism, led its victims to welcome the idea of a final absorption of their individuality. Their philosophical ambition was to pass into the framework of a gigantic nature, to be &quot; rolled round the earth s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.&quot; There is a relic of this spirit in the dropo^io, aTrdOeia, and ^pe/xi a, which are the amis at once of the Epicurean and Stoic systems; but the doctrines of passive obedience had been banished from Greece as early as the overthrow of the Pythagorean institute. They revived in the dark and middle ages, when the church took upon itself the task of legislating for the intellect; and even the precursors of the Reformation were possessed with an almost oppressive sentiment of resignation. The reproduction of the Oriental spirit in America, in so far as it is genuine and not the mere expression of a love of far-fetched quotations, may be attributed to external influences in some respects comparable to those which weighed on the inhabitants of ancient India. In the Western, as formerly in the Eastern World, nature still struggles to assert her old supremacy, and threatens to domineer over men s minds by the vastness of her empire. But in other respects the conditions are reversed. In place of stagnation and uniform although magnificent decay, we have to deal with the manifold progress of 19th century civilisation in a land where every one is more or less inspired by the resolve of the modern mariner with an ancient name to &quot; sail beyond the sunset &quot; in pursuit of fresh adventures; where the energies of the individual are in constant, and in the long run triumphant, straggle with all that tends to restrict the full sweep of his arm or to retard the freest activities of his mind. Where every moon sees new forests felled, new rivers crossed, new fleets built, new tribes amalgamated, new discussions raised, and new problems solved, mysticism, if it exist at all, must take on a form very different from that handed down from the East of 3000 years ago to the Alexandrians, and trans mitted to the European ages of implicit faith by the pseudo Dionysius. Mr Emerson strikes the key-note of the dif ference when he writes, &quot; Feudalism and orientalism had long enough thought it majestic to do nothing; the modern I. -- 92