研究型美国文学备课参考资料
第一部分：Puritanism
思考题：
1．清教主义与美国文化和文学的形成
2．清教主义与美国早期资本主义
3．清教主义与美国人的审美观
4．清教主义与美国人的服饰
The term "Puritan" first began as a taunt or insult applied by traditional Anglicans to
those who criticized or wished to "purify" the Church of England. Although the word
is often applied loosely, "Puritan" refers to two distinct groups: "separating" Puritans,
such as the Plymouth colonists, who believed that the Church of England was corrupt
and that true Christians must separate themselves from it; and non-separating Puritans,
such as the colonists who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed in
reform but not separation. Most Massachusetts colonists were nonseparating Puritans
who wished to reform the established church, largely Congregationalists who believed
in forming churches through voluntary compacts. The idea of compacts or covenants
was central to the Puritans' conception of social, political, and religious organizations.
Several beliefs differentiated Puritans from other Christians. The first was their belief
in predestination. Puritans believed that belief in Jesus and participation in the
sacraments could not alone effect one’s salvation; one cannot choose salvation, for
that is the privilege of God alone. All features of salvation are determined by God’s
sovereignty, including choosing those who will be saved and those who will receive
God’s irresistible grace. The Puritans distinguished between "justification," or the gift
of God's grace given to the elect, and "sanctification," the holy behavior that
supposedly resulted when an individual had been saved; according to The English
Literatures of America, "Sanctification is evidence of salvation, but does not cause it"
(434). When William Laud, an avowed Arminian, became Archbishop of Canterbury
in 1633, the Church of England began to embrace beliefs abhorrent to Puritans: a
focus on the individual’s acceptance or rejection of grace; a toleration of diverse
religious beliefs; and an acceptance of "high church" rituals and symbols.
According to Samuel Eliot Morison’s Oxford History of the American People, the
Puritans "were deeply impressed by a story that their favorite church father, St.
Augustine, told in his Confessions. He heard a voice saying, tolle et lege, ‘Pick up and
read.’ Opening the Bible, his eyes lit on Romans xiii:12-14: ‘The night is far spent,
the day is at hand; not in carousing and drunkenness, not in debauchery and lust, not
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in strife and jealousy. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for
the flesh, to fulfil the lusts therof’" (62).
The concept of the covenant also provided a practical means of organizing
churches. Since the state did not control the church, the Puritans reasoned, there
must be an alternate method of of establishing authority. According to Harry S. Stout,
"For God's Word to function freely, and for each member to feel an integral part of the
church's operations, each congregation must be self-sufficient, containing within itself
all the offices and powers necessary for self-regulation. New England's official
apologist, John Cotton, termed this form of church government 'Congregational,'
meaning that all authority would be located within particular congregations" (The
New England Soul 17).
Cotton's sermon at Salem in 1636 described the basic elements of this system in
which people covenanting themselves to each other and pledging to obey the word of
God might become a self-governing church. Checks and balances in this
self-governing model included the requirement that members testify to their
experience of grace (to ensure the purity of the church and its members) and the
election of church officials to ensure the appropriate distribution of power, with a
pastor to preach, a teacher to "attend to doctrine," elders to oversee the "acts of
spiritual Rule," and a deacon to manage the everyday tasks of church organization
and caring for the poor (Stout 19). The system of interlocking covenants that bound
households to each other and to their ministers in an autonomous, self-ruling
congregation was mirrored in the organization of towns. In each town, male church
members could vote to elect "selectmen" to run the town's day-to-day affairs,
although town meetings were held to vote on legislation.
Thus the ultimate authority in both political and religious spheres was God's word, but
the commitments made to congregation and community through voluntary obedience
to covenants ensured order and a functional system of religious and political
governance. This system came to be called the Congregational or "New England
Way." According to Stout, "By locating power in the particular towns and defining
institutions in terms of local covenants and mutual commitments, the dangers of
mobility and atomism--the chief threats to stability in the New World--were
minimized. . . . As churches came into being only by means of a local covenant, so
individual members could be released from their sacred oath only with the
concurrence of the local body. . . . Persons leaving without the consent of the body
sacrificed not only church membership but also property title, which was contingent
on local residence. Through measures like these, which combined economic and
spiritual restraints, New England towns achieved extraordinarily high levels of
persistence and social cohesion" (23).
The plain style is the simplest of the three classical forms of style. In choosing the
plain style, Puritan writers eschewed features common to the rhetoric of the day; they
declined to stuff their sermons with the rhetorical flourishes and learned quotations of
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the metaphysical style of sermon, believing that to be the province of Archbishop
Laud and his followers. The Puritan sermon traditionally comprised three parts:
doctrine, reasons, and uses. According to Perry Miller in The New England Mind,
"The Anglican sermon is constructed on a symphonic scheme of progressively
widening vision; it moves from point to point by verbal analysis, weaving larger and
larger embroideries about the words of the text. The Puritan sermon quotes the text
and "opens" it as briefly as possible, expounding circumstances and context,
explaining its grammatical meanings, reducing its tropes and schemata to prose, and
setting forth its logical implications; the sermon then proclaims in a flat, indicative
sentence the "doctrine" contained in the text or logically deduced from it, and
proceeds to the first reason or proof. Reason follows reason, with no other transition
than a period and a number; after the last proof is stated there follow the uses or
applications, also in numbered sequence, and the sermon ends when there is nothing
more to be said. The Anglican sermon opens with a pianissimo exordium, gathers
momentum through a rising and quickening tempo, comes generally to a rolling,
organ-toned peroration; the Puritan begins with a reading of the text, states the reason
in an order determined by logic, and the uses in an enumeration determined by the
kinds of person in the throng who need to be exhorted or reproved, and it stops
without flourish or resounding climax" (332-3).
American Puritanism
Early in the 17th century some Puritan groups separated from the Church of England.
Among these were the Pilgrims, who in 1620 founded Plymouth Colony. Ten
years later, under the auspices of the Massachusetts Bay Company, the first major
Puritan migration to New England took place. The Puritans brought strong religious
impulses to bear in all colonies north of Virginia, but New England was their
stronghold, and the Congregationalist churches established there were able to
perpetuate their viewpoint about a Christian society for more than 200 years.
Richard Mather and John Cotton provided clerical leadership in the dominant Puritan
colony planted on Massachusetts Bay. Thomas Hooker was an example of those who
settled new areas farther west according to traditional Puritan standards. Even though
he broke with the authorities of the Massachusetts colony over questions of religious
freedom, Roger Williams was also a true Puritan in his zeal for personal godliness and
doctrinal correctness. Most of these men held ideas in the mainstream of Calvinistic
thought. In addition to believing in the absolute sovereignty of God, the total
depravity of man, and the complete dependence of human beings on divine grace
for salvation, they stressed the importance of personal religious experience.
These Puritans insisted that they, as God's elect, had the duty to direct national affairs
according to God's will as revealed in the Bible. This union of church and state to
form a holy commonwealth gave Puritanism direct and exclusive control over most
colonial activity until commercial and political changes forced them to relinquish it at
the end of the 17th century.
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Because of its diffuse nature, when Puritanism began to decline in America is difficult
to say. Some would hold that it lost its influence in New England by the early 18th
century, but Jonathan Edwards and his able disciple Samuel Hopkins revived Puritan
thought and kept it alive until 1800. Others would point to the gradual decline in
power of Congregationalism, but Presbyterians under the leadership of Jonathan
Dickinson and Baptists led by the example of Isaac Backus (1724 - 1806) revitalized
Puritan ideals in several denominational forms through the 18th century.
During the whole colonial period Puritanism had direct impact on both religious
thought and cultural patterns in America. In the 19th century its influence was indirect,
but it can still be seen at work stressing the importance of education in religious
leadership and demanding that religious motivations be tested by applying them to
practical situations.
小组讨论材料
The American Sense of Puritan
Scott Atkins
As part of the iconography and symbology by which a sense of the American past is
constructed, the entry of the Puritans into 17th century New England has been
interpreted and re-interpreted as a shaping force of what has been recurrently
described as that peculiar and essential figure, the being somehow common to every
component of a nevertheless immeasurably diverse culture, the "American" itself.
Never mind if this shared self seems to blur under scrutiny; the past out of which it is
made is just as elusive, just as dependent upon the plasticity of its popular conception.
It is easier and perhaps in its way necessary to do what has often been done with the
waves of emigrants that fixed the European presence in New England in 1620 and
1630, to jumble two groups into, depending upon one's mood, either a stern but strong
figure of religious freedom and peaceful coexistence, or a stark, superstitious,
grim-faced symbol of oppression and fatalism. On one side, we have the Pilgrims and
Plymouth Rock, the blunderbuss and the turkey--a good-natured and benign collage of
historical images that help fill the nation's collective past with reassuring facts, help
establish one's sense of tradition by allowing it key moments of adherence. But then
the commonly-held 'dark side,' the Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans: witch-hunts,
elitism, intolerance, narrow-minded zealotry; a paradigm used to understand and
explain perceived moments of its recurrence within our society, such as in both the
1850's and the 1950's, the fervor of morally-crusading Abolitionism, and the fever of
Communist-purging McCarthyism.
There to help explain just what America means, the art adorning the Rotunda of the
United States Capitol still does not evoke, of the two, the culture whose influence had
the greater effect and which indeed swallowed the other not long after either of their
establishment. Instead, one finds in painting, the embarkation of the Pilgrims, and in
both a fresco and frieze, the landing of the Pilgrims. In each image one finds the
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correlative to the conception most readily available to Americans, the one fixed in a
National holiday, Thanksgiving. But again, that the Pilgrims seem to be offered as
representative of our 'Forefathers,' does not necessarily mean that the Puritans are
forgotten; paradoxically, in name at least, the opposite may be true. As Michael
Kammen points out in his overarching treatment on the role of memory in formulating
American culture, Mystic Chords of Memory, the first group is more often than not
conflated with the second.
If the symbolism of the Pilgrims occupy the foreground of popular memory, it does so
in a relatively fixed, institutional sense--that of its enshrinement in the Rotunda, and
its memorialization through a National holiday. The idea of Puritanism has
nevertheless served as a kind of frame for the Pilgrims, allowing a title and a context
which, when taken notice of, may be safely understood as something not essential,
and so, not a danger, to the meaning of the tradition seen. But it is then Puritanism
whose meaning has proved the more dynamic, the more vital to the discourse of
public memory. It is Puritanism which has been seen as both good and bad, and has
served as a site of contention for differing ideological uses and perspectives. It is the
"paper trail" that the Puritans left behind, along with their strong strain of ideology,
which Kammen notes as the distinguishing features of their role in popular memory
(Kammen, 64). The Pilgrims, because of their lack of these traits, have had a plasticity
of meaning, have provided a useful malleability to the fashioning of 'American'
tradition. The Puritans have provided a more consistent interpretive challenge, simply
because there is so much more to interpret. Documents do not necessarily 'prove' a
whole lot; rather they must be compared in relation to others, judged within a
spectrum of representativeness, gauged as an expression of intent. Within them one
searches for the what seems must be there, the 'Puritan Mind', even as one realizes
simply from the differing historical interpretations-- 'scientific', revisionist,
'new-historical', and otherwise--that such a thing, if it could and did exist, will always
be but inadequately known.
The underlying assumption of the project will be primarily that of Michael Kammen,
who traces two major features of American understanding of its place in time: the first,
"to historicize the present"; the second, to "depoliticize the past" (Kammen, 704).
That is, as alternate modes of "hope" and "memory," progress and tradition, inform
the collective understanding of what the nation has come from and where it is headed,
its conception of cultural and social identity is transformed in the process. The
approach here then will be not to establish an absolute understanding of Pilgrims and
Puritans, but rather to fix some ground of stability based largely upon original
writings and what seem to be more or less undisputed interpretations about what those
writings suggest. What will follow from that will be a view of subsequent historical
fashionings of both Pilgrim and Puritan, as they have been converted into both myth
and ideological argument. From the Revolution to the Civil War, to the period
following World War I, both Pilgrims and Puritans have served as part of a rationale
for national progress and cultural identity. This perspective of historical utility in turn
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provides a way to read and explain an institutional America evinced in the speeches of
politicians, and perhaps most clearly seen in the art of the Rotunda.
THE PILGRIMS
The immigration of the Pilgrims to New England occurred in stages. But that they had
to go somewhere became apparent soon enough. Theirs was the position of the
Separatist: they believed that the reforms of the Anglican church had not gone far
enough, that, although the break with Catholicism in 1535 had moved some way
toward the Puritan belief in and idea of religious authority grounded solely in
Scripture, by substituting king for pope as the head of the church, England was only
recapitulating an unnecessary, corrupt, and even idolatrous order (Gill, 19-21). In one
basic respect, the Pilgrims are a logical outcome of the Reformation. In its increasing
dissemination of the Bible, the increasing emphasis on it as the basis of spiritual
meaning, the subsequently increasing importance of literacy as a mode of religious
authority and awareness, a growing individualism was implicit. This individualism
may then have easily led to an atomization or dispersion of authority that the
monarchy duly feared, and that later generations of Americans could easily label
democratization. As a writer in 1921 put it, "They accepted Calvin's rule, that those
who are to exercise any public function in the church should be chosen by common
voice" (Wheelwright, vii). However much this might emphasize the democratic
qualities of the Pilgrims, as dissenters they do suggest at some level the origins of
democratic society, in its reliance upon contending and even conflicting points of
view, and in its tendency toward a more fluid social structure.
But theirs was a religious, not a political agenda; moral and theological principles
were involved, and from their perspective, there could be no compromise. For them 2
Corinthians made it clear: "Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the
Lord." To achieve and preserve a simplicity and 'purity' that they felt had been lost
amid the some of the surviving features of Catholicism--the rituals which continued
through into the Anglican Church and were epitomized in its statement, "'I believe
in...the holy Catholick Church'" (Gill, 19). To establish themselves as rightful
interpreters of the Bible independent of an inherited social and cultural order, they
removed from the Anglican Church in order to re-establish it as they believed it truly
should be. This of course meant leaving the country, and they left for Holland in
1608.
After 12 years, they decided to move again. Having gone back to England to obtain
the backing of the Virginia Company, 102 Pilgrims set out for America. The reasons
are suggested by William Bradford, when he notes the "discouragements" of the hard
life they had in Holland, and the hope of attracting others by finding "a better, and
easier place of living"; the "children" of the group being "drawne away by evill
examples into extravagence and dangerous courses"; the "great hope, for the
propagating and advancing the gospell of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts
of the world" (Wheelwright, 7-8). In these reasons, the second sounds most like the
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Pilgrims many Americans are familiar with--the group that wants to be left alone and
live in its own pure and righteous way. Behind it seems to lie not only the fear of the
breakdown of individual families, but even a concern over the dissolution of the larger
community. The concern seems to be that their split with England was now only
effecting their own disolution into Dutch culture. But it is also interesting to note the
underlying traces of evangelism in, if not the first, certainly the last of the reasons. On
the one hand, this strain would find its later expression (and perversion) in such
portrayals of the Pilgrims as the Rotunda fresco, where the idea of conversion is
baldly fashioned within the image of conquest; here, the Indian is shown as subdued
before the word of the "kingdom" even as the Pilgrims are landing, and the Pilgrim is
seen as an agent of domination, a superior moral force commanding by its sheer
presence. On the other hand, such a portrayal suggests an uneasy tension with the
common (and seemingly accurate) conception of the Pilgrims as a model of tolerance.
Indeed, the first of their reasons for sailing to America is fairly passive--they want to
"draw" others by the example of their prosperity, not necessarily go conquer and
actively convert. Such an idea reflects the one that would be expressed explicitly by
the Puritan John Winthrop, where the New World would become a beacon of
religious light, a model of spiritual promise, a "citty upon a hill."
In any case, from their own point of view, they are 'agents' only insofar as they are
agents of Providence, and as Bradford strives to make clear throughout, the narrative
of their actions is only an interpretation of the works of God. Thus, in a remarkable
instance when a "proud and very profane yonge man" who "would curse and swear
most bitterly" falls overboard from the Mayflower and drowns, it is seen as "the just
hand of God upon him" (Wheelwright, 14). So too when a member of their party is
saved from drowning, or when the initial landing party finds the corn and beans for
seed, or with their safe arrival at Plymouth Bay in general, is the "spetiall providence
of God" evinced. And Bradford seems to self-consciously maintain this version of the
Christian perspective as an historical one, never allowing the reader or student of the
Pilgrims to forget that their story is one with a trajectory--coming from its beginnings
England, and moving through the beginnings of the 'New World'. This is an emphasis
that will serve histories and memories alike, especially in viewing the Revolution and
the increased democratization of the United States as some necessary fulfillment of
the Pilgrim promise.
The Mayflower Compact
Naturally, the primary text for later interpreters would be the Mayflower Compact,
which Bradford gives:
In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwriten, by the loyall subjects
of our dread soveraigne Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britaine,
Franc, and Ireland king, defender of the faith, etc.
Haveing undertaken, for the glorie of God, and advancemente of the Christian faith,
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and honour of our king and countrie, a voyage to plant the first colonie in the
Northerne parts of Virginia, doe by these presents solemnly and mutually in the
presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine our selves togeather into a
civill body politick, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the
ends aforesaid; and by vertue hereof to enacte, constitute and frame shuch just and
equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be
thought most meete and convenient for the generall good of the Colonie, unto which
we promise all due submission and obedience. In witnes whereof we have hereunder
subscribed our names at Cap-Codd the .11. of November, in the year of the raigne of
our soveraigne lord, King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and
of Scotland the fiftie-fourth. Anno Dom. 1620 (Wheelwright, 32-33)
Bradford writes of the Compact, that it developed partly in response to "the
discontented and mutinous speeches" of some of the "strangers"--colonists who had
travelled with them but who "were uncommitted to church fellowship"--and that it
asserted and firmed the Pilgrims' "owne libertie; for none had the power to command
them, the patente they had being for Virginia, and not for New england...." The
Compact thus arose out of a need to maintain social and civic coherence, to ensure
that the officials elected and the group as a whole would have some legitimation
against challenges to its "legal authority" (McQuade, 140; Wheelwright, 32). Michael
Kammen, however, notes a "tradition" in the early 19th century "in which the
Compact was viewed as part of the repudiation of English domination" (Kammen, 64).
Surely there are evident democratic tendencies in the text, wherein a code established
from the consent of the people becomes the underpinning of a society of "just and
equall lawes," where the officials and figures of authority are all elected. But as
"loyall subjects" to the "dread soveraigne Lord, King James," their task is twofold: to
maintain a degree of independence that would allow them to live in accordance with
their Separatist views, but also to keep the ties to England strong enough so that those
who did not share their religion nevertheless would be bound by an order ultimately
traceable to the Crown. The misreadings that Kammen notes will be discussed further
in following sections.
Thanksgiving and the Indians
The first few months were grueling for the Pilgrims. Half of their 102 members
perished: "of the 17 male heads of families, ten died during the first infection"; of the
17 wives, only three were left after three months. When such devastation is seen
against the following summer, when conditions improved so that Bradford would
write of "all things in good plenty," the sincerity of 'Thanksgiving' becomes apparent.
Regardless of how far removed one may be now or even may have been when it was
established as a national holiday in 1863, the sense of Providence had undoubtedly
been heightened to an extreme pitch for the Pilgrims. After such devastating sickness,
everyday survival itself was probably seen as cause for gratitude, but when given a
full and prosperous harvest (with the help and instruction of Native Americans such
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as Squanto), the previous ordeal could be understood as a trial by God, a test of faith,
the heavenly reward prefigured by an earthly one.
The institutional--by which is meant primarily the Capitol's--portrayal of Native
Americans throughout the establishment of Plymouth Plantation stands in curious
relation to Braford's narrative. First of all, there is the initial landing party, with its
description of the men led by Captain Miles Standish, firing shots into the darkness at
"a hideous and great crie." This they mistook for a "companie of wolves, or such like
wild beasts," until the next morning's skirmish--when the "arrowes came flying" and
one "lustie man, and no less valiente" who "was seen shoot .3. arrowes" and "stood .3.
shot of a musket..." (Wheelwright, 25-26). This is hardly the humble servant offering
up the corn at the mere sight of the Pilgrim's arrival (see the Rotunda fresco). And
when Samoset, the first representative of the Indians, comes to speak (in "broken
English") with the Pilgrims, "he came bouldly amongst them" (emphasis added); and
having had previous contact with Europeans, he presumably knew as much or more
about the Pilgrims than they about him. Squanto, who had been to England and could
communicate well with the colonists, and who taught them "how to set their corne,
wher to take fish, and to procure other commodities," is understood by the Pilgrims as
"a spetiall instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation"
(Wheelwright, 41). Regardless of the sense of utility in such an expression (all things
being for them the effect or instrument of God), there is an undeniable gratitude, and
even the sense of dependence that those must have before one who would provide aid
and instruction. The treaty with Massasoit was initiated not by the Pilgrims but by the
sachem himself, who had already made an equivalent pact with earlier explorers. The
success of the treaty during Massasoit's lifetime suggests an equality, fairness, and
tolerance that would be idealized and wistfully re-presented in various remembrances
of the overall colonial experience. It allows both the positive exemplar of the 'Indian'
in Massasoit, and reassurance of European good-faith in dealing with him. It follows:
.1. That neither he (Massasoit) nor any of his, should injurie or doe hurt to any of their
peopl(e).
.2. That if any of his did any hurte to any of theirs, he should send the offender, that
they might punish him.
.3. That if any thing were taken away from any of theirs, he should cause it to be
restored; and they should do like to him.
.4. If any did unjustly warr against him, they would aide him; if any did warr against
them, he should aide them. He should send to his neighbours confederates, to certifie
them of his, that they might not wrong them, but might be likewise comprised in the
conditions of peace.
THE PURITANS
The most obvious difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans is that the Puritans
had no intention of breaking with the Anglican church. The Puritans were
nonconformists as were the Pilgrims, both of which refusing to accept an authority
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beyond that of the revealed word. But where with the Pilgrims this had translated into
something closer to an egalitarian mode, the "Puritans considered religion a very
complex, subtle, and highly intellectual affair," and its leaders thus were highly
trained scholars, whose education tended to translate into positions that were often
authoritarian. There was a built-in hierarchism in this sense, but one which mostly
reflected the age: "Very few Englishmen had yet broached the notion that a lackey
was as good as a lord, or that any Tom, Dick, or Harry...could understand the Sermon
on the Mount as well as a Master of Arts from Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard"
(Miller, I: 4, 14). Of course, while the Puritan emphasis on scholarship did foster such
class distinction, it nevertheless encouraged education among the whole of its group,
and in fact demanded a level of learning and understanding in terms of salvation.
Thomas Hooker stated in The Application of Redemption, "Its with an ignorant sinner
in the midst of all means as with a sick man remaining in the Apothecaries shop, ful
of choycest Medicines in the darkest night: ...because he cannot see what he takes,
and how to use them, he may kill himself or encrease his distempers, but never cure
any disease" (qtd. in Miller, I: 13).
Knowledge of Scripture and divinity, for the Puritans, was essential. This was an
uncompromising attitude that characterized the Puritans' entry into New England,
according to Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, whose thematic anthology, The
Puritans (1932, 1963), became a key text of revisionist historicism, standing as an
influential corrective against the extreme anti-Puritanism of the early twentieth
century. Following Samuel Eliot Morison, they noted that the emphasis on education
saw the establishment, survival, and flourishing of Harvard College--which survived
only because the entire community was willing to support it, so that even the poor
yeoman farmers "contributed their pecks of wheat" for the continued promise of a
"literate ministry" (Miller, I: 14). And again, to their credit, Puritan leaders did not
bolster the knowledge of its ministry simply to perpetuate the level of power of the
ruling elite. A continuing goal was to further education among the laity, and so ensure
that not only were the right and righteous ideas and understandings being held and
expressed, but that the expressions were in fact messages received by a
comprehending audience. An Act passed in Massachusetts in 1647 required "that
every town of one hundred families or more should provide free common and
grammar school instruction." Indeed, the first "Free Grammar School" was
established in Boston in 1635, only five years after the Massachusetts Bay Colony
was founded (Miller, II: 695-97). For all the accusations of superstition and
narrow-mindedness, the Puritans could at least be said to have provided their own
antidote in their system of schools. As John Cotton wrote in Christ the Fountaine of
Life, "zeale is but a wilde-fire without knowledge" (qtd. in Miller, I: 22).
The Puritans who, in the 1560s, first began to be (contemptuously) referred to as such,
were ardent reformers, seeking to bring the Church to a state of purity that would
match Christianity as it had been in the time of Christ. This reform was to involve,
depending upon which Puritan one asked, varying degrees of stripping away practices
seen as residual "popery"--vestments, ceremony, and the like. But many of the ideas
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later associated strictly with the Puritans were not held only by them. The Calvinist
doctrine of predestination, with which Puritanism agreed, was held by the Pilgrims as
well: both believed that the human state was one of sin and depravity; that after the
Fall all but an elect group were irrevocably bound for hell; that, because God's
knowledge and power was not limited by space or time, this group had always been
elect. In other words, there was nothing one could do about the condition of one's soul
but try to act as one would expect a heaven-bound soul to act.
As Perry Miller points out, they inherited Renaissance humanism just as they
inherited the Reformation, and so held an interesting place for reason in their overall
beliefs. The Puritan idea of "Covenant Theology" describes how "after the fall of man,
God voluntarily condescended...to draw up a covenant or contract with His creature in
which He laid down the terms and conditions of salvation, and pledged Himself to
abide by them" (Miller, I: 58). The doctrine was not so much one of prescription as it
was of explanation: it reasoned why certain people were saved and others were not, it
gave the conditions against which one might measure up one's soul, and it ensured
that God would abide by "human conceptions of right and justice"--"not in all aspects,
but in the main" (Miller, I: 58). The religious agency for the individual Puritan was
then located in intense introspection, in the attempt to come to an awareness of one's
own spiritual state. As with the Pilgrims, the world, history, everything for the Puritan
became a text to be interpreted. One could not expect all of God's actions to be limited
by one's ideas of reason and justice, but one at least had a general sense, John Cotton's
"essentiall wisdome," as guidance. And of course, one had the key, the basis of
spiritual understanding, the foundational text and all-encompassing code, the Bible.
Salem Witchcraft
It was because the Puritan mode of interpretivity--with its readings of providence and
secondary causes--could reach such extremes that the Salem witch-trials broke out. Of
course, as Thomas H. Johnson writes, the belief in witches was generally questioned
by no one--Puritan or otherwise--"and even as late as the close of the seventeenth
century hardly a scientist of repute in England but accepted certain phenomena as due
to witchcraft." But the Puritan cosmology held a relentless imaginative power,
especially demonstrated in narratives wherein Providence was shown to be at work
through nature and among human beings. The laity read and took in such readings or
demonstrations of Providence, and the ministry felt compelled by a sense of official
responsibility to offer their interpretations and explain the work of God in the world
(Miller, II: 734-35).
Johnson notes the "lurid details" of Cotton Mather's Memorable Providences,
Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689), which helped generate an unbalanced
fascination with witchcraft. This would prove both fire and tinder for Salem Village,
so that "by September, twenty people and two dogs had been executed as witches"
and hundreds more were either in jail or were accused (Miller, II: 735). Yet to
envision the Puritan community at this point simply as a mob of hysterical zealots is
11
to lose sight of those prominent figures who stood against the proceedings. Granted
that they did not speak out too loudly at the height of the fervor, but then to do so
would be to risk exposure to a confusion of plague-like properties, where the
testimony of an alleged victim alone was enough to condemn a person. But it was the
injustice of this very condition against which men such as Thomas Brattle and
Increase Mather wrote. Brattle's "A Full and Candid Account of the Delusion called
Witchcraft...." (1692) argued that the evidence was no true evidence at all, because
the forms of the accused were taken to be the accused, and the accusers, in declaring
that they were informed by the devil as to who afflicted them, were only offering the
devil's testimony. His was an argument which seemed wholly reasonable to many, but
it led Brattle to the fear "that ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains
which these things will leave behind them upon our land" (In Miller, II: 762). Mather
wrote in 1693, in Cases of Conscience concerning Evil Spirits, that "it were better that
Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person be Condemned"
(Qtd. in Miller, II: 736).
Beyond this is as well is the journal of Samuel Sewall, which records his fascinating
approach to what had happened. This complicates the idea of the 'Puritan' on another
level because while Brattle and (Increase) Mather may have offered challenges to any
conception of the homogeneity of Puritan belief, Sewall reminds one of the variability
within an individual. It introduces an axis of time by which the measure of the
'Puritan mind' must be adjusted. On Christmas Day, 1696, one reads the terse opening,
"We bury our little daughter." And three weeks later is a transcript of the notice
Sewall had posted publicly. It relates that "Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated
strokes of God upon himself and family...Desires to take the Blame and Shame of [the
Salem proceedings], Asking pardon of Men..." (In Miller, 513). This is once again an
interpretation of the "reiterated strokes of God" which has brought the sense of shame
to his consciousness, and it suggests that, at least for Puritans such as Sewall, these
readings of nature and events are not merely those of convenience or self-justification.
There is at least the indication here that if some Puritans stood ready to see the guilt in
others, some of those same people at least made their judgments in good faith and
with honesty, giving credence to their understanding of the ways of God, even when
they themselves were the object of judgment. Sewall's example suggests a kind of
Puritan whose Puritanism not only carries him to almost inhuman extremes, but also
relentlessly brings him back, full circle, to humility.
The revealed Word, Antinomianism, Individualism
What also must be emphasized is the absolute ground of religious understanding that
the Biblical text represented for the Puritans. The Bible was the Lord's revealed word,
and only through it does He directly communicate to human beings. While the natural
world may be studied and interpreted in order to gain a sense of His will, He is not the
world itself, and does not instill Himself directly into human beings by means of
visitations or revelations or divine inspirations of any sort (Miller, I: 10). The
antinomian crisis involving Anne Hutchinson focused on this issue. John Winthrop
12
records it in his journal:
[October 21, 1636] One Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church of Boston, a
woman of ready wit and bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errors: 1.
That the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person. 2. That no
sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification....(In Miller I: 129)
What the Puritans faced in Hutchinson, or in the Quaker idea of "inner light" which
allowed every person direct access to God, was an outbreak of "dangerous"
individualism, one which threatened the foundation of their social order. It was not
simply a matter of letting Hutchinson spread her ideas freely--not when those ideas
could carry the Puritan conception of grace to such an extreme that it translated into
an overall abandonment of any structured church, which is to say, the basis of a
Puritan society. Miller states how the followers of Hutchinson became caught up in a
"fanatical anti-intellectualism" fed by the original Puritan "contention that regenerate
men were illuminated with divine truth," which was in turn taken indicate the
irrelevance of scholarship and study of the Bible. Both possibilities were potentially
destructive to the Massachusetts Bay colony, and both only carried out Puritan ideas
further than they were meant to go (Miller, I: 14-15); the individualistic tendencies
that was embedded in the Pilgrim community, exists as well with the Puritans. In
reference to Tocqueville's use of the term in volume II of Democracy in America,
Ellwood Johnson goes so far as to say, "The anti-traditionalism and de- ritualization
of society that he named Individualisme had their sources in Puritan culture. This
Puritan individualism had survived especially in the habit of judging others by their
characters of mind and will, rather than rank, sex, or race..." (Johnson, 119). Of
course, as Johnson notes, Tocqueville's experience in America was limited both in
time and geographic location. But Hutchinson and her followers were banished, after
all, and while Puritanism did substitute the more simplified approach of Ramean logic
to replace the overly recondite and complicated mediaeval scholasticism, and while it
fostered a more personal mode of religion with its emphasis on individual faith and
access to Scripture instead of the structured ritualism and mediation of the Catholic
church, it nevertheless took for granted a society and state which relied upon what
was only a translated form of class division, and which depended upon a hierarchy
where the word of God would not become dispersed (and so, altered) into a kind of
religious precursor to democracy. The Puritans had themselves suffered repeatedly
under a society which had seemed to evince the potentially ominous side of the
relation of church and state. The king was the leader of the church, and the state
decided how the church was to function, and in 1629 when Charles I dissolved
parliament, the people found that they no longer had any political representation, any
means to act legislatively. Their secular agency had then become a measure of their
religious agency; the removal to Massachusetts in turn was a way to gain a political
voice, to create a state that would develop according to their own beliefs and fashion
itself harmoniously with the church.
13
It was not an effort to establish a society wherein one might unreservedly express
what one wished to express and still hope to have a say in communal affairs. If
religion was to come to bear on the governance of the society, to what good would a
more egalitarian, democratic form come? The integrity of the community as religious
entity (Winthrop's "citty on a hill"), which had been the purpose of their coming to
America, could only be, at best, weakened and dispersed, and at worst, be challenged
to such a degree and in so many ways that there would be no agreement, no action or
political effectiveness. Their religion itself would seem to be faced with a prospect of
which kind does not easily (if at all) admit--a prefiguration of what is now called
'gridlock.' Despite what some later commentators would say, Puritanism and
Democracy were not coproductive ideas, no matter how much one might have
anticipated, and even allowed the eventuality of, the other.
One who stated the problems which would ultimately unravel Puritanism as a
dominant political force was Roger Williams. For one thing, Williams's critique of the
institutions being developed in Massachusetts directly illuminates the difficulty
indicated above--that of perpetuating a religion which both held the seed of an
increasingly liberating individualism and at the same time maintained the need of a
limited meritocracy. The primary point of contention for Williams began in 1631
when he declared that the church in New England was, in its failure to fully separate
from the English church, inadequate, and tainted. He removed to Plymouth, where he
remained for a year. But even there "Williams wore out his welcome" (Heimert, 196).
Part of the reason lay in another of Williams's critique of New England as it was
developing, that the lands granted to the colonists had been unjustly given by the
crown, because they had not been first purchased from the Indians. For his efforts,
Williams was banished. His primary response to this was one of his more threatening
ideas, "that the civil magistrates had no power to punish persons for their religious
opinions" (Miller, I: 215). This was not necessarily an over-arching argument for full
toleration, but rather implied a statement specific to Christian salvation, that "no
power on earth was entitled to prevent any individual from seeking Christ in his own
way" (Heimert, 198). For the Puritan ministry, this was far enough, because it targeted
the strongest tie between it and civil government, and thus implied a potential
disconnection between the two. As John Cotton wrote, the question of "mens goods or
lands, lives or liberties, tributes, customes, worldly honors and inheritances" was
already the jurisdiction of "the civill state" (qtd. in Hall, 117), but the establishment of
laws which fostered Christian principles and punished threats to them-- that was only
part of the continued and increasing realization of divine will on earth.
That dissenters such as Hutchinson and Williams were banished, suggests what has
recurringly been described as a major factor in the evolution not only of the Puritan
theocracy, but of supposed national identity in general--the frontier. Both Crevecoeur
and Tocqueville portray the pioneer type, the individual who, being away from the
influence of religion and mannered, social customs, becomes increasingly rough, and
even near-barabaric. This same figure is also seen as a necessary precursor to more
and more 'civilized' waves of society. Another view of the frontier effect comes with
14
the increasing democratization of the United States, where populist movements occur
such as the Jacksonian Revolution, suggesting a kind of evolutionary mode through
which the American socio-political 'self' is more and more fully realized. For Puritan
society, Miller suggests a more socio-economic effect, where the frontier increasingly
disperses communities and so disperses the effect and control of the clergy, and where
the drive for material profit begins to predominate over the concern with "religion and
salvation" (Miller, I: 17). And if the frontier demands more a stripped-down material
efficacy than the finer attributes of 'culture' and class distinction, then so too does
frontier-influenced religion lose its taste for the nicer distinctions of theological
scholarship, and move instead toward a greater simplicity, toward the eventual
evangelism of the Great Awakening in the 1740s, further out toward
"fundamentalism" and other forms of belief that had long-since ceased to be Puritan.
第二部分：Washington Irving
思考题：
1．欧文是美国文学之父吗？
2．欧文的最大贡献是什么？
3．欧文的气质与他的风格有关系吗？
American author Washington Irving was a short story writer, essayist, poet, travel
book writer, biographer, and columnist. Irving was born in New York City (near
present-day Wall Street) at the end of the Revolutionary War on April 3, 1783. His
parents, Scottish-English immigrants, were great admirers of General George
Washington, and named their son after their hero.
Irving studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1806, but his career soon gave way
to his love of writing. His other interests included architecture and landscape design,
traveling, and diplomacy. He is best known, however, as the first American to make a
living solely from writing. Initially, he wrote under pen names; one of these was
"Diedrich Knickerbocker," who was supposedly an eccentric Dutch scholar. In 1809,
using this pen name, Irving wrote A History of New-York that describes and satirizes
the lives of the early Dutch settlers of Manhattan. Eventually, the term
"Knickerbocker" came to refer to anyone from New York who was of Dutch ancestry.
Irving's writing continued with The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819), a
collection which included his best known short stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,
in which the schoolmaster Ichabold Crane meets with a headless horseman, and Rip
Van Winkle, about a man who falls asleep for 20 years. Irving's writing did a great
deal to make the short story a popular form of American literature. In 1822 he
published a sequel to The Sketch Book, entitled Bracebridge Hall.
15
Irving was engaged to be married to Matilda Hoffmanm who died at the age of
seventeen, in 1809. He later wrote, "For years I could not talk on the subject of this
hopeless regret; I could not even mention her name; but her image was continually
before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly." Irving never married.
Irving traveled in Europe for seventeen years from 1815 to 1832, living in Dresden
(1822-23), London (1824) and Paris (1925). He began work at the U.S. Embassy in
Madrid in 1826. From 1829 to 1832 he was the secretary to the American Legation
under Martin Van Buren. During his stay in Spain, he wrote Columbus (1828),
Conquest of Granada (1829), and The Companions of Columbus (1831), all based on
careful historical research. In 1829, he moved to London and published Alhambra
(1832), concerning the history and the legends of Moorish Spain. Among his literary
friends were Mary Shelley and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Returning to the United States, Irving traveled to the American West and wrote
several books using the West as their setting. These works include A Tour on the
Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836), and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A.
(1837).
In 1842 Irving returned to Europe as U.S. Ambassador minister to Spain, where he
lived until 1846, continuing his historical research and writing. At the age of
sixty-two Irving wrote to his friends in America: "My hear yearns for home; and I
have now probably turned the last corner in life, and my remaining years are growing
scanty in number, I begrude every one that I am obliged to pass separated from my
cottage and my kindred...." He returned to the United States again in 1846 and settled
at Sunnyside, his country home near Tarrytown, New York. Irving died in Tarrytown
on November 28, 1859. Just before retiring for the night, the author had said: "Well, I
must arrange my pillows for another weary night! If this could only end!" He was
buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow,
N.Y.
Irving's other works include Tales of a Traveller (1824), A Chronicle of the Conquest
of Granada (1829), Oliver Goldsmith (1849), and Life of Washington (5 volumes,
1855-1859). Irving's major works were published in 1860-61 in 21 volumes.
可供小组讨论参考
Washington Irving (1783-1859)
John D. Anderson
Washington Irving was among the first generation born in the newly created United
States of America. The year of his birth--1783--was also the year England officially
16
recognized our new nation, ending the American Revolution. Irving was heir to the
legacy of freedom won by the heroes of the war for American independence, a legacy
that marked Irving's contemporaries as the first "lost" generation. With George
Washington as their larger-than-life Founding Father, Irving's generation was unsure
how to live up to his standard of achievement.
Irving eventually earned the title of the "Father of American Literature," but his
journey to that goal was fraught with anxiety. His was a search for freedom from not
political oppression, but from the uncertainty of what to do with the freedom won by
the founding fathers; his was a search for identity. This search consisted of three
distinct phases.
In the first phase, lasting until he was 33 years old, Irving's wealthy and indulgent
family allowed him to drift casually through life. Irving, the youngest of eight
children, was clearly the pet of the family. His father, William Irving, was a
well-to-do merchant in New York City, a self-made Scotsman who had emigrated to
America in 1763. An imaginative but sickly child, Irving was eventually groomed as a
lawyer, but his real education took place on a grand tour of Europe in 1804-1806, in
lieu of attending Columbia College as had his two older brothers, William and Peter.
His adventures abroad included being attacked by pirates while en route to Sicily.
From this early time in his life, Washington Irving felt a tension between the New
World and the Old. The absence of a cultural tradition in America created a vacuum
that Irving sought to fill with borrowed traditions from Europe. Irving's early work as
a writer showed the clear influence of the genteel English essayists Addison and
Steele, with an uneasy infusion of American brashness. For example, Irving chose to
make his literary debut in a series of Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. (1802-03),
Jonathan being the name of a popular stage stereotype of a bumptious American, and
Oldstyle suggesting the Old World refinement of British gentility.
In 1807, Irving became a member of a social and literary club known as the "lads of
Kilkenny" or the "nine worthies," with two of whom Irving wrote Salmagundi, a
literary "stew" consisting of satirical essays on the social scene in New York and its
environs. Some of the political satire of Jeffersonian democrats in these essays betrays
Irving's Federalist leanings. During this time, Irving fell hopelessly in love with
Matilda Hoffman, the young daughter of his employer, Judge Josiah Hoffman. The
high and low points of this first phase of Irving's life both occurred in 1809. While he
was writing his parodic History of New York, Matilda died of tuberculosis. Deep in
mourning, Irving managed to complete this comic masterpiece, written in the voice of
Diedrich Knickerbocker, a name now synonymous with New York City.
The next year, Irving's brothers Peter and Ebenezer made him an essentially inactive
partner in their import business, based in Liverpool. Irving was enjoying his literary
celebrity, being wined and dined up and down the Eastern seaboard. While in
Washington, Irving crashed a party at the White House and became friends with Dolly
17
Madison. When the British burned the White House in 1814, Irving was so incensed
that he signed up as a colonel, serving on the Canadian frontier but never fighting in
any battles.
During this first phase, Washington Irving wrote for his own enjoyment, not needing
to concern himself with making money. In fact, he did not publish any significant
work during the ten years between 1809 and 1819. Supported by his family and
lionized by society for his early successes, Irving lived up to his reputation as a genial
man of leisure.
The second phase of Washington Irving's search for identity commenced when he set
sail in May of 1815 for Europe. He was not to return for 17 years. His brother Peter
falling ill, Irving stepped in to help run the import business. When the War of 1812
ended in 1815, low demand in the U.S. for trade goods from England caused the
business to fail. Finally, in 1818, the brothers declared bankruptcy.
Irving was devastated, becoming severely anxious about earning a livelihood. For the
first time, he set out to write a commercially successful work that would also firmly
establish his literary reputation both at home and abroad. He succeeded beyond his
wildest imagination with The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820),
writing this time in the persona of a charmingly self-effacing wanderer fascinated by
the quaintness and antiquity of English landscapes and customs. Although the book's
subtext reveals his anxiety about being dispossessed of home and security, the surface
is famously genial and sentimental (Rubin-Dorsky 32-64). Although only four of the
34 literary sketches in the book are about America, two enduring American classics
(actually based on European folk legends) are among them: "Rip Van Winkle" and
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."
The disorientation resulting from Rip Van Winkle's famous 20-year sleep is evocative
of Irving's generation's loss of its bearings. One day the sign at the tavern in the
Catskill village in which the story is set shows the image of George III; the next day
(so it seems to Rip) the sign depicts General Washington. In the mysterious interval,
Rip is also freed of the despotism of his shrewish wife, who has died: "Happily that
was at an end--he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and
out whenever he pleased without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle" (History,
Tales, and Sketches 783).
Rip Van Winkle escaped the responsibilities of the prime of his life, just as
Washington Irving and his generation on some level must have yearned to escape the
pressures they faced. In fact, Irving was a lifelong bachelor (although he may have
proposed to and been rejected by 18-year-old Emily Foster when he was 40). The
sentimental explanation promulgated by his nephew Pierre was that Irving pined for
Matilda Hoffman all his life, but some of the negative views of wives in his work
suggest that Irving's search for freedom included freedom from the ties that bind
(Banks).
18
The success of The Sketch Book made Irving the first American man of letters to
have an international reputation. Irving, in typical self-deprecating fashion, wrote that
the world was surprised to find a native American with a feather in his hand instead of
on his head. Having become friends with Sir Walter Scott on their first meeting in
1817, Irving was now launched as an international celebrity. He followed The Sketch
Book with two more miscellaneous collections of sketches "by Geoffrey Crayon,
Gent.": Bracebridge Hall (1822) and Tales of a Traveller (1824), the latter so poorly
received that Irving afterward essentially abandoned fiction and subjective essays to
write history and biography.
In the 1820s, Irving traveled throughout Europe, making occasional extended stays. In
Dresden, he became close with the Foster family and a favorite of the King of Saxony.
In Paris, he collaborated unsuccessfully with playwright John Howard Payne, whose
claim to fame is writing the song "Home, Sweet Home." In London, he resisted the
flirtatious advances of Mary Shelley, widow of Percy Shelley and author of
Frankenstein. Finally, in Madrid and Seville from 1826-29, he researched and wrote
Life and Voyages of Columbus and A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada.
Enchanted by the Moorish palace in Granada, he was inspired to write The Alhambra
(1832), a sort of Spanish Sketch Book.
In 1829, Irving took on another identity, that of diplomat. In September of that year he
accepted an appointment as secretary at the American legation in London, eventually
serving as acting chargé d'affaires until the new minister, Martin Van Buren, arrived
in 1831. Irving's wide circle of friends in England proved useful in negotiating trade
agreements with England.
By 1832, Irving had been abroad for 17 years. It was time to return and begin the third
and final phase of his life, a phase marked by a renewed connection to America.
Received with great ceremony in New York, Irving declared, quoting Scott, "This was
my own--my native land!" He proceeded to travel throughout the fast-growing
country, stopping in Washington to dine with President Andrew Jackson and his
vice-presidential nominee, Irving's friend Martin Van Buren. (In the decade of the
1830s, Irving apparently supported the Democratic party, although he aligned himself
with the opposing Whigs in later years.) He even ventured to Indian Territory (now
Oklahoma) in the company of Commissioner of Indian Affairs Henry Ellsworth in
October of 1832. He published his account of this trip, A Tour on the Prairies, in 1835,
following that work of "adventurous enterprise" with two more: Astoria (1836), an
account of John Jacob Astor's fur trade in the northwest, and Adventures of Captain
Bonneville, U.S.A. (1837), the story of a western explorer.
Irving's books about the west balance elements of his early rougher personae with the
refined romanticism of Geoffrey Crayon. Similarly, in these books, Irving balanced
the demands of commerce and art, of appeals to greed and to cultural values.
According to Peter Antelyes, Irving produced a commercially viable "revised
adventure tale form that endorsed expansionism while noting the dangers posed to
19
American society by that expansion" (xv). After over a century of dismissal and
neglect, Irving's western writings finally received attention from scholars more open
to the complex balancing act Irving achieved in these works.
In 1835, Irving not only demonstrated his commitment to his American identity by
publishing his first book about the West, but he also bought property on the Hudson
River north of New York City. Over the years he expanded his home there, called
"Sunnyside," and received a steady stream of visitors. Sunnyside remains a popular
tourist site for fans of Irving to this day.
The only time Irving ventured back to Europe in this last phase of his life was when
President John Tyler appointed him minister to Spain in 1842. After serving with
distinction for four years, he returned to Sunnyside in 1846 to resume work on a
long-planned life of George Washington. (The Founding Father had actually
bestowed a blessing on the future Father of American Literature in 1789, when the
six-year-old Irving's nurse had presented the child to Washington in a shop in New
York.) The monumental Life of George Washington was eventually published in five
volumes over a five year period, the last volume finally seeing print in the last months
of Irving's life. After a long period of declining health, Irving died of a heart attack at
Sunnyside on November 28, 1859, almost the eve of the Civil War. His lifespan
linked the two wars that forged our nation.
Despite his fears of failure, Washington Irving's life-long search produced an
enduring identity as America's first professional man of letters. Celebrated for his
graceful prose style, he pioneered the short story as a genre and folklore as a source of
literary narrative. He was, as William Makepeace Thackeray described, "the first
ambassador sent by the new world of letters to the old."
Washington Irving (1783-1859)
Primary Works
Salmagundi (with William Irving and James Paulding), 1808; Diedrich
Knickerbocker's History of New York from the Beginning of the World
to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, 1809; The Sketch Book, 1819-20,
containing "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow;"
20
Bracebridge Hall, 1822; Tales of a Traveller, 1824; The Life and
Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1828); The Conquest of Granada
(1829); Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus,
1831; The Alhambra, 1832; The Crayon Miscellany, 1835; Astoria,
1836; The Rocky Mountains, (The Adventures of Captain Bonneville),
1837; Biography of Margaret Miller Davidson, 1841; Goldsmith,
Mahomet, 1850; Mahomet's Successors, 1850; Wolfert's Roost, 1855;
Life of Washington, 1855.
Achievements:
1. Irving is the first belletrist in American literature, writing for
pleasure at a time when writing was practical and for useful purposes.
2. He is the first American literary humorist.
3. He has written the first modern short stories.
4. He is the first to write history an d biography as entertainment.
5. He introduced the nonfiction prose as a literary genre.
6. His use of the gothic looks forward to Poe.
(from Perkins, et. al. The American Tradition in Literature. 6th Ed. One Volume)
Study Questions：
1. Compare and contrast Freneau's and Irving's uses of the historical situation as the
subject of imaginative literature. What makes Irving more successful, and why is he
more successful?
2. Discuss several different ways in which "Rip Van Winkle" addresses versions of
the American dream.
3. Compare Rip Van Winkle with Franklin's Father Abraham in The Way to Wealth.
What do the two have in common?
4. 'Rip Van Winkle" is an early work that casts the American woman as the cultural
villain. Analyze the character of Dame Van Winkle in the story and discuss the
significance Irving attributes to her death.
5. Although Irving's 'Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" may
make it appear that Irving wrote primarily fiction, a reading of the longer Sketch-Book,
in which these stories first appeared, makes it clear that for Irving himself writing the
literary sketch both preceded and made it possible for him to write works we now
consider stories. For an out-of-class essay, read The Sketch-Book and write an essay in
which you describe the various literary genres that Irving uses in the book. Then focus
on either 'Rip Van Winkle" or "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and explore both what
21
the story's form shares with the other works in The Sketch-Book and how it deviates
from them. Speculate on what, in either story, makes it possible for Irving to cross
over into fiction.
Washington Irving
IRVING, Washington, author, born in New York city, 3 April, 1783; died at
Sunnyside, Irvington, New York, 28 November, 1859. His father was William Irving,
of the Orkneys, a man of good lineage, who a little after the middle of the last century
had taken to a sea-faring life; and it was while serving as petty officer upon a British
armed packet, which plied between Falmouth and New York, that he encountered at
the former port a beautiful girl--Sarah Sanders by name--who became his wife. He
married in 1761, and in 1763 migrated with her to New York, where he established
himself in trade in William street, at a point midway between Fulton and John. There
are no traces now of that first Irving home into which were born eleven children, eight
of them reaching maturity; of these, Washington, the subject of this notice, and the
author of the "Sketch-Book," was the youngest. The father did fairly well in his
business ventures, but had his tribulations, growing out of his fervid patriotism in the
days of the Revolution, when his house lay within easy gun-shot of the British
war-ships. Once, indeed, he had been compelled to decamp and take refuge in the
Jerseys, but in 1784--a year after the birth of his son Washington --he was established
in a new and commodious home. There are old New-Yorkers who remember its
quaint tables, and our author's biographer tells us of a visit that Washington Irving
made to this home of his boyhood ten years before his death, and of the merry twinkle
of the eye with which he told of his escapades over this or that loft or through this or
that window in the peaked gables, for a run to the theatre in John street, or for a foray
upon adjoining roofs, whence he could safely discharge a little volley of pebbles
down the chimney of some wondering neighbor. Such stories were not needed by any
reader of the Knickerbocker chronicle to convince him of the love of mischief in the
lad. Indeed, mischievous propensities declared themselves the more strongly in all
likelihood because the father, Deacon Irving, was a strict disciplinarian. He was,
indeed, a man of all probity, with a high sense of honor, and uniformly respected; but
he held all play-houses in detestation, counted dancing a sin, and looked askance upon
any Sunday reading in his household beyond the catechism or Bible story,
or--delightful exception for the boy-Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." The mother of
Washingtorn had more of toleration in her judgments and of sunshine in her
temperament; all accounts represent her as a dear, good, lively, cheery, sympathetic
person, beloved in her household, and doubtless taking away the edge from many a
paternal rebuke by her forgiving caresses.
At the age of four Irving went to a woman's school in Anti street, and shortly
afterward to that of an old soldier in Fulton street. But these were not the busy
thoroughfares that we know by those names. In going and coming, the lad must have
caught sight many times, between the houses, of East river and of the heights of Long
Island. There were gardens in his own street which reached down to the water, the old
22
Dutch church had its green yard abutting upon Nassau street, and beyond Chambers
cows were at pasture. The boy's schooling was not of a thorough sort, and when it
ended, he being then sixteen, he had only, beyond the ordinary English branches, a
smattering of Latin and of music, and such dancing skill as he had come by furtively.
But he had read intelligently and voraciously such books as "Sindbad," " Gulliver,"
and '" Robinson Crusoe." Why he was not presented for a course in Columbia college,
which two of his elder brothers had taken, does not appear; instead, he entered a
law-office, relieving his studies there (which, it would seem, were not very strenuous)
by literary squibs, under the pen-name of "Jonathan Old-style," for the " Morning
Chronicle," and later by a memorable sloop voyage up the Hudson, tacking and
scudding under the Highlands, and floating for days together in sight of the blue
Kaatskills, on his way to visit some kinsfolk who lived in the wilds of northern New
York. The trip was undertaken partly for his health; continued invalidism, with threat
of pulmonary trouble, determined his friends in the spring of 1804 to send him upon
European voyagings. It was largely at the instance of his brother William, who was
seventeen years his senior, and well established, that this scheme was effected.
Washington was at that date twenty-one, a little below the average height, delicate,
handsome of feature--Vanderlyn's somewhat too effeminate portrait of him gives
doubtless a good notion of his appearance in that day.--full of all courtesies, too, and
with a most winning manner. He had even then given token of strong literary aptitude
and of a keen humor. He carried abundant letters, and was warmly received at
Bordeaux, at Genoa, at Naples; a glamour of romance hangs over his story of the trip
in home letters. Off Messina he saw the great fleet of Nelson, which was presently
a-wing for Trafalgar; at Rome he met Washington Allston, and by interfusion of
minds became almost mated to Allston's life of art. Meantime admonitory letters were
coming from the staid brother William to see Florence, to see Venice, to improve his
opportunities. But he had determined to make a straight way for Paris. He heard that
excellent lectures on chemistry and botany were within free reach there, besides the
chances for the language. And he goes, and has a gay " outing" in that capital; there is,
indeed, mention in his record of the costs of a botanical dictionary, and for two
months' tuition in French; but there is more mention of Talma and of the theatres,
which he takes by turn and follows up with alacrity and method.
He goes thence to London, via Holland, and is "put out there," as he says, by his "gray
coat, embroidered white vest, and colored small-clothes," a gay young fellow! He is
enraptured with Mrs. Siddons, who is playing in those days; is in the theatre, indeed,
when news of Nelson's death comes to England like a thunderbolt. On his return to
New York in 1806 with re-established health and with critical faculty whetted by
foreign life, he undertook, in conjunction with his friend James K. Paulding (q. v.)
and his brother William, the publication of " Sahnagundi," a periodical of the "
Spectator" stamp, but lacking its finish and vitality. He took up law again, but never
showed a love for it. There entered also a disturbing element into his studies of
whatever sort at this period, by reason of a strong attachment with tragic ending
which he formed for the accomplished daughter of his friend and legal instructor,
Judge Hoffman. In a confidential communication to an intimate friend many years
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later he says: "I was by her when she died; all the family were assembled round her,
some praying, others weeping, for she was adored by them all. I was the last one she
looked upon. The despondency I had suffered for a long time in the course of this
attachment, and the anguish that attended its catastrophe, seemed to give a turn to my
whole character and throw some clouds into my disposition, which have ever since
hung about it. When I became more calm and collected, I applied myself, by way of
occupation, to the finishing of my work. I brought it to a close as well as I could, and
published it; but the time and circumstances in which it was produced rendered me
always unable to look upon it with satisfaction." The work alluded to was the "History
of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker" (1809), a work which in his latter years
Irving was able to look upon with more complacency. It had great success; it
established his early fame; even its pecuniary returns, $3,000, were notable in that day.
There are traces in it of his love of Sterne and of Rabelais; there are broader sallies in
it than he would have ventured upon in his maturity; but there is a breezy and
boisterous fun that is all his own, and that has brought the echoes of its rollicking
humor distinctly down to our times. There is some coquetting with the law after this;
he even appeared at the trial of Aaron Burr (Richmond, 1807) in a quasi-legal
capacity; but he was more apt in the social junketings he encountered and enlivened in
Philadelphia and Baltimore.
In 1810 he became a partner, with one-fifth interest, in a commercial house that was
established by his brothers--Peter, in England, and Ebenezer, in New York. This
promised, and for a time gave, a fair revenue, which allowed such easy dalliance with
literature as his humors permitted; there followed, indeed, certain editorial relations
with the old "Analectic Magazine" in Philadelphia in 1813-'14, in which appeared one
or two papers that were afterward incorporated in the "Sketch-Book." Yet his literary
methods were scarcely more business-like than his law. In 1815 he sailed for Europe,
old recollections luring him; besides which, his brother Peter was in England; a
married sister had a charming home, gay with young voices, near Birmingham; scores
of old friends were ready to welcome him in London, and Napoleon was just started
on a new career, after Elba. But, on Irving's arrival in Liverpool, Waterloo had
befallen, his brother Peter was ill, and the affairs of the house of P. and E. Irving were
shaky. As a consequence much commercial task-work fell to his hands; there was
relief, however, in the trips to London, and to the charming home near Birmingham;
in the meeting with Allston and Leslie, who contributed to an illustrated edition of the
Knickerbocker history; in the theatre-going, where Kean and the O'Neil were shining;
in quiet saunterings about Warwickshire; in encounters with Campbell and Disraeli,
and with Scott at Abbotsford. The "Knickerbocker" fame opened doors to him
everywhere, and his delightful humor, bonhomie, and courtesy kept them open. There
were two or three years of such pleasures, dampened by commercial forebodings, till
at last, in 1818, the house went into bankruptcy. William Irving meantime had used
influences at Washington, through which a secretaryship in the navy department, with
$2,500 per annum, was offered to the author; but it was peremptorily declined. He
was feeling his power to do somewhat with his pen of better worth; yet for a long time
the very exaltation of his purpose palsied his writing faculty. It was not until 1819 that
24
he transmitted to this country, for publication in New York and Philadelphia, the first
number of the "Sketch-Book." It appeared in June, ninety-two pages, octavo, "large
type and copious margins," and sold for seventy-five cents. Among the papers in this
first number was the story of Rip Van Winkle, the tatterdemalion of the Kaatskills,
who is still living a lusty youthhood. Other numbers quickly succeeded, and were
approved and hugely enjoyed in New York and Philadelphia, before yet British
applause of them had sounded. But this came in its time, and with a fervor that had
never before been kindled by work from an American hand. John Murray became
eventually (1820) the publisher of the "Sketch-Book," as also of the succeeding works
of "Bracebridge Hall" (2 vols., London, 1822), and " Tales of a Traveller" (1824). For
the first he paid $2,400, for the second $5,250, and for the third $7,875--sums which
most readers will regard as bearing inverse ratio to their merits, but which marked
Irving's growing popularity. The "Sketch-Book" was approved by the best critical
judgment of those days, for its graces of language, its delicate fancies, its touches of
pathos, and its quiet humor; and, although there may be modern question of this
judgment at some points, there is a leaven of charm in it for the average mind which
has kept it in favor and made it the most popular of the Irving books.
Meantime the author was enjoying himself in travelling. In 1826 he found himself in
Madrid, going thither at the instance of United States minister Alexander H. Everett,
who made him attache of the legation, and advised his translation of Navarrete's "
Voyages of Columbus," which was then in course of publication. This work he
entered upon with zeal; but soon, inspired by the picturesque aspects of the subject,
gave over the project of translation and determined to make his own "Life of
Columbus." Upon this he worked with a will, and as early as July, 1827, advised
Murray of its completion. It was published (3 vols., 1828) by Murray in London and
Carvill in New York, their joint payments reaching the sum of $18,000. The sale did
not equal the expectations of Mr. Murray; an abridgment, however, without
honorarium to the author, had large success. The research requisite to this work gave
Irving a footing with serious readers, who had ignored him as a romancer: its
accuracy, its clearness of style, and its safe judgments have given it place in all
historic libraries. Two succeeding books, of a more popular cast, which grew out of
Irving's study of Spanish chronicles, were the " Conquest of Granada " (1829) and the
"Alhambra" tales (1832). This last was the result of the author's enjoyable occupancy,
by favor of the governor, of a suite of rooms in the old Moorish palace in the summer
of 1829. There is in it pleasant description of his surroundings there--the towers, the
courts, the dusky-eyed attendants--with a fantastic dressing up of old Moorish legends.
The "Granada" chronicle is a romantic narrative of the actual struggles which
belonged to the Moorish subjugation in Spain. It was while a resident of the Alhambra,
in 1829, that Irving received news of his appointment to the post of secretary of
legation in London. With some hesitancy he accepted, bade adieu to his Spanish
friends, and went to a pleasant renewal of his old alliances in England. He passed
three years there, taking to diplomatic lines of life not ungraciously, and making new
friendships; and with a medal of the Royal society of literature (1830), a doctorate
from Oxford (1831), and other enviable honors, he sailed for New York in 1832, after
25
seventeen years of absence. The greeting that met him was most marked and sincere;
even the stammering hesitancy with which he met it, at a public dinner, provoked new
cheers of hearty welcome. Neither diplomacy nor great literary successes had spoiled
his modesty.
It was at this period that he purchased and put in shape the stone cottage that formed
his after-home, and that of his brother and nieces, at Sunnyside, which is shown in the
accompanying illustration. But the travelling habit was strong upon him, and within a
year he was away upon the prairies, the trip having delightful outcome thereafter in
his "Tour on the Prairies" (1835). A friendly association, too, with John Jacob Astor,
at whose home on Harlem river he spent much time, resulted in the compilation, in
conjunction with his nephew Pierre, of the records of "Astoria" (2 vols., Philadelphia,
1836). This was followed by the "Adventures of Captain Bonneville " (1837).
A project for writing a history of Mexico that he had long entertained was given up on
learning, in 1839, that William H. Prescott was engaged upon the theme. A temporary
association with the " Knickerbocker Magazine" became the occasion of putting to
press a few papers of various quality, which served later to make up the bulk of a
book of miscellany, called "Wolfert's Roost" (New York, 1854). In the year 1842,
while Irving was living quietly at Sunnyside, he was appointed by President Tyler, at
the instance of Daniel Webster, then secretary of state, minister to Spain. The United
States senate promptly confirmed the appointment, and the whole country gave a
quick and loud approval. The author, aged fifty-nine, and beginning to feel somewhat
the weight of years, was reluctant to leave home; but the expenses of his household
were large; all his earlier books were out of print and bringing no revenue; his vested
property was tied up largely in non-paying stocks or lands; his purpose of engaging
upon the "Life of Washington" might, he thought, find execution in Madrid. He
accepted, therefore, and in a letter from Paris, on the way to his post, he says: "I am
somewhat of a philosopher, so I shall endeavor to resign myself to the splendor of
courts and the conversation of courtiers, comforting myself with the thought that the
time will arrive when I shall once more return to sweet little Sunnyside, to be able to
sit on a stone fence and talk about politics and rural affairs with neighbor Forkel and
Uncle Brom [Ebenezer]." His residence of four years at the court of Spain was
uneventful; but his letters of that period afford interesting glimpses of the young
queen, of Christina, of Espartero, of Narvaez, of the insurrections of 1843. Even his
diplomatic correspondence shows at times the old glow that belonged to his
Andalusian life. He was never weaned from a yearning fondness for the atmosphere
of Spain, for the dark-eyed women, and for the proud grandees that once gave dignity
to its history. Little was accomplished, however, in these years upon his "Life of
Washington." Over and over, in his private letters, he lamented his literary inactivity;
but the round of diplomatic courtesies and the larger round of friendly socialities were
in the way of methodic work. Uncertain health, too, compelled repeated absences, and
seriously interfered with that old blitheness of mood under which only his best work
could find accomplishment.
Resigning his post some months before the appointment of his successor, he returned
to the United States, reaching his home of Sunnyside in September, 1846, where
26
thirteen years of happy life still remained for him. One of his first tasks upon arrival
was to enlarge the country home and make it ample for a household which, by his
generous insistence, now included his brother Ebenezer and his family. The squat
tower, with its pagoda-like roof, added at this time, is perhaps the most salient
architectural feature of the homestead. There were periodic dashes from year to year
at. his long-delayed "Life of Washington"; and in 1848 an agreement with George P.
Putnam--a liberal and energetic publisher of New York, who became a fast
friend--demanded revision of all his published works for a new and uniform edition
(15 vols., 1848-'50). This enterprise proved extraordinarily successful and Irving was
induced to add to his older books a "Life of Mahomet and his Successors" (1849-'50),
which had been long floating in his mind, but not of the author's best; also a "Life of
Goldsmith" (1849)--this last was an extension of a sketch that was originally printed
in the Paris (Baudry) library of British authors, and offered a subject which was at one
with all of Irving's tastes and sympathies. It is a delightful biography, and sparkles
throughout with the author's best touches. In 1852 he writes, "My ' Life of
Washington' lags and drags heavily"; indeed, age had begun to tell seriously upon him;
nor did he find in his study of old home records the picturesque aspects which so
kindled his enthusiasms in his former gropings among the Moorish and Spanish
chronicles. Yet he put an honest hand to the work and a clear head; but it was not until
1855 that the first volume appeared. It was well received; but it was easy to see that
esteem for the author and for his past triumphs lent no inconsiderable force to the
encomiums bestowed upon the new work. At the close of 1855 the second volume
appeared; the third in 1856; the fourth in 1857; the fifth dragged wearily. "I have
taken things to pieces," he says, "and could not put them together again." "A streak of
old age" had come upon him; he had "wearisome muddles" in his work; his asthma
was very afflictive; his years counted seventy-five; nor was it until 1859, within less
than a twelvemonth of his death, that the fifth and last volume appeared. The
conditions had not been such as favor vigorous literary work. We must go back to the
days of his full strength and vigor to measure his true forces. In this book of
"Washington" there is a clear, pale outline of the distinguished American leader,
wonderfully vivid transcripts of the battles, sagacious judgments, great fairness, and
sturdy American feeling; but there is no such strong grasp of the subject or such
sustained vigor of treatment as will rank it with his earlier works or with great
biographies.
There were no financial anxieties to disturb his later years; the revenue from his books
was very large; he could and did make his old generosities more lavish; his
hospitalities were free and hearty; he loved the part of entertainer and graced it. His
mode of living showed a quiet elegance, but was never ostentatious. At the head of his
table--cheered by the presence of old friends--his speech bubbled over with young
vivacities, and his arching brow and a whimsical light in his eye foretold and exalted
every sally of his humor. His rides and drives and cheery smiles of greeting brought
him to the knowledge of all the neighborhood. When he died, the grief there was
universal and sincere. On the day of his funeral (1 December, 1859), a remarkably
mild day for the season, the village shops were closed and draped in mourning, and
27
both sides of the high-road leading from the church, of which he had been warden, to
the grave by Sleepy Hollow, where his body lies, were black with the throngs of those
who had come from far and near to do honor to his memory. We cannot class
Washington Irving among those strenuous souls who delve new channels for thought;
his touch in literature is of a gentler sort. We may safely, however, count him the best
beloved among American authors--his character was so clean, his language so full of
grace, his sympathies so true and wide, and his humor so genuine and abounding.
After his death appeared his "Life and Letters," edited by his nephew, who also
collected and edited his " Spanish Papers and other Miscellanies" (3 vols., 1866).
During Irving's lifetime, 600,000 volumes of his works were sold in the United States,
and from his death till the present, time (1887) the annual sale has averaged 30,000
volumes. Of the portraits of Irving, that by his friend, Gilbert Stuart Newton, painted
in 1820, was most esteemed by the family, and best liked by the author. The portrait
by John Vanderlyn, painted in 1805, that by John Wesley Jarvis, in 1810, and that by
Charles Martin, an English artist, in 1851, are well known by engravings. The Jarvis
picture was considered excellent, and with the bust by Ball Hughes, which is also
good, is still preserved at the Irving homestead of Sunnyside. Portraits by Escacena,
painted in Seville, Spain, in 1829, by Vogel in Dresden in 1823, and by Foy in Paris
in 1824, which are named in Pierre Irving's biography, are not known by engravings,
nor has their present, ownership been traced. Sir David Wilkie's sketch of
"Washington Irving consulting the Archives Of Cordova" (25 April, 1828), which
forms the frontispiece to one of Wilkie's published volumes, can hardly be considered
a likeness. The steel portrait that accompanies this article is from a photograph. Busts
of Irving have been set up in Central park and in Prospect park, Brooklyn. The latest
edition of Irving's works is that published in New York (27 vols., 12mo, 1884-'6). A
tabulated list of books and pamphlets relating to the author's life and writings
appeared in the "reference lists" of the Providence public library for April, 1883. In
the same year was founded a Washington Irving association at Tarrytown, which
commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the author's birth by a public meeting
and addresses, of which record was made in a memorial volume (New York, 1884).
The standard life of Irving is that by his nephew, Pierre M. Irving (4 vols., 1862-'3;
memorial ed., 4to, 1883; German abridgment by Adolph Lann, Berlin, 1870). See also
William C. Bryant's address before the New York historical society (New York,
1860); that of Henry W. Longfellow before the Massachusetts historical society,
published in its "Proceedings" (Boston, 1860): "Irvingiana" (New York, 1860);
Charles Dudley Warner's "Life of Irving" in the "American Men of Letters" series
(Boston, 1881); and James Grant Wilson's " Bryant and his Friends" (New York,
1886).--His brother, William, merchant, born in New York city, 15 August, 1766;
died there, 9 November, 1821, engaged in commercial pursuits, and from 1787 till
1791 was a fur-trader with the Indians on the Mohawk river, residing at Johnstown
and Caughnawaga, New York In 1793 he settled in New York city, and married a
sister of James K. Paulding, one of the authors of "Salmagundi." In the preparation of
the latter work he took an active part, contributing most of the political pieces "from
the mill of Pindar Cockloft." He also furnished hints and sketches for several of the
28
prose articles, as the letters of "Mustapha" in Nos. 5 and 14, which were elaborated by
his brother Washington. His extensive experience, combined with his wit and genial
manners, made his house a literary centre, and although his poetical and other
contributions to "Salmagundi," if issued separately, would have given him a distinct
place among American humorists, he was entirely unambitious of literary fame. He
was elected to congress three times as a Democrat, serving from 22 January, 1814, till
1818, when he resigned in consequence of declining health.--Another brother, Peter,
author, born in New York city, 30 October, 1771; died there, 27 June, 1838, was
graduated as a physician in Columbia in 1794, but never practised his profession. In
October, 1802, he began the publication of the "Morning Chronicle," a Democratic
newspaper, which advocated the election of Aaron Burr to the presidency. Among the
contributors were the editor's brothers, Washington and John Treat, J. K. Paulding,
William A. Duet, and Randolph Bunner. In 1807 he travelled in Europe, and on his
return projected, with his brother Washington, the work that the latter developed into
" Knickerbocker's History of New York." He again visited Europe in 1809,
established himself in business there, and remained until 1836. During his residence
abroad he published "Giovanni Sbogarro, a Venetian Tale " (New York,
1820).--Another brother, John Treat, lawyer, born in New York city in 1778; died
there, 18 March, 1838, was graduated at Columbia in 1798. He studied law, was
admitted to the bar, and from 1817 until his death served as presiding judge of the
New York court of common pleas. By his contributions to his brother's "Chronicle" he
acquired some reputation through his poetical attacks on his political opponents. "He
was," says the biographer of Washington Irving, "a man of perfect uprightness and
great refinement of character, and enjoyed through life the high respect of the
community. In his earlier days he had something of a literary turn, which, however,
was soon quenched under the dry details of the law and the resolute fidelity with
which he gave himself up to the claims of his profession."--William's son, Pierre
Munroe, lawyer, born in 1803; died in New York city, 11 February, 1876, was
graduated at Columbia in 1821, studied law, and was admitted to the bar. Meeting his
uncle, Washington, in Spain in 1826, during a "youthful tour of Europe," he, at the
latter's request, took charge of the work of getting the "Life of Columbus" correctly
through the press in London. Subsequently he acted as his uncle's literary assistant,
managed his business affairs, and attended him in his last illness. Some years before
his death, Washington Irving appointed Pierre his biographer, and in 1862-'3 the latter
published "The Life and Letters of Washington Irving" (New York). He also edited
his uncle's " Spanish Papers and Other Miscellanies" (1866).-Theodore, educator, son
of Washington's brother, Ebenezer, born in New York city, 9 May, 1809; died there,
20 December, 1880, joined his uncle in Spain, and remained three years abroad,
attending lectures and devoting himself to the study of modern languages. He
subsequently read law in London and New York. In 1836 he was appointed professor
of history and belles-lettres in Geneva (now Hobart) college, where he remained until
1848, when he accepted the corresponding chair in the Free academy (now College of
the city) of New York. This he resigned in May, 1852, and two years later, having
studied theology, was ordained a priest of the Protestant Episcopal church. He became
29
rector of Christ church, Bay Ridge, Long Island, and for several years had charge of
St. Andrew's and afterward of Ascension parish, Staten island. In 1874 he again
engaged in teaching, becoming rector of a young ladies' school in New York city. He
received the degree of A. M. from Columbia in 1837, and that of LL. D. from Union
in 1851. Besides contributing frequently to periodical literature, Mr. Irving was the
author of "The Conquest of Florida by Hernando de Soto" (Philadelphia and London,
1835; revised ed., uniform with the collective edition of Washington Irving's works,
New York and London, 1851); "The Fountain of Living Waters" (New York, 1854;
4th ed., 1855); "Tiny Footfalls" (1869); and "More than Conqueror" (1873).--John
Treat's son, John Treat, author, born in New York city, 2 December, 1812, was
graduated at Columbia in 1829, studied law, and was admitted to the bar. He is the
author of "Sketches in an Expedition to the Pawnee Tribes" (2 vols., Philadelphia and
London, 1835); "Hawk Chief" (Philadelphia and London, 1836); "The "Attorney" and
"Harry Harson, or the Benevolent Bachelor," the last two being first published in the
"Knickerbocker Magazine" over the signature of "John Quod" in 1842-'3; and "The
Van Gelder Papers and Other Sketches" (New York, 1887).
第三部分：William Cullen Bryant
Born: November 3,
1794,
Cummington,
Massachusetts.
Died: June 12,
1878, Long Island,
New York. Bryant
died from a fall after
giving a speech in
Central Park, New
York City.
Buried: Roslyn
Cemetery, near Port
Washington, New
York.
思考题：
1． 布莱恩特的文学贡献是什么？
2． 布莱恩特对美国社会的贡献是什么？
3． 布莱恩特对美国艺术的贡献是什么？
30
William Cullen Bryant
Essay by Wynn Yarborough, 1994
William Cullen Bryant was our " first American writer of verse to win international acclaim."
(Tomlinson, 30) Bryant was considered a child-prodigy, publishing his first poem at age ten and
his first book when he was thirteen, a political satire of an embargo policy of Thomas Jefferson.
Bryant studied both Latin and Greek and had access to a library full of the classics, which explains
many of the classical allusions in his poetry. Dr Bryant, his father, was a physician and interceded
in many points of Bryant's life. He pushed Bryant towards the legal profession, helped critique and
even sent his poems, without his son's approval, to literary magazines, and helped to publish his
first book, Embargo .
Bryant's early poetry was published in the early nineteenth century. He published poems in the
North American Review. In fact this is where we first find "Thanatopsis." This early poetry seems
to be written before and submitted much later; Bryant was known for editing his work for quite
some time before submissions. He also published essays in which he called for a " . . . robust
American literature." (Tomlinson, 33) He wanted poetry praised for its merit not its
"American-ness". He was very interested in technique, publishing "On the Use of Trisyllabic Feet
in Iambic Verse" in 1819. His combination of freedom and form is not seen as paradoxical:" His
poetic theory and practice, founded upon romantic principles of emotional expression, naturalness,
simplicity, spontaneity, irregularity, and freedom, set him squarely in the romantic movement
which he anticipates in America by over a decade." (Jelliffe, p. 134)
He practiced law, supporting a wife and family, and wrote very little between 1818-1825. Most of
the material published during this period was previously written poems now submitted. His newest
poem of that period, The Ages, resulted from delivering the Phi Beta Kappa poem at the Harvard
commencement. Bryant's first book of poems was published following the warm reception of this
poem. It appears that this is when he made a change that would alter his prominence and affect his
art, profoundly. He became assistant editor to the New York Evening Post, after giving up the
drudgery of practicing law. While he would make more money as a journalist, his output of poetry
was greatly reduced thus directly reducing his placement in literary history according to critics.
The New York Evening Post was a paper established by the Federalist Party stalwart, Alexander
Hamilton. Bryant was a proponent of "Laissez-Faire," hands-off , economic policy. He opposed
tariffs of any kind, as we saw in his earliest book where he satirizes the embargo of U.S. goods to
the European ports. He was against slavery, endorsing the Free-Soil party, the Republican party,
and Lincoln. His influence from the editorial desk of the New York Evening Post was great. He
published poetry, but his first collected edition included only five previously unpublished poems.
Bryant received great praise for his poetry, but the critics did not give him unconditional laurels,
due to the absence of a full range of poetry, such as epics, elegies, and verse drama. In short, as we
have seen, he didn't publish enough. He looked at art as something demanding time and reflection,
something not afforded to him on his travels or by his work at the paper. He did publish The
Letters of a Traveller in 1850, a series of letters he had written to the Evening Post, describing his
tours of Europe, Mexico, Cuba, and South America.
In 1866, after the death of his wife, Bryant resumed translating the Iliad and subsequently the
31
Odyssey. He took up translation and editing anthologies as he did less and less with the newspaper.
He published a collected edition, a final one, in 1876. He died after attending the dedication of a
bust of himself in New York that same year.
Bryant's place in literary history is not altogether secure. He is regarded as falling somewhat short
of his potential. Although he published little as he became immersed in the journalistic life, he was
extremely popular in his time and even one time was named as a candidate for President.
第四部分：James F. Cooper
思考题：
1．库伯的最大文学贡献是什么？
2．美国“神话”的形成
3．文明与“野蛮”之间的关系是什么？
第五部分：Herman Melville
思考题：
1．
麦尔维尔与霍桑之间的关系
2．
《白鲸》中的象征意义
3．
麦尔维尔对美国文学的贡献是什么？
American author, best-known for his novels of the sea and his masterpiece
MOBY-DICK (1851), a whaling adventure dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. "I
32
have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb," Melville wrote to
Hawthorne. The work was only recognized as a masterpiece 30 years after Melville's
death. The fictionalized travel narrative of TYPEE (1846) was Melville's most
popular book during his lifetime.
"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the less of
things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and
cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all
evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically
assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump
the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from
Adam down; and then, as if chest had been a mortar, he burst his
hot heart's shell upon it." (from Moby-Dick)
Herman Melville was born in New York City into an established merchant family. He
was the third child of eight. His father, Allan Melvill, an importer of French dry goods,
became bankrupt and insane, dying when Melville was 12. His mother, Maria
Gansevoort Melvill, was left alone to raise eight children. Occasionally she received
help from her wealthy relatives. A bout of scarlet fever in 1826 left Melville with
permanently weakened eyesight. He attended Albany (N.Y.) Classical School in 1835.
He left the school and was largely autodidact, devouring Shakespeare as well as
historical, anthropological, and technical works. From the age of 12, he worked as a
clerk, teacher, and farmhand. In search of adventures, he shipped out in 1839 as a
cabin boy on the whaler Achushnet. He joined later the US Navy, and started his years
long voyages on ships, sailing both the Atlantic and the South Seas. During these
years he was a clerk and bookkeeper in general store in Honolulu and lived briefly
among the Typee cannibals in the Marquesas Islands. Another ship rescued him and
took him to Tahiti. In his mid-20's Melville returned to his mother's house to write
about his adventures.
Typee, an account of his stay with the cannibals, was first published in Britain, like
most of his works. The book sold roughly 6,000 copies in its first two years. Its sequel,
OMOO (1847), was based on his experiences in Polynesian Islands, and gained a
huge success as the first one. Throughout his career Melville enjoyed a rather higher
estimation in Britain than in America. His older brother Gansevoort held a
government position in London, and helped to launch Melville's career. From his third
book, MARDI AND A VOYAGE THITHER (1849), Melville started to take distance
to the expectations of his readers.
In 1847 Melville married Elisabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of
Massachusetts. After three years in New York, he bought a farm, "Arrowhead", near
Nathaniel Hawthorne's home at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and became friends with
him for some time. Melville had almost completed Moby-Dick when Hawthorne
encouraged him to change it from a story full of details about whaling, into an
allegorical novel.
"In general, it is the non-psychological novel that offers the richest
33
opportunities for psychological elucidation. Here the author,
having no intentions of this sort, does not show his characters in a
psychological light and thus leaves room for analysis and
interpretation, or even invites it by his unprejudiced mode of
presentation... I would also include Melville's Moby Dick, which I
consider the be the greatest American novel, in this broad class of
writings." (Carl Jung in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1967)
Inspired by the achievement of Hawthore, Melville wrote his masterpiece, Moby-Dick.
He worked at his desk all day not eating anything till 4 or 5 o'clock, and bursting with
energy he shouted: "Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand!" When the novel was
published, it did not bring him the fame he had acquired in the 1840s. Readers of
Typhee and Omoo were not expecting this kind of story, and its brilliance was only
noted by some critics. Through the story Melville meditated questions about faith and
the workings of God's intelligence. He returned to these meditations in his last great
work, BILLY BUDD, a story left unfinished at his death. Its manuscript was found in
Melville's desk when he died.
"Call me Ishmael," says the narrator in the beginning of Moby-Dick. We don't know is
it his real name and exactly when his story is taking place. He signs abroad the whaler
Pequod with his friend Queequeg, a harpooner from the South Sea Islands. Then the
mood of the story changes. The reader is confronted by a plurality of linguistic
discourses, philosophical speculations, and Shakespearean rhetoric and dramatic
staging. Mysterious Captain Ahab, a combination of Macbeth, Job, and Milton's Satan,
appears after several days at sea. Melville named the character after the Israelite king
who worshiped the pagan sun god Baal. Ahab reveals to the crew that the purpose of
the voyage is to hunt and kill the snow-white sperm whale, known as Moby-Dick, that
had cost Ahab his leg on a previous voyage. The captain has his own faith and sees
the cosmos in contention between two rival deities. "Oh! thou clear spirit of clear
fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act
so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I know thee, thou clear spirit,
and I now know that thy right worship is defiance." Ahab has nailed a goldpiece
to the mast and offers it as a reward to the first man who sights the creature. Starbuck,
the first mate, tries to dissuade Ahab from the quest. The novel culminates when
Moby-Dick charges the boat which sinks. Ahab is drowned, tied by the harpoon line
his archenemy. In his end Ahab takes his crew with him. The only survivor is the
narrator, who is rescued by a passing ship.
Moby-Dick was misunderstood by those who read and reviewed it and it sold only
some 3,000 copies during Melville's lifetime. The book can be read as a thrilling sea
story, an examination of the conflict between man and nature - the battle between
Ahab and the whale is open to many interpretations. It is a pioneer novel but the
prairie is now sea, or an allegory on the Gold Rush, but now the gold is a whale. Jorge
Luis Borges has seen in the universe of Moby-Dick "a cosmos (a chaos) not only
perceptibly malignant as the Gnostics had intuited, but also irrational, like the
cosmos in the hexameters of Lucretius." (from The Total Library, 1999) Clare
34
Spark has connected in Hunting Captain Ahab (2001) different interpretations with
changing political atmosphere - depending on the point of view Ahab has been seen as
a Promethean hero or a forefather of the twentieth-century totalitarian dictators. The
director John Huston questions in his film version (1956) which one, Ahab or the
whale, is the real Monster.
REDBURN (1849) and WHITE-JACKED (1850) Melville wrote to get money,
comparing his work to "sawing wood". PIERRE (1852), a Gothic romance and
psychological study based on the author's childhood, was a financial and critical
disaster. Melville's stories in Putnam's Monthly Magazine reflected the despair and the
contempt for human hypocrisy and materialism. Among the stories were 'The
Scrivener' (1853), 'The Encantadas' (1854) and 'Benito Cereno' (1855). 'Batleby' was a
story about a man, who confronts life with an Everlasting Nay - "I would prefer not
to," is his quiet defense against onrushing materialism of the day.
THE CONFIDENCE MAN (1857), Melville's last novel, was a harsh satire of
American life set on a Mississippi River steamboat. After 1857 he wrote only some
poetry. His health was failing, he did not earn enough money to support his family,
and he was a dependent of his wealthy father-in-law. To recover from a breakdown,
he undertook a long journey to Europe and the Holy Land. CLAREL (1876), a long
poem about religious crisis, was based on this strip, and reflected his Manichean view
of God. The book was ignored. Subsequent works were privately printed and
distributed among a very small circle of acquaintances.
After unsuccessful lecture tours in 1857-60, Melville lived in Washington, D.C.
(1861-62). He moved to New York, where he was appointed customs inspector on the
New York docks. This work secured him a regular income. Melville's later works
include BATTLE-PIECES AND ASPECTS OF THE WAR (1865), privately printed
JOHN MARR AND OTHER SAILORS (1888), and TIMOLEON (1891). Melville's
death on September 28, 1891, in New York, was noted with only one obituary notice.
His unfinished work, Billy Budd, Foretopman, remained unpublished until 1924. A
definitive edition appeared in 1962. The story is set in 1797 during the war between
England and France. Billy Budd, 'the Handsome Sailor', is favorite of the crew of
HMS Bellipotent. He becomes the target of John Claggart, the satanic master-at-arms.
Claggart accuses falsely Billy of being involved in a supposed mutiny. The innocent
Billy, who is unable to answer the charge because of a chronic stammer, accidentally
kills Claggart. Captain Vere sees through Claggart's plot, fears reaction among the
crew, if Billy is not punished. He calls a court and in effect instructs it to find Billy
guilty of capital crime. The court condemns Billy, who goes willingly to his fate and
is hanged from the yardarm after crying out 'God bless Captain Vere'. Later Vere is
killed during an engagement with the French, murmuring as his last words Billy's
name.
COLLECTING HERMAN MELVILLE
by William S. Reese
35
(From The Gazette of the Grolier Club, 1993)
Nineteen-ninety-one marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Herman Melville.
Numerous observances were held to commemorate the work of that remarkable
American writer, so widely forgotten a century ago and so widely celebrated today.
The centenary was another step in the evolving attitude toward the man and his work.
The re-evaluation of Melville's literary career began even before his death, and has
grown in ever-widening circles ever since. Today it is a healthy small industry,
especially in the academic arena, where biographers, critics and interpreters, as well
as biographers of critics and critics of biographers, assiduously work away. In this
whole imposing edifice of Melville studies, booksellers and book collectors have
played a role, sometimes aiding scholarship and sometimes paralleling it. And, at the
same time, intentionally or not, they have shaped some part of the way Melville is
read today.
I came to be a collector of Melville, and hence a participant in the modern Melville
world, purely as an amateur. Hearing Robert Penn Warren read from Battle-Pieces
inspired me to read further than Moby-Dick, and I worked my way through the works
from Typee to the late poems before beginning to accumulate seriously. My reading
was made easier by having acquired, for starters, the scholarly Melville material from
the library of the Yale professor, Norman Holmes Pearson. This gave me a wealth of
secondary material, including all of the standard biographies and early criticism. My
own reference library provided many of the sources for the activities of my
predecessors in Melville collecting. These aided greatly both in pursuing Melville
material and in looking at the history of collecting him. In the case of Melville, there
is a strong parallel between the revival of general scholarly interest in him and interest
in Melville collecting. In both instances, the modern "Melville revival" dates from
1919, both the centenary of his birth and beginning of a more disillusioned,
deterministic, post-war age.
Melville was never completely ignored by intelligent readers during his decades of
eclipse. In England, especially, Moby-Dick found numerous readers in the late
nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth century, most notably among the
Pre-Raphaelites and such writers as W.H. Hudson and Virginia Woolf. It is safe to say
that his general literary stock was far higher among English readers than among
Americans during this period. At home, Arthur Stedman made a valiant effort to
revive Melville around the time of his death in 1891, republishing Typee, Omoo,
White Jacket, and Moby-Dick, but the publisher went bankrupt, and the remaining
sheets were sold to an English publisher. Typee seems to have never gone out of print
at Harper's during Melville's lifetime, even if its sales were minimal. Moby-Dick saw
further republication in England, including in Everyman's Library, before the First
World War.
If Melville was read, though, he was hardly collected. His books are listed in the first
bible of American literature collectors, P.K. Foley's American Authors, in 1897, and
36
he makes sporadic appearances in booksellers' and auction catalogues beginning with
what is usually described as the first bookseller's catalogue devoted to American
literature, that of Leon & Brother in 1885. But he was not the taste of the day.
Certainly most American rare book collectors of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries were pursuing anything but American literature. Many of them
were collecting American history, especially of the early, colonial, and Revolutionary
periods. Those with more literary tastes, however, tended strongly towards English
literature, which was generally held to end with the great Victorian novelists. Before
the War a collector with a desire to be daring might even throw in a few collectible
"moderns" like Stevenson, Wilde or Kipling. However, with a few notable exceptions,
American literature took a back seat among American book collectors.
Perhaps the best example of those exceptional few who were passionate collectors of
American literature in this period is Stephen H. Wakeman. Wakeman collected from
1900 to 1920, and his sale catalogue in 1924 contains an extraordinary wealth of
material by the authors he chose to pursue. They were Bryant, Emerson, Hawthorne,
Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, Poe, Thoreau, and Whittier - an excellent reflection of
the authors canonized in the book collecting taste of the time. Wakeman was a
persistent collector who sometimes assembled multiple association copies - for
instance, he owned Hawthorne's own copy of The Scarlet Letter, as well as
presentation copies to his wife and to his sister. In this whole assemblage there is only
one Melville volume - Hawthorne's copy of Redburn, which is now in my collection.
Even that was catalogued as a Hawthorne item, listed among the many books from
Hawthorne's library Wakeman had acquired. Laid in the book at that time was a letter
from Melville to Hawthorne, present whereabouts unknown. The book and letter
together brought only $35, about one-tenth of what Longfellow's Kavanagh, A Tale,
inscribed to Hawthorne, fetched a little later in the sale. About this latter item, the
cataloguer remarked, "In the whole of American literature, it is hardly possible to
imagine a finer or more important Literary Association Item." Well, tastes have
certainly changed in that area - not that I have anything against Longfellow.
By the time of the Wakeman sale, the tide was turning. Melville's centenary in 1919
had brought numerous literary notices, and a weary and disillusioned post-war world
was probably for more ready for his prose. In 1921 Raymond Weaver's biography,
Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, came out, sparking further interest. The
following year the first real bibliography of Melville was issued by the English
collector, publisher, editor and bibliographer Michael Sadleir. Sadleir deserves special
remembrance by all Melvillians, for he was also the impetus behind the first - and
until the Newberry-Northwestern edition is completed, the only - complete collected
edition of Melville's works, issued by Constable between 1922 and 1924. Through his
efforts, all of Melville's prose and poetry was brought back into print, Billy Budd and
many poems were published for the first time, and Melville was made generally
accessible to readers. Before the collected works appeared, Sadleir published a
volume of author bibliographies entitled Excursions in Victorian Bibliography. Here,
included with the likes of Trollope, Marryat, Disraeli, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade,
37
Whyte-Melville and Mrs. Gaskell, Melville appeared as the lone American,
introduced by Sadleir's enthusiastic essay, comparing him favorably to the better
known English writers, although Sadleir saw little resemblance except that they all
lived in the same period: "They are of Victorianism Victorian," Sadleir said, while
Melville "is of the ageless, raceless family of lonely giants." If scholars need a text,
collectors often need a list - and a push - and Sadleir provided both.
Only a few months after Excursions in Victorian Bibliography appeared, the Brick
Row Book Shop of New Haven published a compilation of Melville's letters, with a
bibliography by another Englishman, Meade Minnigerode. This was somewhat more
extensive than Sadleir's, and remained the most detailed Melville bibliography for the
next fifty years. Significantly, it was published by a bookseller. The owner of the
Brick Row Book Shop, Edward Byrne Hackett, also maintained stores in New York
and Princeton in the 1920s, and more than a few undergraduates who later became
major collectors bought their first books from Brick Row. (After several changes of
location and ownership, Brick Row still flourishes in San Francisco, and sold me
Hawthorne's Redburn.) Hackett was a buccaneer and a scoundrel - David Randall
gives a vivid portrait of working for him in his autobiography, Dukedom Large
Enough - but he understood that bibliographies help sell books, and that more
collectible authors made for more sales. Whatever his motives, Hackett was an early
and influential dealer pushing Melville.
The other bookseller to promote Melville was A.S.W. Rosenbach, the pre-eminent
American bookseller from 1920 to 1950. Equally comfortable with illuminated
manuscripts or the most modern of authors, Rosenbach liked to buy great writers who
were critically out of favor. Certainly his most famous investment in the latter was his
purchase of the manuscript of Joyce's Ulysses at the John Quinn sale in 1924 for
$1950 - a price Joyce found so insultingly low that he was moved to write a nasty
limerick about the Doctor. Despite an attempt by some of Joyce's friends to buy it
back for the Bibliotheque Nationale, it resides at the Rosenbach Foundation today. At
the same time he was buying Ulysses, Rosenbach was writing an essay of Melville
appreciation, issued in 1924 by the auctioneer and publisher Mitchell Kennerly as An
Introduction to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale. Four years later, the
essay was reprinted as the Introduction to an edition of Moby-Dick jointly published
by Doubleday of New York and Kennerly's London branch. The Rosenbach seal of
approval meant a great deal in the book collecting world of the 1920s, and some of his
friends and customers took up the torch. But with Melville, as with Joyce, the Doctor
was his own best customer, ultimately leaving to the Rosenbach Foundation the finest
group of association copies of Melville ever brought together. These include the
dedication copy of Omoo, inscribed to his uncle Herman Gansevoort, presentation
copies of Omoo and Mardi to his sister-in law, Hope Shaw; a copy of Moby-Dick
which had belonged to Hawthorne (although not the dedication copy itself, which
may still exist in a Berkshires barn somewhere); The Whale inscribed to his father-in
law, Chief Justice Shaw; and Pierre, inscribed to the Hawthornes, the only book
actually inscribed to them to survive.
38
Melville inscribed or presented very few copies of his books, which makes the
Rosenbach group all the more amazing. Typee and Battle-Pieces seem to have been
the two he inscribed most often, with at least seven known presentations of each.
White Jacket and The Confidence-Man are unknown in presentation, although
Melville's own copy of the first survives, now at Harvard, and there is a presentation
copy from Melville's brother, Allan, of the latter, now at Yale. The bulk of surviving
presentations are either to family members, or to close acquaintances. Herman
Melville was not a man for casual book signing. The one inscribed book in my
collection is interesting in that regard. It is a copy of Typee, evidently specially bound
in full morocco for gift purposes, inscribed to Henry A. Smythe at Christmas, 1868.
Smythe had known Melville since 1857, but in 1866, as Collector of Customs in New
York, he had performed a signal service, handing Melville a job as customs inspector
when five thousand patronage job-seekers, each with three political sponsors, were
lined up at his door. It would be interesting to know if Smythe had requested a copy
of Typee or if Melville picked it out among all of his books as the volume to signify
his gratitude, since the success of his first book and his reputation as "the man who
had lived among cannibals" had come to rankle later. However, The Confidence-Man
would hardly have been a politic gift for his boss.
Once the book collecting world noticed Melville they were ready to embrace him. The
most popular writer about book collecting of the 1920s, A. Edward Newton, gave
Melville a ringing endorsement in his 1928 volume, The Book-Collecting Game. An
enthusiastic collector and author, writing in the pose of a self-made man without
higher education, but enamored of the world of books and scholarship, Newton set the
tone for the post-war book world with his famous The Amenities of Book-Collecting
in 1918. His essays continued to appear in the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday
Evening Post; and he was probably read by as wide an audience as any author on
book collecting before or since. A friend and disciple of Dr. Rosenbach, whose
triumphs are sounded and opinions repeated throughout his own essays, Newton
surely came by his Melville interest via Rosenbach's Walnut Street book store. When
he proclaimed Moby-Dick "one of the finest pieces of literature in the English
language," and put it on his much collected list of "One Hundred Good Novels,"
popular collecting interest took a huge step forward.
It was impossible for the book collecting writers of the '20s to think of Melville
without mention of Conrad, the other great writer of "sea tales," as they usually
termed them, making one think of garrulous old captains champing on their pipes and
beginning stories, "It was a dark and stormy night...." Some collectors were never
quite comfortable until it was resolved, once and for all, which was "greater." Newton
had no use for Conrad at all. Dr. Rosenbach observed that Melville was a better writer
but was ready - protean as always - to buy most of the extant Conrad manuscripts at
the John Quinn Sale. Barton Currie, after Newton the most popular popularizer of
book collecting, may have spoke for a certain taste of the time when he wrote, in 1931,
of his love of Conrad:
39
Nine out of ten of my collector friends were keen about Melville.
Several of them called Moby-Dick the great American novel, though it
is really no more of a novel than Robinson Crusoe. (And what child or
adolescent has ever been able to read so much as a chapter of it?) But
somehow I could not rave about Moby-Dick, American classic of the
sea though it be. I had read it three times, trying to step up my
enthusiasm. I paid one thousand dollars for a very fine first edition of it
and again read it in its pristine form. But no, Conrad for me ten to one
against Herman Melville.
I love the image created here, that the earnest book collector, failing to appreciate
what he knows he should, makes one more effort employing the talisman of "the very
fine first edition" as an aid to understanding, only to be beaten back to Lord Jim.
Another sign of the book collecting interest in Melville in the late '20s was the
publication of fine press editions. The first of these was another English production,
the Nonesuch Press edition of Benito Cereno, published in 1926. But by far the most
important was the Moby-Dick issued by the Lakeside Press in 1930 in three large
volumes, with illustrations by Rockwell Kent. I think this edition of Moby-Dick is of
the greatest importance because of the extraordinary impact of Kent's illustrations.
Later used in the Modern Library Giant edition, they are so powerful and so well
known that I would argue they have had a major impact on the way the book is read
and understood. Anyone who becomes seriously interested in Melville cannot escape
seeing them sooner or later - they even illustrate the checklist of editions of
Moby-Dick compiled by Thomas Tanselle. (The line of Kent's Moby-Dick dinnerware
sadly never caught on. The Columbia Library has some magnificent pieces from it,
including a massive Pequot punch bowl.) If there was ever a case of a later illustrator
profoundly asserting his own voice in the text, this is it - all the more so because the
immediate reaction of most readers is that the Kent illustrations are completely
appropriate. I am certainly among those who find the illustrations powerful and
beautiful. But I do feel that they have become a text of their own for modern readers
of Moby-Dick, and it is impossible to say how the subtle subtext of added illustrations
has altered perceptions of the original book. Melville was a writer with a broad
interest in visual images - he discusses whaling prints in Moby-Dick, had a print
collection, and lectured on art. It is interesting to speculate what he would have
thought of the linking of these essentially alien images to his book. In any case, Kent's
illustrations provided an iconographic romanticism which I think contributed to the
rising popular interest in Moby-Dick and Melville's writing.
By the 1930s, despite the generally hard times for the rare book business during the
Depression, Melville was well established as a very respectable author to collect. A
group of strong collectors pursued Melville and other American writers, building
some of the great collections of American literature during these years - such names
to conjure with as Carroll A. Wilson, H. Bradley Martin, C. Waller Barrett, and Frank
J. Hogan. Even in the depths of 1938 Melville's annotated copy of the Moby-Dick
40
sourcebook, Owen Chase's Narrative, realized $1700 at the Cortland Bishop sale to
Hogan's agent, although Moby-Dick itself had dropped back from its 1929 peak of
$1000 or more for a fine copy to the mid-three figure range. David Randall, who
headed Scribner's rare book department after working for Brick Row, has left us the
best record of selling during the '30s and '40s in the chapter on Melville in Dukedom
Large Enough. Like all booksellers, but less than most, Randall must be watched for
the exaggeration of reminiscence - I rather doubt that the Brick Row Book Shop
always had copies of those great, late, rarities, John Marr and Timoleon, in stock, as
he recalls, but for the most part his recollections collate with sale catalogues, and
Scribner's under Randall was undoubtedly the leading Melville dealer of the period.
Much of the Bradley Martin collection came from Randall, as well as key parts of
other major collections. After the death of Carroll Wilson, Randall catalogued his
Melville collection in the record of Wilson's collecting issued by his widow, 13
Author Collections, and then sold it, mainly to Martin, Barrett, and the Boston
collector Parkman Howe. Waller Barrett's books, of course, are now at the University
of Virginia. The Hogan books were sold at auction at an unfavorable time - early 1945
- offering the best single group of Melville to appear at public sale until the Bradley
Martin sale in 1989.
***
My own experience as a Melville collector has been in a field already well surveyed
by others. At first, I wondered what was left to buy. Great institutions are built with
collections of collections, and it is sometimes discouraging for the private collector to
contemplate what has gone beyond reach in research libraries, even if one happens to
be fond of those libraries. Taking Melville presentation copies as a guide, for instance,
one finds that the great bulk of those known are now in institutions. What does that
leave for the collector? When I started buying Melville, several friends who are book
trade veterans suggested I wouldn't find much new.
The answer is that the collector has the fun of discovering the unknown. Years in the
rare book business have convinced me that just at the point someone proclaims
nothing new is going to turn up, something great pops out of nowhere. In the last few
years, someone found, and sold at Sotheby's for several million dollars, a real
Declaration of Independence in a picture frame he paid four dollars for - unfortunately
prompting thousands of people with later reproductions to call up me and my
colleagues, hoping they are going to strike it rich. Two ladies in California looked in
their grandfather's trunk recently and discovered the first half of the manuscript of
Huckleberry Finn. Events like this make hope spring eternal for us all.
In my case, my first step in collecting Melville was made in an area where quite a lot
has reached the market recently, and hopefully will continue to - books from his
library. After Melville's death some of his books remained in the family, and these
groups are now largely institutionalized, at The New York Public Library and
Harvard. The bulk of his library was sold, however, to a Brooklyn bookseller for $110.
41
No special importance, obviously, was attached to his ownership and they were
widely scattered through the trade. Those that were unmarked cannot be recovered,
but Melville was a persistent and sometimes copious annotator, and a slow but steady
stream of his books from his library have been rediscovered. Merton Sealts, who has
painstakingly chronicled all this in successive editions of his Melville's Reading,
notes that between 1966 and 1988 the number of surviving books located rose from
247 to 269 - a rate of one a year. Among books in my own collection, such an
important and extensively annotated text as his copy of Dante only re-emerged in the
last decade, as did Melville's Milton, probably the most thoroughly annotated of his
books to come to light. I have succeeded in securing most of the books from
Melville's library to come on the market recently. My first Melville purchase was his
copy of Macy's History of Nantucket and the Whale-Fishery. I also have a group of
volumes of poetry given to relatives, Kearsley's Stranger's Guide...to London signed
by both Melville and his father, two volumes of Hazlitt, his set of the works of
Abraham Cowley, and several others. I also have a number of volumes which
belonged to his older brother, Gansevoort, and may have later been inherited by
Herman, most notably Poe's narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
The history of books from Melville's library in the marketplace has been a strange one.
The value and interest of any book, worthless in itself but invested with iconic power
and perhaps research value by virtue of marks of ownership or annotations, can be
very much a matter of opinion. The high end of this kind of associative magic is
Washington's copy of The Federalist, sold at the Bradley Martin sale to an
unidentified buyer for almost $1,430,000. (By the way, anyone who can identify the
mystery purchaser can get a finder's fee from more than one dealer.) In the case of
Melville, most of the really interesting associative books are in the family groups in
New York and Cambridge, but the steady trickle of discoveries, including some major
books, has seen a very uneven market. The defining event was the first sale of the
Milton at Phillips in New York in the early 1980s. The Milton had first appeared in
the catalogue of the veteran manuscript dealer, Robert Batchelder, priced, I think, at
$27,500. It was bought by a New York manuscript runner (and, more recently,
convicted felon), well known in the trade for sharp practices. He consigned it to
Phillips, who had a New York gallery at the time, evidently negotiating a very high
reserve. Our operator was banking on the known interest of the famous zany
collector-cum-cult leader, Haven O'More, then at the height of his buying career. In
the event, John Fleming, bidding for O'More, paid $100,000 against the reserve for
the Milton. Since it has since emerged that O'More was spending someone else's
money, we have a sales figure reflecting unreality all around. When the Milton
reappeared in the Garden Library sale in 1990, the bidding quickly resolved itself into
a two-way contest between Ximenes, bidding for Princeton, and myself, with
Princeton winning at $45,000. At the same sale I bought the annotated Dante,
evidently against the reserve, at $20,000.
But, to return to the Milton, its first sale rewrote the marketplace. Suddenly, anyone
who had a volume from Melville's library figured it was worth some serious
42
percentage of $100,000. Never mind that the Milton was a major work which had
greatly influenced Melville, with wonderful annotations, and they just had a bad book
of poems with a titlepage signature. It must be worth $25,000 anyway! For the most
part, I've stubbornly refused to go along with these wishful thinkers, and cold reality
suggests that, at the moment, I'm the only game in town. I've bought the reasonable
ones, but there has been a steady stream of auction buy-ins of over-reserved books
from Melville's library. Such is the chaos created in the marketplace by a shrewd
speculator and a collector using someone else's money.
At first I thought I would stick to books from Melville's library and avoid collecting
his writings, but as I read more of him, my restraint collapsed. The decisive moment
came at Ximenes in New York, where I saw and bought The Piazza Tales inscribed
by Allan Melville, once the property of the Pforzheimer Foundation. Shortly after that,
I was able to buy from my friend, Clarence Wolf, the 1853 remainder issue of The
Whale. As some of you may know, Richard Bentley, Melville's publisher for
Redburn, Mardi, White Jacket and The Whale, refused to have anything to do with
Pierre, and in 1853 remaindered all four, binding up the sheets in single volumes in
cheap red cloth with cancel titles. The Whale is the most interesting of these, of
course, and is a good deal rarer in this issue than the regular first edition. For
whatever reason, the remaindered Redburn turns up with some frequency, and I have
it in two different forms of remainder cloth. I also have the remaindered White Jacket,
which I got from Rob Rulon-Miller. The remaindered Mardi has so far alluded me, as
has an English Mardi in original cloth.
For the most part, it is the English editions of Melville which present complications
for the collector. Nice copies of all of the four Bentley titles in original cloth are
difficult to find - in the case of Mardi, impossible, so far. All that stands between me
and the cream and gold spines of a Whale in original cloth is the price, pushed up to
the $100,000 range in the Martin and Gorden sales, and held there by some of the
rasher members of the trade. A nice but rebound one is still a fraction of that; however,
probably the most difficult of English editions are those of Piazza Tales and The
Confidence Man. Piazza Tales is actually the American sheets with a cancel title, and
it is sufficiently rare that Carroll Wilson, no less, doubted its existence. My copy
came from the Hermitage Book Shop in Denver. The English Confidence Man is an
entirely English setting of type, and was issued by Longman, Brown, Green and
Longman's on the basis of a contract negotiated for Melville by Hawthorne, who by
then was American consul in Liverpool. My copy came from the great Melville
scholar, Merton Sealts.
A collection of American Melville can be formed without great difficulty, excepting
the first two books in wrappers and the final two books of poems. These famous black
tulips, Timoleon and John Marr, were issued by Melville in editions of twenty-five
copies each, just before his death in 1891. Both came up at the Martin sale, and they
were my prime desiderata. In the event I got both of them at very reasonably prices,
thanks in large measure, I think, to the widespread knowledge in the trade that I
43
wanted them for my own collection, and a good deal of collegial forbearance as a
result. Even this would not have saved me if Maurice Sendak, who bought many of
the other Martin copies, had decided to pursue these, but he unaccountably did not. At
the time of the sale I did not know Sendak, except of course by reputation, but the
next year we got to know each other personally and had a convivial Melvillian lunch
and gam, in which he confessed to me that he had not realized the rarity of the two,
and wished the sale could be rerun. This kind of confession is of course music to a
collector's ears, and while I wish Maurice the best of luck as a Melville collector, I
don't wish him that.
As I suggested earlier, association copies of Melville's works have always been great
rarities and are almost entirely in institutions now - many of them here in the Barrett
collection, in fact. I have two: the previously mentioned Hawthorne copy of Redburn,
which is an inferential presentation copy, in that we know Melville gave Hawthorne a
copy via Harper's, this is inscribed by Hawthorne, and Melville's calling card is
affixed to the front pastedown. My other is the Typee inscribed to Henry Smythe
which I mentioned earlier. This volume has an interesting history. It was discovered
in Brooklyn and put up for auction at Darvick's in New York, a gallery more
associated with baseball cards than literature. There it was purchased by the same
operator who put up the annotated Milton. In fact, given the time frame, he probably
bought the book with the profits from that piece work. He kept it for several years. In
the meantime, his main occupation lay in American historical manuscripts. He
obtained from one of Jimmy Carter's secretaries a large group of Carter manuscript
material, all of which she had illicitly fished out of the trash can. This group of rather
hot presidential material he sold to a real estate developer who collected manuscripts,
for $100,000 or so. In due course, our operator got a call from a Los Angeles collector
who claimed to be particularly interested in Carter manuscripts. Going back to his
original buyer, the operator persuaded the developer to resell the letters, telling him
that they would realize a modest profit over the original $100,000. In fact, he was
offering them to the Los Angeles buyer at $250,000. The operator flew out to L.A.
with the manuscripts, where he was picked up at the airport by the customer's limo
and whisked to a posh office in Beverly Hills. The prospective buyer looked them
over, indicated great enthusiasm for the material, and asked for confirmation that they
were for sale. When our operator assured him they were and repeated the price,
WHAM! The room filled up with Secret Service agents. It's a federal crime to steal a
president's papers, even those of a former president, and the secretary had been caught
and spilled the beans to save herself. Our operator had fallen victim to a sting.
When the real estate developer found out the whole story, including the disparity in
profit margin, he was understandably unhappy. Since the chances of the operator
paying him back his original $100,000 were small, and the papers were in the hands
of the Secret Service, he demanded stock in trade. And so, the Typee, when I heard
about it, was in the hands of a man who didn't know Melville from the man in the
moon. He first knew that it represented a quarter of his money out of pocket. We
44
quickly concluded a transaction, mutually agreeable, and I got the Typee. The
operator got a little over a year, with time off for good behavior.
Collecting Melville manuscripts or letters is just about impossible. The largest
collection by far was the Bradley Martin collection, but here the arrangement of the
sale and other factors were a handicap. First was my concern for John Marr and
Timoleon, which came up first, in the event I got them for far less than I was prepared
to pay. But I was also interested in Melville's Bible, the last Melville lot, after the
manuscripts, and so I needed to reserve funds for that. In the event, I underbid it. The
best letters, Melville's correspondence with Richard Bentley, was lotted as one group,
which I knew I could not afford in any event. As the sale neared, it became clear that
two different groups of dealers were going to attempt to buy the letters and then
market them individually. My best chance to secure some good letters, therefore, was
to join one of those consortiums and then negotiate my share in letters. In fact, I was
invited by both blocs to join their team. I joined the wrong one. As it turned out, both
groups posited a top bid of $150,000. In the event, the bid was against us and we
underbid. Such are the vagaries of auctions. I did buy two individual letters and have
privately acquired another since then.
I have had more luck with the Melville family than Herman himself when it comes to
manuscripts. I've been able to acquire a number of manuscripts relating to his
relatives, including a memorandum by his sister, Augusta, on family excursions in the
summer of 1852, which illuminates some obscure biographical points; other family
correspondence in which Herman is mentioned; his father's manuscript exercise book
from 1796; and some of his father's business papers. All of this might seem far afield,
but it is all fodder for devoted Melvillians. Recently I was able to add a collection of
prints which had belonged to Melville. These will be published in an upcoming
Harvard Library Bulletin. While few of the prints are very notable, it does tell us a
good deal about his interests in visual material, something of considerable scholarly
investigation, these days.
Finally, and less expensively, there is the vast literature of Melville studies and
Melville enthusiasm, ranging from the biographical and critical works, to Rockwell
Kent plates and comic book versions of Moby-Dick. I even have the movie poster for
the Ray Bradbury and John Huston adaptation of Moby-Dick.
One of the pleasures of collecting Melville has been getting to know the scholarly
community who study him, a pleasantly obsessed group of people. I am fortunate in
having sufficient material of interest that they want to come see me - running a very
small private research library is one of the most enjoyable aspects of book collecting.
Although I now have all Melville's works in first editions, numerous collecting
opportunities still beckon. No doubt books from Melville's library will continue to
turn up. I am particularly interested in finding other editions besides the first, since
this gives a picture of how Melville was read by other cultures and readers not
contemporary with his first appearances in print. I know of such interesting printings
45
as the first German editions of Typee and Omoo, which appeared shortly after the
English ones, but I have never seen them available for sale. The secondary literature
provides a happy playground for years. And then one can always contemplate
something really big - the actual dedication copy to Hawthorne of Moby-Dick, or
even the manuscript of one of the books. After all, it was not long ago that The New
York Public Library was able to acquire the only surviving part of the manuscript of
Typee, along with a number of important letters. As Melville wrote to Hawthorne,
"As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing...Leviathan is not the
biggest fish;- I have heard of Krakens."
麦尔维尔的信件
LETTER TO JULIAN HAWTHORNE, FEBRUARY 8 1852
My Dear Master Julian
I was equally surprised and delighted by the sight of your printed note. (At first I
thought it was a circular (your father will tell you what that is)). I am very happy that
I have a place in the heart of so fine a little fellow as you.
You tell me that the snow in Newton is very deep. Well, it is still deeper here, I fancy.
I went into the woods the other day, and got so deep into the drifts among the big
hemlocks & maples that I thoguht I should stick fast there till SPring came, -- a Snow
Image.
Remember me kindly to your good father, Master Julian, and Good Bye, and may
Heaven always bless you, & may you be a good boy and become a great good man.
LETTER TO NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, JULY 17 1852
My Dear Hawthorne: -- This name of "Hawthorne" seems to be ubiquitous. I have
been on something of a tour lately, and it has saluted me vocally & typographically in
all sorts of places & in all sorts of ways. I was at the solitary Crusoeish island of
Naushon (one of the Elisabeth group) and there, on a stately piazza, I saw it gilded on
the back of a very new book, and in the hands of a clergyman. -- I went to visit a
gentleman in Brooklyne, and as we were sitting at our wine, in came the lady of the
house, holding a beaming volume in her hand, from the city -- "My Dear," to her
husband, "I have brought you Hawthorne's new book." I entered the cars at Boston for
this place. In came a lively boy "Hawthorne's new book!" -- In good time I arrived
home. Said my lady-wife "there is Mr Hawthorne's new book, come by mail" And
this morning, lo! on my table a little note, subscribed Hawthorne again. -- Well, the
Hawthorne is a sweet flower; may it flourish in every hedge.
I am sorry, but I can not at present come to see you at Concord as you propose. -- I am
but just returned from a two weeks' absence; and for the last three months & more I
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have been an utter idler and a savage -- out of doors all the time. So, the hour has
come for me to sit down again.
Do send me a specimen of your sand-hill, and a sunbeam from the countenance of
Mrs: Hawthorne, and a vine from the curly arbor of Master Julian.
As I am only just home, I have not yet got far into the book but enough to see that you
have most admirably employed materials which are richer than I had fancied them.
Especially at this day, the volume is welcome, as an antidote to the mooniness of
some dreamers -- who are merely dreamers -- Yet who the devel aint a dreamer?
H Melville
LETTER TO NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, NOVEMBER [17?] 1851
My Dear Hawthorne, -- People think that if a man has undergone any hardship, he
should have a reward; but for my part, if I have done the hardest possible day's work,
and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably -- why, then I
don't think I deserve any reward for my hard day's work -- for am I not now at peace?
Is not my supper good? My peace and my supper are my reward, my dear Hawthorne.
So your joy-giving and exultation-breeding letter is not my reward for my ditcher's
work with that book, but is the good goddess's bonus over and above what was
stipulated -- for for not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative
recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is love
appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory
-- the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill
comprehended. I say your appreciation is my glorious gratuity. In my proud, humble
way, -- a shepherd-king, -- I was lord of a little vale in the solitary Crimea; but you
have now given me the crown of India. But on trying it on my head, I found it fell
down on my ears, notwithstanding their asinine length -- for it's only such ears that
sustain such crowns.
Your letter was handed me last night on the road going to Mr. Morewood's, and I read
it there. Had I been at home, I would have sat down at once and answered it. In me
divine maganimities are spontaneous and instantaneous -- catch them while you can.
The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can't write what I felt.
But I felt pantheistic then -- your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in
God's. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your
having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the
lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the
gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling -- no hopefulness is in it, no
despair. Content -- that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I
speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.
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Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life?
And when I put it to my lips -- lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead
is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this
infinite fraternity of feeling. Now, sympathizing with the paper, my angel turns over
another page. you did not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read,
you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book -- and that you praised.
Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and
embrace the soul. Once you hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in
the mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon, -- the familiar, -- and recognized the
sound; for you have heard it in your own solitudes.
My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric skepticisms steal into me now, and make me
doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe me, I am not mad, most noble
Festus! But truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the
concussion is a little stunning. Farewell. Don't write a word about the book. That
would be robbing me of my miserly delight. I am heartily sorry I ever wrote anything
about you -- it was paltry. Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have
anything more to do, we have done nothing. So,now, let us add Moby Dick to our
blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish; -- I have heard if
Krakens.
This is a long letter, but you are not at all bound to answer it. Possibly, if you do
answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you will missend it -- for the very fingers
that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this
paper. Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it's a long stage, and no inn in
sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a passenger, I am content
and can be happy. I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having
come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our
immortality.
What a pity, that, for your plain, bluff letter, you should get such gibberish! Mention
me to Mrs. Hawthorne and to the children, and so, good-by to you, with my blessing.
Herman.
P.S. I can't stop yet. If the world was entirely made up of Magians, I'll tell you what I
should do. I should have a paper-mill established at one end of the house, and so have
an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I
should write a thousand -- a million -- billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to
you. The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A
foolish question -- they are One.
H.
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P.P.S. Don't think that by writing me a letter, you shall always be bored with an
immediate reply to it -- and so keep both of us delving over a writing-desk eternally.
No such thing! I sh'n't always answer your letters, and you may do just as you please.
LETTER TO SOPHIA HAWTHORNE, JANUARY 8 1852
My Dear Mrs Hawthorne
I have hunted up the finest Bath I could find, gilt-edged and stamped, whereon to
inscribe my humble acknowledgement of your highly flattering letter of the 29th Dec:
-- It really amazed me that you should find any satisfaction in that book. It is true that
some men have said they were pleased with it, but you are the only woman -- for as a
general thing, women have small taste for the sea. But, then, since you, with your
spiritualizing nature, see more things than other people, and by the same process,
refine all you see, so that they are not the same things that other people see, but things
which while you think you but humbly discover them, you do in fact create them for
yourself -- Therefore, upon the whole, I do not so much marvel at your expressions
concerning Moby Dick. At any rate, your allusion for example to the "Spirit Spout"
first showed to me that there was a subtile significance in that thing -- but I did not, in
that case, mean it. I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was
susceptible of an allegoric construction, & also that parts of it were -- but the
speciality of many of the particular subordinate allegories, were first revealed to me,
after reading Mr Hawthorne's letter, which, without citing any particular examples,
yet intimated the part-&-parcel allegoricalness of the whole. But, My Dear Lady, I
shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I shall commend, will
be a rural bowl of milk.
And now, how are you in West Newton? Are all domestic affairs regulated? Is Miss
Una content? and Master Julien satisfied with the landscape in general? And does Mr
Hawthorne continue his series of calls upon all his neighbors within a radius of ten
miles? Shall I send him ten packs of visiting cards? And a box of kid gloves? and the
latest style of Parisian handkerchief? -- He goes into society too much altogether -seven evenings out, a week, should content any reasonable man.
Now, Madam, had you not said anything about Moby Dick, & had Mr Hawthorne
been equally silent, then had I said perhaps, something to both of you about another
Wonder-(full) Book. But as it is, I must be silent. How is it, that while all of us human
beings are so entirely disembarrased in censuring a person; that so soon as we would
praise, then we begin to feel awkward? I never blush after denouncing a man: but I
grow scarlet, after eulogizing him. And yet this is all wrong; and yet we can't help it;
and so we see how true was that musical sentence of the poet when he sang -"We can't help ourselves"
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For tho' we know what we ought to be; & what it would be very sweet & beautiful to
be; yet we can't be it. That is most sad, too. Life is a long Dardenelles, My Dear
Madam, the shores whereof are bright with flowers, which we want to pluck, but the
bank is too high; & so we float on & on, hoping to come to a landing-place at last -but swoop! we launch into the great sea! Yet the geographers say, even then we must
not despair, because across the great sea, however desolate & vacant it may look, lie
all Persia & the delicious lands roundabout Damascus.
So wishing you a pleasant voyage at last to that sweet & far countree -Beleive Me Earnestly Thine-Herman Melville
I forgot to say, that your letter was sent to me from Pittsfield -- which delayed it.
My sister Augusta begs me to send her sincerest regards both to you & Mr
Hawthorne.
Herman Melville's Obituary Notices
Melville died at home, of a heart attack, shortly after midnight on September 28, 1891.
He was seventy-two years old; his last novel, The Confidence-Man, had been
published more than three decades earlier. As the following notices suggest, he had
been almost totally forgotten by all but a small group of admirers in Great Britain and
the United States. In an article written about a year before his death (included below),
columnist Edward W. Bok went so far as to state that most of those who could
remember Melville in 1890 thought he had died long before.
Melville is buried next to his wife Elizabeth Shaw in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx,
New York.
ARTICLE BY EDWARD W. BOK, IN NEW YORK PUBLISHERS' WEEKLY,
NOVEMBER 15 1890
There are more people to-day, writes Edward Bok, who believe Herman Melville
dead than there are those who know he is living. And yet if one choose to walk along
East Eighteenth Street, New York City, any morning about 9 o'clock, he would see
the famous writer of sea stories -- stories which have never been equalled perhaps in
their special line. Mr. Melville is now an old man, but still vigorous. He is an
employee of the Customs Revenue Service, and thus still lingers around the
atmosphere which permeated his books. Forty-four years ago, when his most famous
tale, Typee, appeared, there was not a better known author than he, and he
commanded his own prices. Publishers sought him, and editors considered themselves
50
fortunate to secure his name as a literary star. And to-day? Busy New York has no
idea he is even alive, and one of the best-informed literary men in this country
laughed recently at my statement that Herman Melville was his neighbor by only two
city blocks. "Nonsense," said he. "Why, Melville is dead these many years!" Talk
about literary fame? There's a sample of it!
NEW YORK TIMES, SEPTEMBER 29 1891
Herman Melville died yesterday at his residence, 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, this
city, of heart failure, aged seventy-two. He was the author of Typee, Omoo, Mobie
Dick, and other sea-faring tales, written in earlier years. He leaves a wife and two
daughters, Mrs. M. B. Thomas and Miss Melville.
NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 2 1891
There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced
age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigor of
life that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was but of
three or four lines. Yet forty years ago the appearance of a new book by Herman
Melville was esteemed a literary event, not only throughout his own country, but so
far as the English-speaking race extended. To the ponderous and quarterly British
reviews of that time, the author of Typee was about the most interesting of literary
Americans, and men who made few exceptions to the British rule of not reading an
American book not only made Melville one of them, but paid him the further
compliment of discussing him as an unquestionable literary force. Yet when a visiting
British writer a few years ago inquired at a gathering in New-York of distinctly
literary Americans what had become of Herman Melville, not only was there not one
among them who was able to tell him, but there was scarcely one among them who
had ever heard of the man concerning whom he inquired, albeit that man was then
living within a half mile of the place of the conversation. Years ago the books by
which Melville's reputation had been made had long been out of print and out of
demand. The latest book, now about a quarter of a century old, Battle Pieces and
Aspects of the War, fell flat, and he has died an absolutely forgotten man.
In its kind this speedy oblivion by which a once famous man so long survived his
fame is almost unique, and it is not easily explicable. Of course, there are writings that
attain a great vogue and then fall entirely out of regard or notice. But this is almost
always because either the interest of the subject matter is temporary, and the writings
are in the nature of journalism, or else the workmanship to which they owe their
temporary success is itself the produce or the product of a passing fashion. This was
not the case with Herman Melville. Whoever, arrested for a moment by the tidings of
the author's death, turns back now to the books that were so much read and so much
talked about forty years ago has no difficulty in determining why they were then read
51
and talked about. His difficulty will be rather to discover why they are read and talked
about no longer. The total eclipse now of what was then a literary luminary seems like
a wanton caprice of fame. At all events, it conveys a moral that is both bitter and
wholesome to the popular novelists of our own day.
Melville was a born romancer. One cannot account for the success of his early
romances by saying that in the Great South Sea he had found and worked a new field
for romance, since evidently it was not his experience in the South Sea that had led
him to romance, but the irresistible attraction that romance had over him that led him
to the South Sea. He was able not only to feel but to interpret that charm, as it never
had been interpreted before, as it never has been interpreted since. It was the romance
and the mystery of the great ocean and its groups of islands that made so alluring to
his own generation the series of fantastic tales in which these things were celebrated.
Typee and Omoo and Mardi remain for readers of English the poetic interpretation of
the Polynesian Islands and their surrounding seas. Melville's pictorial power was very
great, and it came, as such power always comes, from his feeling more intensely than
others the charm that he is able to present more vividly than others. It is this power
which gave these romances the hold upon readers which it is surprising that they have
so completely lost. It is almost as visible in those of his books that are not professed
romances, but purport to be accounts of authentic experiences -- in White Jacket, the
story of life before the mast in an American man-of-war; in Moby Dick, the story of a
whaling voyage. The imagination that kindles at a touch is as plainly shown in these
as in the novels, and few readers who have read it are likely to forget Melville's
poetizing of the prosaic process of trying out blubber in his description of the old
whaler wallowing through the dark and "burning a corpse." Nevertheless, the South
Pacific is the field that he mainly made his own, and that he made his own, as those
who remember his books will acknowledge, beyond rivalry. That this was a very
considerable literary achievement there can be no question. For some months a
contemporaneous writer, of whom nobody will dispute that he is a romancer and a
literary artist, has been working in the same field, but it cannot seriously be pretended
that Mr. [Robert Louis] Stevenson has taken from Herman Melville the laureateship
of the Great South Sea. In fact, the readers of Stevenson abandon as quite unreadable
what he has written from that quarter.
SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS REPUBLICAN, OCTOBER 4 1891
Herman Melville, one of the most original and virile of American literary men, died at
his home on Twenty-sixth street, New York, a few days ago, at the age of 72. He had
long been forgotten, and was no doubt unknown to the most of those who are reading
the magazine literature and the novels of the day. Nevertheless, it is probable that no
work of imagination more powerful and often poetic has been written by an American
than Melville's romance of Moby Dick; or the Whale, published just 40 years ago; and
it was Melville who was the first of all writers to describe with imaginative grace
based upon personal knowledge, those attractive, gentle, cruel and war-like peoples,
52
the inhabitants of the South Sea islands. His Typee, Omoo and Mardi made a
sensation in the late forties, when they were published, such as we can hardly
understand now; and from that time until Pierre Loti began to write there has been
nothing to rival these brilliant books of adventure, sufficiently tinged with romance to
enchain the attention of the passing reader as well as the critic. Melville wrote many
books, but ceased to write so long ago as 1857, having since that date published only
two volumes of verse which had no obvious relation to his previous work, and gave
no addition to his literary reputation....
Herman Melville later was appointed to a clerkship in the New York custom-house,
and since then his home has been in New York city, where in the society of a few
friends he has been content to see the world go by. He published a volume of war
poems in 1866, and 10 years later his versified record of travel, Clarel, a Pilgrimage
in the Holy Land. Mr. Melville has not gained a place as poet, yet no one can read his
book of Battle Pieces without much admiration for the vigor of the verse, and the
frequent flashes of prophetic fire which they show.... The book is exceptional in that
its verse was not suggested and put forth at the time of the events it wraps in rhythmic
guise, but after the fall of Richmond Melville wrote nearly all of the poems; they
show, nevertheless, such differences of proportion as might have occurred from the
spontaneity of immediate impulse. The verses on Worden, "In the Turret," on Cushing,
"At the Cannon's Mouth," are not ordinary writing nor is the poem "Chattanooga" on
the battle fought in November, 1863....
Yet the better evidence of the divine afflatus that was in him appeared in his South
Sea romances and in Moby Dick; his Clarel cannot be read except as a task, and
contains probably nothing worth quoting, although some very patient reader might
discover here and there lines of some consequence. Melville was very interesting in
his personality, -- a man above the ordinary stature, with a great growth of hair and
beard, and a keen blue eye; and full of vigor and quickness of thought in his age, -which he felt and yielded to earlier than would have been expected of one of so
stalwart a frame.
Although as aforesaid Melville's early novels are not now read, they are as well worth
reading as the more sensuous stories of Pierre Loti, or the vivacious ventures of
Robert Louis Stevenson, whose scenes are laid in the same region of "lotus eating," to
describe in a fit phrase the common life of the Pacific islands. Typee, particularly,
would be found to retain its charm for even the sophisticated readers of to-day. But
the crown of Melville's sea experience was the marvelous romance of Moby Dick, the
White whale, whose mysterious and magical existence is still a superstition of whalers,
-- at least such whalers as have not lost touch with the old days of Nantucket and New
Bedford glory and grief. This book was dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
Hawthorne must have enjoyed it, and have regarded himself as honored in the
inscription. This story is unique; and in the divisions late critics have made of novels,
as it is not a love-story (the only love being that of the serious mate Starbuck for his
wife in Nantucket, whom he will never see again), it is the other thing, a hate-story.
53
And nothing stranger was ever motive for a tale than Capt Ahab's insane passion for
revenge on the mysterious and invincible White whale, Moby Dick, who robbed him
of a leg, and to a perpetual and fatal chase of him the captain binds his crew. The
scene of this vow is marvelously done, and so are many other scenes, some of them
truthful depictions of whaling as Melville knew it; some of the wildest fabrications of
imagination. An immense amount of knowledge of the whale is given in this amazing
book, which swells, too, with a humor often as grotesque as Jean Paul's, but not so
genial as it is sardonic. Character is drawn with great power too, from Queequeg the
ex-cannibal, and Tashtego the Gay Header, to the crazy and awful Ahab, the grave
Yankee Starbuck, and the terrible White whale, with his charmed life, that one feels
can never end. Certainly it is hard to find a more wonderful book than this Moby Dick,
and it ought to be read by this generation, amid whose feeble mental food, furnished
by the small realists and fantasts of the day, it would appear as Hercules among the
pygmies, or as Moby Dick himself among a school of minnows.
NEW YORK MAIL AND EXPRESS, OCTOBER 8 1891
A remarkable man of letters recently passed away in the person of Mr. Herman
Melville at the age of 72. If he had died forty years ago his death would have attracted
as much attention as the death of Mr. Lowell at that time, for his books were of a kind
that was more widely read than those of Mr. Lowell.... The early career of Mr.
Melville was adventurous enough to make him famous among his countrymen, who,
less literary in their tastes and demands than at present, were easily captivated by
stories of maritime life like Omoo and Typee, and Moby Dick.
They read Marryatt then, and Cooper, and Dana, and it was natural that they should
read Melville, whose gifts in writing were rather those of a sailor of genius than a
landsman of talent. He knew the sea as only sailors know it, for, beginning before the
mast at the age of 18, he went to Liverpool and London and elsewhere in England,
and then returned to New York, where he was born and lived, and where he was not
content to remain long. A descendant of a member of the Boston "tea party," there
was that in his blood which chafed at the limitations of modern city life, its artificial
conventionalities and proprieties, and a spirit in his feet, which, spurning the ground,
impelled him to seek again the life and freedom, the delights and dangers, that are so
dear to those who go down to the sea in ships....
Popular among his own countrymen, who read him without quite knowing why,
except that he entertained them, for they were not critical, though they had persuaded
themselves that they were, Mr. Melville was a revelation to the English, who as a
people have never grown weary of reading the stories of adventurous navigators,
whether they were written in the days of Drake and Cavendish, or are written in our
more prosaic days of ocean steamers that beat the record, and who could not but be
charmed, critics and all, with the wild, and spirited, and picturesque prose poetry of
Mr. Melville. It was as new in their literature as it was in ours, and they admired it
54
accordingly, not more ardently, perhaps, than we, but more lastingly, for the fame of
Melville, as we were assured a few years ago by Mr. Clark Russell, is still perennial
in the mother country.
It cannot be said to be so here, for after Mardi (1849), a clumsy attempt at an allegory,
which was a great disappointment to Mr. Melville's readers, and still more after Pierre,
or the Ambiguities (1852), his reputation declined. Not that he was other than he had
been from the beginning, but that a new king had arisen who knew not Joseph; not
that he was written out, for a man of genius is never written out so long as he
understands what is best in himself, but that writing like his was no longer cared for
or read....
Mr. Melville was a man of great genius, but he cannot be said to have understood the
limitation of his genius, or the things which it could, or could not, accomplish, and he
cannot be said to have understood, or to have cultivated, literature as an art. He wrote
as he felt, following out his moods and whims, confessing himself to his readers, of
whose condemnation, or absolution, he took no thought, satisfied to be what he was,
and to do what he did. Typee and Omoo are full of light and color, of sensations that
seem to be reflections, and of the restlessness of thought that seems to imply activity
of mind. We drift with him through his Pacific splendors and dangers as if we had
partaken of the lotus plant; everything about us is wonderful, is marvelous, is
miraculous, but nothing is tangible, real, "of the earth, earthy."
There was a wealth of imagination in the mind of Mr. Melville, but it was an
untrained imagination, and a world of the stuff out of which poetry is made, but no
poetry, which is creation and not chaos. He saw like a poet, felt like a poet, thought
like a poet, but he never attained any proficiency in verse, which was not among his
natural gifts. His vocabulary was large, fluent, eloquent, but it was excessive,
inaccurate and unliterary. He wrote too easily, and at too great length, his pen
sometimes running away with him, and from his readers. There were strange, dark,
mysterious elements in his nature, as there were in Hawthorne's, but he never learned
to control them, as Hawthorne did from the beginning, and never turned their
possibilities into actualities. The suggestive comparison with Hawthorne reminds us
that Mr. Melville and that great writer, who were personal friends, were at one time
neighbors or nearly such, the one living at Pittsfield and other at Lenox, on the brink
of the Stockbridge Bowl, and that in Mr. Julian Hawthorne's memoir of his parents -Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife -- there are references to this friendship, besides
several letters that passed between them at this time.
As none of these letters have as yet (so far as we know) been quoted in any literary
notice of Mr. Melville, we copy one of them, which was written at Pittsfield in the
summer of 1851, after the finishing of The House with the Seven Gables on the one
hand, and during the composition of Moby Dick on the other, and which represents the
peculiarities of the writer with a force and a faithfulness which leaves nothing to be
desired:
55
[quotes most of Melville's letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1851]
This is a very curious letter, and a very interesting one, from a personal point of view;
but it is a strange and sad one, for a man of 32, who had written four or five
remarkable books, and whose promise of fame was voluble in mouths of wisest
censure. But, whatever it was, it was unfortunately prophetic, for, whether its writer
knew it or not, his development had "come to the inmost leaf of the bulb" when he
wrote Moby Dick. He wrote other books afterward -- four in prose, stories and what
not, and three in verse -- but they added nothing to his reputation; why, it is not easy
to determine, since they were conceived in the same spirit, and informed with the
same qualities, as Omoo and Typee, which are landmarks in American literature, in
which the name of Herman Melville must ever hold an honorable place. --Richard
Henry Stoddard
Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne
In the summer of 1850 Melville purchased an eighteenth-century farmhouse in the
community of Pittsfield in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Berkshire was then
home to a number of prominent literary figures such as Fanny Kemble, Oliver
Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and, in Lenox, less than six miles from
Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The two authors met for the first time in Stockbridge on August 5, 1850, on a picnic
excursion hosted by David Dudley Field. Hawthorne was forty-six and was familiar
with at least a portion of Melville's work, having favorably reviewed Typee in the
Salem Advertiser (March 25, 1846); Melville was thirty-one and had just written or
was about to write an exceedingly warm and enthusiastic piece on Hawthorne's
Mosses From an Old Manse, a copy of which had been given to him by an aunt a few
weeks before.
Early in the course of the excursion, a sudden thunderstorm forced the party to take
shelter, giving Melville and Hawthorne an opportunity to become better acquainted.
The two men took to each other at once, and as their conversation continued were
delighted to discover a growing bond of mutual sympathy and comprehension. Two
days later Hawthorne wrote to a friend "I liked Melville so much that I have asked
him to spend a few days with me." This would be the first of a series of visits,
supplemented by written correspondence, that would continue until the gradual
cooling off of the friendship late in 1852.
In the beginning the relationship was a great source of comfort and intellectual
stimulation to Melville, who believed he had finally found the soul mate for whom he
had been yearning. As Sophia Hawthorne observed, "Mr. Melville, generally silent
and uncommunicative, pours out the rich floods of his mind and experience to
[Nathaniel Hawthorne], so sure of apprehension, so sure of a large and generous
interpretation, and of the most delicate and fine judgment." Hawthorne's influence, in
56
fact, is credited as the prime catalyst behind Melville's decision to transform what
originally seems to have been a light-hearted whaling adventure into the dramatic
masterpiece that is arguably the greatest American novel of all time.
In August of 1852 Melville wrote to Hawthorne about the true story of a New
England woman who had taken in and married a shipwrecked sailor only to be
abandoned by him. "The Story of Agatha", Melville thought, would be a perfect
subject for the application of Hawthorne's talents; the older man, however, felt little
enthusiasm for the project and after a few desultory attempts suggested that Melville
write the story himself. Melville agreed, but it is uncertain now whether he ever
actually did anything with the material; at any rate, no published version of the story
by him has been discovered.
The "Agatha" correspondence marks nearly the end of the Melville - Hawthorne
relationship, which had lasted only a little over two years. The initial abundance of
warmth and fellowship had faded for reasons which can only be conjectured. Melville
may have come to feel that Hawthorne was not as profoundly sympathetic and
responsive as he had at first seemed; for his part, Hawthorne was unsuccesful in using
his long-established connections with Franklin Pierce to secure a government post for
the impoverished Melville, a failure that left him "embarrassed and chagrined" and
probably made him reluctant to pursue further encounters. The two men met for the
last time in November 1856: en route to the Mediterranean Melville stopped in
Liverpool, where Hawthorne had been appointed American Consul; the two spent
several days together, which Hawthorne recorded in his journal as follows:
"Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do (a
little paler, and perhaps a little sadder), in a rough outside coat, and with his
characteristic gravity and reserve of manner.... [W]e soon found ourselves on pretty
much our former terms of sociability and confidence. Melville has not been well, of
late; ... and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued
without much success, latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated
a morbid state of mind.... Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence
and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he
had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to
rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite
belief. It is strange how he persists -- and has persisted ever since I knew him, and
probably long before -- in wondering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and
monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor
be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do
one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly
religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth
immortality than most of us."
Although Melville never corresponded with Hawthorne again, he did not forget him.
He continued to read and annotate Hawthorne's works after the latter's death in 1864
57
(Melville's copies of Hawthorne texts are preserved in Harvard's Houghton Library);
the reserved and finally unresponsive traveler Vine in Clarel is widely considered to
have been based on Hawthorne; and the poem "Monody" from Timoleon is almost
certainly about him.
Melville's Reflections
Some of Melville's wittier or more interesting remarks as culled from letters and
conversation. Extracts from his novels, short stories, and poems will not be found here;
they are located in the Excerpts areas of the individual Works pages.
On Writing
-- Can you send me about fifty fast-writing youths, with an easy style & not averse to
polishing their labors? If you can, I wish you would, because since I have been here I
have planned about that number of future works & cant find enough time to think
about them separately. -- But I don't know but a book in a man's brain is better off
than a book bound in calf -- at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book
off the brain, is akin to the ticklish and dangerous business of taking an old painting
off a panel -- you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due
safety -- & even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble. --Letter to Evert
Duyckinck, December 13 1850
What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, -- it will not pay. Yet, altogether,
write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are
botches. --Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1851
On Typee
... I could not but feel heartily vexed, that while the intelligent Editors of a publication
like [Chamber's Edinburgh Journal] should thus endorse the genuineness of the
narrative -- so many numskulls on this side of the water should heroically avow their
determination not to be "gulled" by it. The fact is, those who do not beleive it are the
greatest "gulls". -- full fledged ones too. --Letter to A. W. Bradford, May 23 1846
Typee has come out measurably unschathed from the fiery ordeal of Mr Wiley's
criticisms. I trust as it now stands the book will retain all those essential features
which most commended it to the public favor. --Letter to Evert Duyckinck, July 15
1846
This new edition will be a Revised one, and I can not but think that the measure will
prove a judicious one. -- The revision will only extend to the exclusion of those parts
not naturally connected with the narrative, and some slight purifications of style. I am
58
pursuaded that the intrinsick merit of the narrative alone -- & that other portions,
however interesting they may be in themselves, only serve to impede the story. The
book is certainly calculated for popular reading, or for none at all. -- If the first, why
then, all passages which are calculated to offend the tastes, or offer violence to the
feelings of any large class of readers are certainly objectionable.
-- Proceeding from this principle then, I have rejected every thing, in revising the
book, which refers to the missionaries. Such passages are altogether foreign to the
adventure, & altho' they may possess a temporary interest now, to some, yet so far as
the wide & permanent popularity of the work is conserned, their exclusion will
certainly be beneficial, for to that end, the less the book has to carry along with it the
better. --Letter to John Murray, July 15 1846
-- I had almost forgotten one thing -- the title of the book. -- From the first I have
deeply regretted that it did not appear in England under the title I always intended for
it -- "Typee" It was published here under that title & it has made a decided hit. Nor
was anything else to be expected -- that is, if the book was going to succeed at all, for
"Typee" is a title naturally suggested by the narrative itself, and not farfetched as
some strange titles are. Besides, its very strangeness & novelty, founded as it is upon
the character of the book -- are the very things to make "Typee" a popular title.
--Letter to John Murray, July 15 1846
You ask for "documentary evidences" of my having been at the Marquesas -- in
Typee. -- Dear Sir, how indescibably vexatious, when one really feels in his very
bones that he has been there, to have a parcel of blockheads question it! -- Not (let me
hurry to tell you) that Mr John Murray comes under that category -- Oh no -- Mr
Murray I am ready to swear stands fast by the faith, beleiving "Typee" from Preface
to Sequel -- He only wants something to stop the mouths of the senseless sceptics -men who go straight from their cradles to their graves & never dream of the queer
things going on at the antipodes. -I know not how to set about getting the evidence -- How under Heaven am I to
subpeona the skipper of the Dolly who by this time is the Lord only knows where, or
Kory-Kory who I'll be bound is this blessed day taking his noon nap somewhere in the
flowery vale of Typee, some leagues too from the Monument.
Seriously on the receipt of your welcome favor, Dear Sir, I addressed a note to the
owners of the ship, asking if they could procure for me, a copy of that part of the
ship's log which makes mention of two rascals running away at Nukaheva -- to wit
Herman Melville and Richard T. Greene. As yet I have nothing in reply -- If I think of
any other kind of evidence I will send it, if it can be had & dispatched. --Letter to
John Murray, September 2 1846
On Omoo
I have another work now nearly completed which I am anxious to submit to you
before presenting it to any other publishing house. It embraces adventures in the
South Seas (of a totally different character from "Typee") and includes an eventful
59
cruise in an English Colonial Whaleman (A Sydney Ship) and a comical residence on
the island of Tahiti. The time is about four months, but I & my narrative are both on
the move during that short period. This new book begins exactly where Typee leaves
off -- but has no further connection with my first work. -- Permit me here to assure Mr
Murray that my new M.S.S. will be in a rather better state for the press than the M.S.S.
[of Typee] handed to him by my brother. A little experience in this art of book-craft
has done wonders. --Letter to John Murray, July 15 1846
On Mardi
... To be blunt: the work I shall next publish will be in downright earnest a "Romance
of Polynisian Adventure" -- But why this? The truth is, Sir, that the reiterated
imputation of being a romancer in disguise has at last pricked me into a resolution to
show those who may take any interest in the matter, that a real romance of mine is no
Typee or Omoo, & is made of different stuff altogether. This I confess has been the
main inducement in altering my plans -- but others have operated. I have long thought
that Polynisia furnished a great deal of rich poetical material that has never been
employed hitherto in works of fancy; and which to bring out suitably, required only
that play of freedom & invention accorded only to the Romancer & poet. -- However,
I thought, that I would postpone trying my hand at any thing fanciful of this sort, till
some future day: tho' at times when in the mood I threw off occasional sketches
applicable to such a work. -- Well: proceeding in my narrative of facts I began to feel
an incurable distaste for the same; & a longing to plume my pinions for a flight, & felt
irked, cramped & fettered by plodding along with dull common places, -- So suddenly
standing the thing altogether, I went to work heart & soul at a romance which is now
in fair progress, since I had worked at it under an earnest ardor. -- Shout not, nor
exlaim "Pshaw! Puh!" -- My romance I assure you is no dish water nor its model
borrowed from the Circulating Library. It is something new I assure you, & original if
nothing more. But I can give you no adequate idea, of it. You must see it for yourself.
-- Only forbear to prejudge it. -- It opens like a true narrative -- like Omoo for
example, on ship board -- & the romance & poetry of the thing thence grow
continually, till it becomes a story wild enough I assure you & with a meaning too.
--Letter to John Murray, March 25 1848
I see that Mardi has been cut into by the London Atheneum, and also burnt by the
common hangman in the Boston Post. However the London Examiner & Literary
Gazette; & other papers this side of the water have done differently. These attacks are
matters of course, and are essential to the building up of any permanent reputation -if such should ever prove to be mine. -- "There's nothing in it!" cried the dunce, when
he threw down the 47th problem of the 1st book of Euclid -- "There's nothing in it --"
-- Thus with the posed critic. But Time, which is the solver of all riddles, will solve
Mardi. --Letter to Lemuel Shaw, April 23 1849
You may think, in your own mind that a man is unwise, -- indiscreet, to write a work
of that kind, when he might have written one perhaps, calculated merely to please the
60
general reader, & not provoke attack, however masqued in an affectation of
indifference or contempt. But some of us scribblers, My dear Sir, always have a
certain something unmanageable in us, that bids us do this or that, and be done it must
-- hit or miss. --Letter to Richard Bentley, June 5 1849
In a little notice of The Oregon Trail I once said something "critical" about another
man's book -- I shall never do it again. Hereafter I shall no more stab at a book (in
print, I mean) than I would stab at a man. -- I am but a poor mortal, & I admit that I
learn by experience & not by divine intuitions. Had I not written & published Mardi,
in all likelihood, I would not be as wise as I am now, or may be. For that thing was
stabbed at (I do not say through) -- & therefore, I am the wiser for it. --Letter to Evert
Duyckinck, December 14 1849
If Mardi be admitted to your shelves, your bibliographical Republic of Letters may
find some contentment in the thought, that it has afforded refuge to a work, which
almost everywhere else has been driven forth like a wild, mystic Mormon into
shelterless exile. --To Evert Duyckinck, February 2 1850
On Redburn
I have now in preparation a thing of widely different cast from "Mardi": -- a plain,
straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experience -- the son of a gentleman
on his first voyage to sea as a sailor -- no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but
cakes & ale. I have shifted my ground from the South Seas to a different quarter of the
globe -- nearer home -- and what I write I have almost wholly picked up by my own
observations under comical circumstances. --Letter to Richard Bentley, June 5 1849
They [Redburn and White-Jacket] are two jobs, which I have done for money -- being
forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood. And while I have felt obliged to refrain
from writing the kind of book I would wish to; yet, in writing these two books, I have
not repressed myself much -- so far as they are concerned; but have spoken pretty
much as I feel. -- Being books, then, written in this way, my only desire for their
"success" (as it is called) springs from my pocket, and not from my heart. So far as I
am individually concerned, and independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to
write those sort of books which are said to "fail".... --Letter to Lemuel Shaw, October
6 1849
This time tomorrow I shall be on land, & press English earth after the lapse of ten
years -- then a sailor, now H.M. author of "Peedee" "Hullabaloo" & "Pog-Dog."
--Journal Entry, November 4 1849
[The Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine review of Redburn is] very comical -- seemed
so, at least, as I had to hurry over it -- in treating the thing as real. But the wonder is
that the old Tory should waste so many pages upon a thing, which I, the author, know
to be trash, & wrote it to buy some tobacco with. --Journal Entry, November 6 1849
61
... I hope I shall never write such a book again -- Tho' when a poor devil writes with
duns all round him, & looking over the back of his chair -- & perching on his pen &
diving in his inkstand -- like the devils about St: Anthony -- what can you expect of
that poor devil? -- What but a beggarly Redburn! --Letter to Evert Duyckinck,
December 14 1849
On White-Jacket
This man-of-war book, My Dear Sir, is in some parts rather man-of-warish in style -rather aggressive I fear. -- But you, who like myself, have experienced in person the
usages to which a sailor is subjected, will not wonder, perhaps, at any thing in the
book. Would to God, that every man who shall read it, had been before the mast in an
armed ship, that he might know something himself of what he shall only read of.
--Letter to Richard Henry Dana, October 6 1849
You ask me about "the jacket." I answer it was a veritable garment -- which I suppose
is now somewhere at the bottom of Charles river. I was a great fool, or I should have
brought such a remarkable fabric (as it really was, to behold) home with me. Will you
excuse me from telling you -- or rather from putting on pen-&-ink record over my
name, the real names of the individuals who officered the frigate. I am very loath to
do so, because I have never indulged in any ill-will or disrespect for them, personally;
& shrink from any thing that approaches to a personal identification of them with
characters that were only intended to furnish samples of a tribe -- characters, also,
which possess some not wholly complimentary traits. If you think it worth knowing -I will tell you all, when I next have the pleasure of seeing you face to face. --Letter to
Richard Henry Dana, May 1 1850
On Moby-Dick
About the "whaling voyage" -- I am half way in the work, & am very glad that your
suggestion so jumps with mine. It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is
blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a
frozen maple tree; -- & to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy,
which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales
themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this. --Letter to Richard
Henry Dana, May 1 1850
In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you
now to propose its publication in England.
The book is a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the
Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author's own personal
experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer.
Should you be inclined to undertake the book, I think that it will be worth to you 200
pounds.. Could you be positively put in possession of the copyright, it might be worth
to you a larger sum -- considering its great novelty; for I do not know that the subject
62
treated of has ever been worked up by a romancer; or, indeed, by any writer, in any
adequate manner. --Letter to Richard Bentley, June 27 1850
It ... is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and
hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle
fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book -- on risk of a lumbago &
sciatics. --Letter to Sarah Morewood, September [12?] 1851
For some days past being engaged in the woods with axe, wedge, & beetle, the Whale
had almost completely slipped me for the time (& I was the merrier for it) when Crash!
comes Moby Dick himself (as you justly say) & reminds me of what I have been
about for part of the last year or two. It is really & truly a surprising coincidence -- to
say the least. I make no doubt it is Moby Dick himself, for there is no account of his
capture after the sad fate of the Pequod about fourteen years ago. -- Ye Gods! What a
commentator is this Ann Alexander whale. What he has to say is short & pithy & very
much to the point. I wonder if my evil art has raised this monster. --Letter to Evert
Duyckinck, in response to news of the sinking of a whale ship by a whale, November 7
1851
So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the
biggest fish; -- I have heard of Krakens. --Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, November
[17?] 1851
On Pierre
... [M]y new book possessing unquestionable novelty, as regards my former ones, -treating of utterly new scenes & characters; -- and, as I beleive, very much more
calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine -- being a
regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, & stirring passions at work, and withall,
representing a new & elevated aspect of American life -- all these considerations
warrant me strongly in not closing with terms greatly inferior to those upon which our
previous negotiations have proceeded. -- Besides, -- if you please, Mr Bentley -- let
bygones be bygones; let those previous books, for the present, take care of themselves.
For here now we have a new book, and what shall we say about this? If nothing has
been made on the old books, may not something be made out of the new? -- At any
rate, herewith you have it. Look at it and see whether it will suit you to purchase it....
It is a larger book, by 150 pages & more, than I thought it would be, at the date of my
first writing you about it. Other things being equal, this circumstance, -- in your mode
of publication -- must of course augment its value to you....
... I have thought that, on several accounts, (one of which is, the rapid succession in
which my works have lately been published) it might not prove unadvisable to publish
this present book anonymously, or under an assumed name: -- "By a Vermonter" say.
or "By Guy Winthrop." --Letter to Richard Bentley, April 16 1852
On Israel Potter
63
I engage that the story shall contain nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious. There
will be very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure. As for its
interest, I shall try to sustain that as well as I can --Letter to George P. Putnam, [June
7?] 1854
Some Memoranda for Publishing Poems
1 -- Don't stand on terms much with the publisher -- half-profits after expenses are
paid will content me -- not that I expect much "profits" -- but that will be a fair
nominal arrangement -- They should also give me 1 doz. copies of the book -2 -- Don't have the Harpers. -- I should like the Appletons or Scribner -- But
Duyckinck's advice will be good here.
3 -- The sooner the thing is printed and published, the better -- The "season" will
make little or no difference, I fancy, in this case.
4 -- After printing, don't let the book hang back -- but publish, & have done.
5 -- For God's sake don't have By the author of "Typee" "Piddledee" &c on the
title-page.
6 -- Let the title-page be simply, Poems by Herman Melville.
7 -- Don't have any clap-trap announcements and "sensation" puffs -- nor any extracts
published previous to publication of book -- Have a decent publisher, in short....
-- Of all human events, perhaps, the publication of a first volume of verse is the most
insignificant; but though a matter of no moment to the world, it is still of some
concern to the author, -- as these Mem. show -- Pray therefore, don't laugh at my Mem.
but give heed to them, and so oblige Your brother Herman --Letter to his brother
Allan, May 22 1860
On Clarel
... [A] metrical affair, a pilgramage or what not, of several thousand lines, eminently
adapted for unpopularity. -- The notification to you here is ambidexter, as it were: it
may intimidate or allure. --Letter to James Billson, October 10 1884
On Fame
Being told that you particularly desired my autograph I cheerfully send it, and the
author of "Typee" looks forward with complacency to his joining that goodly
fellowship of names which the taste and industry of Dr. Sprague have collected. But
believe me, Dear Sir, I take you to be indeed curious in these autographs, since you
desire that of Herman Melville, Lansingburgh, July 24, '46.
Now that I think of it, I was charged to write two of them -- you remember someone
woke one morning and found himself famous. And here am I, just come from hoeing
in the garden, writing autographs. --Letter to Dr. William Sprague, July 24 1846
-- Ah this sovereign virtue of age -- how can we living men attain unto it. We may
spice up our dishes with all the condiments of the Spice Islands & Moluccas, & our
64
dishes may be all venison & wild boar -- yet how the deuce can we make them a
century or two old? -- My Dear Sir, the two great things yet to be discovered are these
-- The Art of rejuvenating old age in men, & oldageifying youth in books. -- Who in
the name of the trunkmakers would think of reading Old [Robert] Burton were his
book published for the first to day? -- All ambitious authors should have ghosts
capable of revisiting the world, to snuff up the steam of adulation, which begins to
rise straightway as the Sexton throws his last shovelful on him. -- Down goes his body
& up flies his name. --Letter to Evert Duyckinck, April 5 1849
The fact is, almost everybody is having his "mug" engraved nowadays; so that this
test of distinction is getting to be reversed; and therefore, to see one's "mug" in a
magazine, is presumptive evidence that he's a nobody. So being as vain a man as ever
lived; & beleiving that my illustrious name is famous throughout the world -- I
respectfully decline being oblivionated by a Daguerrotype.... --Written response to
Evert Duyckinck's request for a photograph, February 1851
What's the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern
book? Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.... Think
of it! To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a "man who
lived among the cannibals"!... I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most
transparent of all vanities. --Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1851
The other day I visited out of curiosity the Gansevoort Hotel, corner of "Little twelfth
Street" and West Street. I bought a paper of tobacco by way of introducing myself:
then I said to the person who served me: "Can you tell me what this word 'Gansevoort'
means? is it the name of a man? and if so, who was this Gansevoort?" Thereupon a
solemn gentleman at a remote table spoke up: "Sir," said he, putting down his
newspaper, "this hotel and the street of the same name are called after a very rich
family who in old times owned a great deal of property hereabouts." The dense
ignorance of this solemn gentleman, -- his knowing nothing of the hero of Fort
Stanwix, aroused such an indignation in my breast, that, disdaining to enlighten his
benighted soul, I left the place without further colloquy. Repairing to the philosophic
privacy of the District Office, I then moralized upon the instability of human glory
and the evanescence of -- many other things. --Letter to his mother, May 5 1870
As to [James Thomson's] not acheiving "fame" -- what of that? He is not the less, but
so much the more. And it must have occurred to you as it has to me, that the further
our civilization advances upon its present lines so much the cheaper sort of thing does
"fame" become, especially of the literary sort. This species of "fame" a waggish
acquaintance says can be manufactured to order, and sometimes is so manufactured
thro the agency of a certain house that has a correspondent in every one of the almost
innumerable journals that enlighten our millions from the Lakes to the Gulf & from
the Atlantic to the Pacific. --Letter to James Billson, December 20 1885
On Insanity
65
Poor [Charles Fenno] Hoffman -- I remember the shock I had when I first saw the
mention of his madness. -- But he was just the man to go mad -- imaginative,
voluptuously inclined, poor, unemployed, in the race of life distancd by his inferiors,
unmarried, -- without a port or haven in the universe to make. His present misfortune
-- rather blessing -- is but the sequel to a long experience of unwholesome habits of
thought. -- This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every
man who feels his soul in him, -- which but few men do. For in all of us lodges the
same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt, momentarily, what
madness is has but a mouthful of brains. What sort of sensation permanent madness is
may be very well imagined -- just as we imagine how we felt when we were infants,
tho' we cannot recall it. In both conditions we are irresponsible & riot like gods
without fear of fate. -- It is the climax of a mad night of revelry when the blood has
been transmuted into brandy. -- But if we prate much of this thing we shall be
illustrating our own propositions. --Letter to Evert Duyckinck, April 5 1849
On Life
Would that a man could do something & then say -- It is finished. -- not that one thing
only, but all others -- that he has reached his uttermost, & can never exceed it. But live
& push -- tho' we put one leg forward ten miles -- its no reason the other leg must lag
behind -- no, that must again distance the other -- & so we go till we get the cramp &
die. --Letter to Evert Duyckinck, April 5 1849
This recovery [from a riding accident] is flattering to my vanity. I begin to indulge in
the pleasing idea that my life must needs be of some value. Probably I consume a
certain amount of oxygen, which unconsumed might create some subtle disturbance in
Nature. Be that as it may, I am going to try and stick to the conviction named above.
For I have observed that such an idea, once well bedded in a man, is a wonderful
conservator of health and almost a prophecy of long life. I once, like other spoonies,
cherished a loose sort of notion that I did not care to live very long. But I will frankly
own that I have now no serious, no insuperable objections to a respectable longevity. I
dont like the idea of being left out night after night in a cold church-yard. --Letter to
Samuel Savage Shaw, December 10 1862
You are young; but I am verging upon three-score, and at times a certain lassitude
steals over one -- in fact, a disinclination for doing anything except the indispensable.
At such moments the problem of the universe seems a humbug, and epistolary
obligations mere moonshine, and the -- well, nepenthe seems all-in-all....
You are young (as I said before) but I aint; and at my years, and with my disposition,
or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright
good feeling. Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational (from a certain point of
view) that one knows not what to make of it, unless -- well, finish the sentence for
yourself.
Thine in these inexplicable fleshly bonds, H.M. --Letter to John C. Hoadley, March
31 1877
66
Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess
independence. They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. True Work is the necessity of
poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundreths of
all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and
wicked. --Letter to Catherine G. Lansing, September 5 1877
On Metaphysics
And perhaps after all, there is no secret. We incline to think that the Problem of the
Universe is like the Freemason's mighty secret, so terrible to all children. It turns out,
at last, to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an apron, -- nothing more! We incline to
think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little more
information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us.
--Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851
On Life at Arrowhead
I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is all covered with
snow. I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a
port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship's cabin; & at nights when I
wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house,
& I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.
Do you want to know how I pass my time? -- I rise at eight -- thereabouts -- & go to
my barn -- say good-morning to the horse, & give him his breakfast. (it goes to my
heart to give him a cold one, but it can't be helped) Then, pay a visit to my cow -- cut
up a pumpkin or two for her, & stand by to see her eat it -- for it's a pleasant sight to
see a cow move her jaws -- she does it so mildly and with such a sanctity. -- My own
breakfast over, I go to my work-room & light my fire -- then spread my M.S.S.
[Moby-Dick] on the table -- take one business squint at it, & fall to with a will. At 2
1/2 P.M. I hear a preconcerted knock at my door, which (by request) continues till I
rise & go to the door, which serves to wean me effectively from my writing, however
interested I may be. My friends the horse & cow now demand their dinner -- & I go &
give it to them. My own dinner over, I rig my sleigh & with my mother or sisters start
off for the village -- & if it be a Literary World day, great is the satisfaction thereof. -My evenings I spend in a sort of mesmeric state in my room -- not being able to read
-- only now & then skimming over some large-printed book. --Letter to Evert
Duyckinck, December 13 1850
On the Mexican War
People here are all in a state of delirium about the Mexican War. A military ardor
pervades all ranks -- Militia Colonels wax red in their coat facings -- and 'prentice
boys are running off to the wars by scores. -- Nothing is talked of but the "Halls of the
Montezumas" And to hear folks prate about those purely figurative apartments one
would suppose that they were another Versailles where our democratic rabble meant
67
to "make a night of it" ere long.... But seriously something great is impending. The
Mexican War (tho' our troops have behaved right well) is nothing of itself -- but "a
little spark kindleth a great fire" as the well known author of the Proverbs very justly
remarks. -- and who knows what all this may lead to -- Will it breed a rupture with
England? Or any other great powers? -- Prithee, are there any notable battles in store
-- any Yankee Waterloos? -- Or think once of a mighty Yankee fleet coming to the war
shock in the middle of the Atlantic with an English one. -- Lord, the day is at hand,
when we will be able to talk of our killed & wounded like some of the old Eastern
conquerors reckoning them up by thousands; when the Battle of Monmouth will be
thought child's play -- & canes made out of the Constitution's timbers be thought no
more of than bamboos. --Letter to his brother Gansevoort, May 29 1846
On the Civil War
Do you want to hear about the war? -- The war goes bravely on. McClellan is now
within fifteen miles of the rebel capital, Richmond. New Orleans is taken &c &c &c....
But when the end -- the wind-up -- the grand pacification is coming, who knows. We
beat the rascals in almost every feild, & take all their ports &c, but they dont cry
"Enough!" -- It looks like a long lane, with the turning quite out of sight. --Letter to
his brother Thomas, May 25 1862
On James Fenimore Cooper
I never had the honor of knowing, or even seeing, Mr Cooper personally; so that,
through my past ignorance of his person, the man, though dead, is still as living to me
as ever. And this is very much; for his works are among the earliest I remember, as in
my boyhood producing a vivid, and awakening power upon my mind.
It has always much pained me, that for any reason, in his latter years, his fame at
home should have apparently received a slight, temporary clouding, from some very
paltry accidents, incident, more or less, to the general career of letters. But whatever
possible things in Mr Cooper may have seemed, to have, in some degree, provoked
the occasional treatment he received, it is certain, that he possessed no slightest
weaknesses, but those, which are only noticeable as the almost infallible indices of
pervading greatness. He was a great, robust-souled man, all whose merits are not even
yet fully appreciated. But a grateful posterity will take the best of care of Fennimore
Cooper. --Letter to Rufus Wilmot Griswold, December 19 1851
On Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Philosophy
Nay, I do not oscillate in Emerson's rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine
own halter than swing in any other man's swing. Yet I think Emerson is more than a
brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic
manufacture he is an uncommon man. Swear he is a humbug -- then is he no common
humbug. Lay it down that had not Sir Thomas Browne lived, Emerson would not have
mystified -- I will answer, that had not Old Zack's father begot him, old Zack would
68
never have been the hero of Palo Alto. The truth is that we are all sons, grandsons, or
nephews or great-nephews of those who go before us. No one is his own sire. -- I was
very agreeably disappointed in Mr Emerson. I had heard of him as full of
transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish; I had only glanced at a book of his
once in Putnam's store -- that was all I knew of him, till I heard him lecture. -- To my
surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that that night he
was unusually plain. -- Now, there is a something about every man elevated above
mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctuly perceptible. This I see in Mr
Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool; -- then had
I rather be a fool than a wise man. -- I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near
the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he
don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plumet that will.
I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now -- but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that
have been diving & coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.
I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was, the
insinuation, that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have
offered some valuable suggestions. These men are all cracked right across the brow.
And never will the pullers-down be able to cope with the builders-up. And this pulling
down is easy enough -- a keg of powder blew up Block's Monument -- but the man
who applied the match, could not, alone, build such a pile to save his soul from the
shark-maw of the Devil. But enough of this Plato who talks thro' his nose. --Letter to
Evert Duyckinck, March 3 1849
God help the poor fellow who squares his life according to this. --Marginalia
On Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I have recently read his "Twice Told Tales" (I hadnt read but a few of them before) I
think they far exceed the "Mosses" -- they are, I fancy, an earlier vintage from his
wine. Some of those sketches are wonderfully subtle. Their deeper meanings are
worthy of a Brahmin. Still there is something lacking -- a good deal lacking -- to the
plump sphericity of the man. What is that?
-- He doesn't patronise the butcher -- he needs roast-beef, done rare. -- Nevertheless,
for one, I regard Hawthorne (in his books) as evincing a quality of genius, immensely
loftier, & more profound, too, than any other American has shown hitherto in the
printed form. Irving is a grasshopper to him -- putting the souls of the two men
together, I mean. --Letter to Evert Duyckinck, February 12 1851
On Fanny Kemble Butler
She makes a glorious Lady Macbeth, but her Desdemona seems like a boarding
school miss. -- She's so unfemininely masculine that had she not, on unimpeckable
authority, borne children, I should be curious to learn the result of a surgical
examination of her person in private. The Lord help Butler ... I marvel not he seeks
being amputated off from his matrimonial half. --Letter to Evert Duyckinck, February
69
24, 1849
On Abraham Lincoln
The night previous to this I was at the second levee at the White House. There was a
great crowd, & a brilliant scene. Ladies in full dress by the hundred. A steady stream
of two-&-twos wound thro' the apartments shaking hands with "Old Abe" and
immediately passing on. This continued without cessation for an hour & a half. Of
course I was one of the shakers. Old Able is much better looking [than] I expected &
younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow -- working hard at it like a man
sawing wood at so much per cord. Mrs Lincoln is rather good-looking I thought. The
scene was very fine altogether. Superb furniture -- flood of light -- magnificent
flowers -- full band of music &c. --Letter to his wife, March 24 & 25 1861
On William Shakespeare
I have been passing my time very pleasurably here, But cheifly in lounging on a sofa
(a la the poet Grey) & reading Shakspeare. It is an edition in glorious great type, every
letter whereof is a soldier, & the top of every "t" like a musket barrel. Dolt & ass that I
am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made close
acquaintance with the divine William. Ah, he's full of sermons-on-the-mount, and
gentle, aye, almost as Jesus. I take such men to be inspired. I fancy that this moment
Shakspeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel Raphael and Michael. And if another
Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakesper's person. -- I am mad to think how minute a
cause has prevented me hitherto from reading Shakspeare. But until now, every copy
that was come-atable to me, happened to be in a vile small print unendurable to my
eyes which are tender as young sparrows. But chancing to fall in with this glorious
edition, I now exult in it, page after page. --Letter to Evert Duyckinck, February 24
1849
And do not think, my boy, that because I, impulsively broke forth in jubillations over
Shakspeare, that, therefore, I am of the number of the snobs who burn their tuns of
rancid fat at his shrine. No, I would stand afar off & alone, & burn some pure Palm oil,
the product of some overtopping trunk.
-- I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway. Not that I
might have had the pleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made merry
with him over a bowl of the fine Duyckinck punch; but that the muzzle which all men
wore on their soul in the Elizebethan day, might not have intercepted Shakspers full
articulations. For I hold it a verity, that even Shakspeare, was not a frank man to the
uttermost. And, indeed, who in this intolerant universe is, or can be? But the
Declaration of Independence makes a difference. --Letter to Evert Duyckinck, March
3 1849
On James Thomson, Poet
70
"Sunday up the River," contrasting with the "City of Dreadful Night," is like a Cuban
humming-bird, beautiful in faery tints, flying against the tropic thunder-cloud.
[Thomson] was a sterling poet, if ever one sang. As to his pessimism, altho' neither
pessimist nor optomist myself, nevertheless I relish it in the verse if for nothing else
than as a counterpoise to the exorbitant hopefulness, juvenile and shallow, that makes
such a bluster in these days -- at least, in some quarters. --Letter to James Billson,
January 22 1885
... [E]ach [of Thomson's poems] is so admirably honest and original that it would have
been wonderful indeed had they hit the popular taste. They would have to be
painstakingly diluted for that -- diluted with that prudential wordly element,
wherewithall Mr Arnold has conciliated the conventionalists while at the same time
showing the absurdity of Bumble. But for your admirable friend this would have been
too much like trimming -- if trimming in fact it be. The motions of his mind in the
best of his Essays are utterly untrameled and independent, and yet falling naturally
into grace and poetry. It is good for me to think of such a mind -- to know that such a
brave intelligence has been -- and may yet be, for aught anyone can demonstrate to
the contrary. --Letter to James Billson, December 20 1885
On Himself
It is now quite a time since you first asked me for my photo: -- Well, here it is at last,
the veritable face (at least, so says the Sun that never lied in his life) of your now
venerable friend -- venerable in years. -- What the deuse makes him look so serious, I
wonder. I thought he was of a gay and frolicsome nature, judgeing from a little rhyme
of his about a Kitten, which you once showed me. But is this the same man? Pray,
explain the inconsistency, or I shall begin to suspect your venerable friend of being a
two-faced fellow and not to be trusted. --Letter to Ellen M. Gifford, October 5 1885
第六部分：Transcendentalism
思考题：
1．超验主义与清教主义之间的矛盾与关联
2．超验主义对美国民族个性的形成的影响
3．超验主义对美国式自我主义的影响
What is Transcendentalism ?
Readers have asked this question often. Here's my answer:
71
When I first learned about Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo
Margaret
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in high school English Fuller*
class, I admit: I couldn't figure out what the term
"Transcendentalism" meant. I couldn't figure out what the
central idea was that held all those authors and poets and
philosophers together so that they deserved this categorical
name, Transcendentalists. And so, if you're at this page
because you're having difficulty: you're not alone. Here's
what I've learned since high school about this subject.
The Transcendentalists can be understood in one sense by
their context -- by what they were rebelling against, what
they saw as the current situation and therefore as what they
were trying to be different from.
One way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a
Theodore
generation of well educated people who lived in the decades
Parker*
before the American Civil War and the national division that
it both reflected and helped to create. These people, mostly
New Englanders, mostly around Boston, were attempting to
create a uniquely American body of literature. It was already
decades since the Americans had won independence from
England. Now, these people believed, it was time for literary
independence. And so they deliberately went about creating
literature, essays, novels, philosophy, poetry, and other
writing that were clearly different from anything from
England, France, Germany, or any other European nation.
Another way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as Harriet
a generation of people struggling to define spirituality and Martineau*
religion (our words, not necessarily theirs) in a way that took
into account the new understandings their age made available.
The new Biblical Criticism in Germany and elsewhere had
been looking at the Christian and Jewish scriptures through
the eyes of literary analysis and had raised questions for some
about the old assumptions of religion.
The Enlightenment had come to new
James
rational conclusions about the natural
Martineau*
world, mostly based on experimentation
and logical thinking. The pendulum was swinging, and a more
Romantic way of thinking -- less rational, more intuitive, more
in touch with the senses -- was coming into vogue. Those new
rational conclusions had raised important questions, but were
no longer enough.
German philosopher Kant raised both questions and insights
into the religious and philosophical thinking about reason and
religion.
72
This new generation looked at the previous generation's rebellions of the early
19th century Unitarians and Universalists against traditional Trinitarianism and
against Calvinist predestinationarianism. This new generation decided that the
revolutions had not gone far enough, and had stayed too much in the rational
mode. "Corpse-cold" Emerson called the previous generation of rational religion.
The spiritual hunger of the age that also gave rise to a new Thomas
evangelical Christianity gave rise, in the educated centers in Wentworth
New England and around Boston, to an intuitive, experiential, Higginson*
passionate, more-than-just-rational perspective. God gave
humankind the gift of intuition, the gift of insight, the gift of
inspiration. Why waste such a gift?
Added to all this, the scriptures of non-Western cultures were
discovered in the West, translated, and published so that they
were more widely available. The Harvard-educated Emerson
and others began to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, and
examine their own religious assumptions against these
scriptures. In their perspective, a loving God would not have
led so much of humanity astray; there must be truth in these
scriptures, too. Truth, if it agreed with an individual's intuition of truth, must be
indeed truth.
And so Transcendentalism was born. In the words of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work
with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation
of men will for the first time exist, because each believes
himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all
men."
Yes, men, but women too.
Most of the Transcendentalists became involved as well in
social reform movements, especially anti-slavery and
women's rights. (Abolitionism was the word used for the
Ralph Waldo
more radical branch of anti-slavery reformism; feminism
Emerson*
was a word that was invented deliberately in France some
decades later and was not, to my knowledge, found in the
time of the Transcendentalists.) Why social reform, and why these issues in
particular?
The Transcendentalists, despite some remaining Euro-chauvinism in thinking
that people with British and German backgrounds were more suited for freedom
than others (see some of Theodore Parker's writings, for instance, for this
sentiment), also believed that at the level of the human soul, all people had access
to divine inspiration and sought and loved freedom and knowledge and truth.
73
Thus, those institutions of society which fostered vast Emily
differences in the ability to be educated, to be self-directed, Dickinson*
were institutions to be reformed. Women and
African-descended slaves were human beings who deserved
more ability to become educated, to fulfill their human
potential (in a twentieth-century phrase), to be fully human.
Men like Theodore Parker
and Thomas Wentworth
Higginson who identified themselves as Transcendentalists,
also worked for freedom of the slaves and for women's
freedom.
超验主义的不同定义（可讨论）
In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1842 lecture The Transcendentalist:
"The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in
miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power;
he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be
suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man,
without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic,
personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never,
who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit
than its own....
"It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the
present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that
term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical
philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the
intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by
showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative
forms, which did not come by experience, but through which
experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself;
and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary
profoundness and precision of that man's thinking have given vogue to
his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever
belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is popularly called at the
present day Transcendental...."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Transcendentalist, 1842
74
American transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and literature
that flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth century (about
1836-1860). It began as a reform movement in the Unitarian church, extending the
views of William Ellery Channing on an indwelling God and the significance of
intuitive thought. It was based on "a monism holding to the unity of the world and
God, and the immanence of God in the world" (Oxford Companion to American
Literature 770). For the transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with
the soul of the world and contains what the world contains.
Transcendentalists rejected Lockean empiricism, unlike the Unitarians: they wanted to
rejuvenate the mystical aspects of New England Calvinism (although none of its
dogma) and to go back to Jonathan Edwards' "divine and supernatural light," imparted
immediately to the soul by the spirit of God.
For an excellent overview of American transcendentalism, go to Chapter Four of Paul
Reuben's PAL site at California State University-Stanislaus and Ann Woodlief's
English 624 students' Transcendentalism Web at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Related links: Tom Foran Clark's online biography of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.
Key statements of its doctrine include Emerson's essays, especially Nature (1836),
"The American Scholar" (1837), "The Divinity School Address" (1838), "The
Transcendentalist" (1842), and "Self-Reliance," and Thoreau's Walden (1854). Others
involved in the Transcendental Club and its magazine The Dial included Margaret
Fuller, editor of The Dial (1840-42), Amos Bronson Alcott, and William Ellery
Channing.
In addition to his famous "transparent eyeball" caricature of Emerson, see also
Christopher Pearse Cranch's poem "Correspondences" for a succinct statement of
Transcendentalist doctrines.
American Romanticism
Defining Transcendentalism:
In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1842 lecture The
Transcendentalist:
"The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual
doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the
human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in
inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should
be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications
to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that
is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of
75
inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so
he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit
than its own....
"It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the
present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that
term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical
philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the
intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by
showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative
forms, which did not come by experience, but through which
experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself;
and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary
profoundness and precision of that man's thinking have given vogue to
his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever
belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is popularly called at the
present day Transcendental...
Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture (1986)
"Transcendentalism, in fact, really began as a religious movement, an
attempt to substitute a Romanticized version of the mystical ideal that
humankind is capable of direct experience of the holy for the Unitarian
rationalist view that the truths of religion are arrived at by a process of
empirical study and by rational inference from historical and natural
evidence" (46).
William Henry Channing(1810-1844)
"Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples, was a pilgrimage from
the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living
God in the soul. It was a putting to silence of tradition and formulas,
that the Sacred Oracle might be heard through intuitions of the
single-eyed and pure-hearted. Amidst materialists, zealots, and skeptics,
the Transcendentalist believed in perpetual inspiration, the miraculous
power of will, and a birthright to universal good. He sought to hold
communion face to face with the unnameable Spirit of his spirit, and
gave himself up to the embrace of nature's perfect joy, as a babe seeks
the breast of a mother."
Charles Mayo Ellis, An Essay on Transcendentalism (1842)
"That belief we term Transcendentalism which maintains that man has
ideas, that come not through the five senses or the powers of reasoning;
but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate
76
inspiration, or his immanent presence in the spiritual world. . . ."
超验主义的形成
-century rationalism


God as Deistic First Cause who creates the world and universal laws but does
not intervene in human affairs
skepticism
Lockean empiricism



idealism (principle of organicism--Leibniz)
Kant and Neoplatonists (mind imposes form). Transcendentalism affirmed
Kant's principle of intuitive knowledge not derived from the senses. According
to M. H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms, "Kant had confined the
expression 'transcendental knowledge' to the cognizance of those forms and
categories--such as space, time, quantity, causality-which, in his view, are
imposed on perception by the constitution of all human minds; he regarded
these aspects as the universal conditions of sense-experience. Emerson and
others, however, extended the concept of transcendental knowledge, in a way
whose validity Kant had specifically denied, to include an intuitive cognizance
of moral and other truths that transcend the limits of human sense-experience"
(216).
Schelling (emphasis on feeling; divinity and creative impulse in nature)
Romantic movement, especially Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the English
romantics (Emerson)
m posits a distinction between "Understanding," or the normal
means of apprehending truth through the senses, and "Reason," a higher, more
intuitive form of perception. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge cites Milton's
Paradise Lost on the difference between reason and understanding (Book V, ll.
479-490). In this passage from Paradise Lost, Raphael instructs Adam and Eve on the
distinction between heavenly and earthly perception:
So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
77
More aery, last the bright consummate flow'r
Spirits odorous breathes: flowr's and thir fruit
Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd
To vital spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual, give both life and sense
Fancy and understanding, whence the Soul
Reason receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive, or intuitive; discourse
Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours
Differing but in degree, of kind the same.
According to Emerson, reason is "the highest faculty of the soul--what we mean by
the soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives; it is vision." By
contrast, "The Understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues,
near sighed but strong-sighted, dwelling in the present the expedient the customary"
(L1:412-413).
sea of forms radically alike. . . ." ; "Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal,
a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.
Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world."
studies relations in all objects."
s a symbol of some spiritual fact."
wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related."
f the circle.
nature of human beings is good and that, left in a state of nature, human beings would
seek the good. Society is to blame for the corruption that mankind endures.
Hawthorne's juxtaposition of the red rose, the flower of nature, and the rusty,
blackened prison, the "black flower" of society, exemplifies this perspective. This
view opposes the neoclassical vision that society alone is responsible for keeping
human beings from giving in to their own brutish natures. Transcendentalism also
takes the Romantic view of man's steady degeneration from childhood to adulthood as
he is corrupted by culture: "A man is a god in ruins."
供学生讨论
The Emergence of Transcendentalism
The emergence of the Transcendentalists as an identifiable movement took place
during the late 1820s and 1830s, but the roots of their religious philosophy extended
much farther back into American religious history. Transcendentalism and evangelical
78
Protestantism followed separate evolutionary branches from American Puritanism,
taking as their common ancestor the Calvinism of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. In exploring their respective departures from Calvinism we can begin to
map out the common ground the two movements shared.
Transcendentalism cannot be properly understood outside the context of Unitarianism,
the dominant religion in Boston during the early nineteenth century. Unitarianism had
developed during the late eighteenth century as a branch of the liberal wing of
Christianity, which had separated from Orthodox Christianity during the First Great
Awakening of the 1740s. That Awakening, along with its successor, revolved around
the questions of divine election and original sin, and saw a brief period of revivalism.
The Liberals tended to reject both the persisent Orthodox belief in inherent depravity
and the emotionalism of the revivalists; on one side stood dogma, on the other stood
pernicious "enthusiasm." The Liberals, in a kind of amalgamation of Enlightenment
principles with American Christianity, began to stress the value of intellectual reason
as the path to divine wisdom. The Unitarians descended as the Boston contingent of
this tradition, while making their own unique theological contribution in rejecting the
doctrine of divine trinity.
Unitarians placed a premium on stability, harmony, rational thought, progressive
morality, classical learning, and other hallmarks of Enlightenment Christianity.
Instead of the dogma of Calvinism intended to compel obedience, the Unitarians
offered a philosophy stressing the importance of voluntary ethical conduct and the
ability of the intellect to discern what constituted ethical conduct. Theirs was a
"natural theology" in which the individual could, through empirical investigation or
the exercise of reason, discover the ordered and benevolent nature of the universe and
of God's laws. Divine "revelation," which took its highest form in the Bible, was an
external event or process that would confirm the findings of reason. William Ellery
Channing, in his landmark sermon "Unitarian Christianity" (1819) sounded the
characteristic theme of optimistic rationality:
Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a
book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is
to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.... With these
views of the Bible, we feel it our bounden duty to exercise our reason
upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter to
the spirit, to seek in the nature of the subject, and the aim of the writer,
his true meaning; and, in general, to make use of what is known, for
explaining what is difficult, and for discovering new truths.22
The intellectual marrow of Unitarianism had its counterbalance in a strain of
sentimentalism: while the rational mind could light the way, the emotions provided
the drive to translate ethical knowledge into ethical conduct. Still, the Unitarians
deplored the kind of excessive emotionalism that took place at revivals, regarding it as
a temporary burst of religious feeling that would soon dissipate. Since they conceived
of revelation as an external favor granted by God to assure the mind of its spiritual
79
progress, they doubted that inner "revelation" without prior conscious effort really
represented a spiritual transformation.
Nonetheless, even in New England Evangelical Protestants were making many
converts through their revivalist activities, especially in the 1820s and 1830s. The
accelerating diversification of Boston increased the number of denominations that
could compete for the loyalties of the population, even as urbanization and
industrialization pushed many Bostonians in a secular direction. In an effort to
become more relevant, and to instill their values of sobriety and order in a
modernizing city, the Unitarians themselves adopted certain evangelical techniques.
Through founding and participating in missionary and benevolent societies, they
sought both to spread the Unitarian message and to bind people together in an
increasingly fragmented social climate. Ezra Stiles Gannett, for example, a minister at
the Federal Street Church, supplemented his regular pastoral duties with membership
in the Colonization, Peace and Temperance societies, while Henry Ware Jr. helped
found the Boston Philanthropic Society. Simultaneously, Unitarians tried to appeal
more to the heart in their sermons, a trend reflected in the new Harvard professorship
of Pastoral Theology and Pulpit Eloquence. Such Unitarian preachers as Joseph
Stevens Buckminster and Edward Everett "set the model for a minister who could be
literate rather than pedantic, who could quote poetry rather than eschatology, who
could be a stylist and scorn controversy."23 But they came nowhere near the
emotionalism of the rural Evangelical Protestants. Unitarianism was a religion for
upright, respectable, wealthy Boston citizens, not for the rough jostle of the streets or
the backwoods. The liberalism Unitarians displayed in their embrace of
Enlightenment philosophy was stabilized by a solid conservatism they retained in
matters of social conduct and status.
During the first decade of the nineteenth century, Unitarians effectively captured
Harvard with the election of Rev. Henry Ware Sr. as Hollis Professor of Divinity in
1805 and of Rev. John Thorton Kirkland as President in 1810. It was at Harvard that
most of the younger generation of Transcendentalists received their education, and it
was here that their rebellion against Unitarianism began. It would be misleading,
however, to say that Transcendentalism entailed a rejection of Unitarianism; rather, it
evolved almost as an organic consequence of its parent religion. By opening the door
wide to the exercise of the intellect and free conscience, and encouraging the
individual in his quest for divine meaning, Unitarians had unwittingly sowed the
seeds of the Transcendentalist "revolt."
The Transcendentalists felt that something was lacking in Unitarianism. Sobriety,
mildness and calm rationalism failed to satisfy that side of the Transcendentalists
which yearned for a more intense spiritual experience. The source of the discontent
that prompted Emerson to renounce the "corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street
and Harvard College" is suggested by the bland job description that Harvard issued
for the new Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. The
professor's duties were to
... demonstrate the existence of a Deity or first cause, to prove and
80
illustrate his essential attributes, both natural and moral; to evince and
explain his providence and government, together with the doctrine of a
future state of rewards and punishments; also to deduce and enforce
the obligations which man is under to his Maker .... together with the
most important duties of social life, resulting from the several relations
which men mutually bear to each other; .... interspersing the whole
with remarks, shewing the coincidence between the doctrines of
revelation and the dictates of reason in these important points; and
lastly, notwithstanding this coincidence, to state the absolute necessity
and vast utility of a divine revelation.24
Perry Miller has argued persuasively that the Transcendentalists still retained in their
characters certain vestiges of New England Puritanism, and that in their reaction
against the "pale negations" of Unitarianism, they tapped into the grittier pietistic side
of Calvinism in which New England culture had been steeped. The Calvinists, after
all, conceived of their religion in part as man's quest to discover his place in the divine
scheme and the possibility of spiritual regeneration, and though their view of
humanity was pessimistic to a high degree, their pietism could give rise to such early,
heretical expressions of inner spirituality as those of the Quakers and Anne
Hutchinson. Miller saw that the Unitarians acted as crucial intermediaries between the
Calvinists and the Transcendentalists by abandoning the notion of original sin and
human imperfectability:
The ecstasy and the vision which Calvinists knew only in the moment
of vocation, the passing of which left them agonizingly aware of
depravity and sin, could become the permanent joy of those who had
put aside the conception of depravity, and the moments between could
be filled no longer with self-accusation but with praise and wonder.25
For the Transcendentalists, then, the critical realization, or conviction, was that
finding God depended on neither orthodox creedalism nor the Unitarians' sensible
exercise of virtue, but on one's inner striving toward spiritual communion with the
divine spirit. From this wellspring of belief would flow all the rest of their religious
philosophy.
Transcendentalism was not a purely native movement, however. The
Transcendentalists received inspiration from overseas in the form of English and
German romanticism, particularly the literature of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Goethe,
and in the post-Kantian idealism of Thomas Carlyle and Victor Cousin. Under the
influence of these writers (which was not a determinative influence, but rather an
introduction to the cutting edge of Continental philosophy), the Transcendentalists
developed their ideas of human "Reason," or what we today would call intuition. For
the Transcendentalists, as for the Romantics, subjective intuition was at least as
reliable a source of truth as empirical investigation, which underlay both deism and
the natural theology of the Unitarians. Kant had written skeptically of the ability of
scientific methods to discover the true nature of the universe; now the rebels at
81
Harvard college (the very institution which had exposed them to such modern
notions!) would turn the ammuntion against their elders. In an 1833 article in The
Christian Examiner entitled simply "Coleridge," Frederic Henry Hedge, once
professor of logic at Harvard and now minister in West Cambridge, explained and
defended the Romantic/Kantian philosophy, positing a correspondence between
internal human reality and external spiritual reality. He wrote:
The method [of Kantian philosophy] is synthetical, proceeding from a
given point, the lowest that can be found in our consciousness, and
deducing from that point 'the whole world of intelligences, with the
whole system of their representations' .... The last step in the process,
the keystone of the fabric, is the deduction of time, space, and variety,
or, in other words (as time, space, and variety include the elements of
all empiric knowledge), the establishing of a coincidence between the
facts of ordinary experience and those which we have discovered
within ourselves ....26
Although written in a highly intellectual style, as many of the Transcendentalist tracts
were, Hedge's argument was typical of the movement's philosophical emphasis on
non-rational, intuitive feeling. The role of the Continental Romantics in this regard
was to provide the sort of intellectual validation we may suppose a fledgling
movement of comparative youngsters would want in their rebellion against the
Harvard establishment.
For Transcendentalism was entering theological realms which struck the elder
generation of Unitarians as heretical apostasy or, at the very least, as ingratitude. The
immediate controversy surrounded the question of miracles, or whether God
communicated his existence to humanity through miracles as performed by Jesus
Christ. The Transcendentalists thought, and declared, that this position alienated
humanity from divinity. Emerson leveled the charge forcefully in his scandalous
Divinity School Address (1838), asserting that "the word Miracle, as pronounced by
Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the
blowing clover and the falling rain."27 The same year, in a bold critique of Harvard
professor Andrews Norton's magnum opus The Evidence of the Genuineness of the
Four Gospels , Orestes Brownson identified what he regarded as the odious
implications of the Unitarian position: "there is no revelation made from God to the
human soul; we can know nothing of religion but what is taught us from abroad, by an
individual raised up and specially endowed with wisdom from on high to be our
instructor."28 For Brownson and the other Transcendentalists, God displayed his
presence in every aspect of the natural world, not just at isolated times. In a sharp
rhetorical move, Brownson proceeded to identify the spirituality of the
Transcendentalists with liberty and democracy:
...truth lights her torch in the inner temple of every man's soul, whether
patrician or plebian, a shepherd or a philosopher, a Croesus or a beggar.
It is only on the reality of this inner light, and on the fact, that it is
82
universal, in all men, and in every man, that you can found a
democracy, which shall have a firm basis, and which shall be able to
survive the storms of human passions.29
To Norton, such a rejection of the existence of divine miracles, and the assertion of an
intuitive communion with God, amounted to a rejection of Christianity itself. In his
reply to the Transcendentalists, "A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity,"
Norton wrote that their position "strikes at root of faith in Christianity," and he
reiterated the "orthodox" Unitarian belief that inner revelation was inherently
unreliable and a potential lure away from the truths of religion.
The religion of which they speak, therefore, exists merely, if it exists at
all, in undefined and unintelligible feelings, having reference perhaps
to certain imaginations, the result of impressions communicated in
childhood, or produced by the visible signs of religious belief existing
around us, or awakened by the beautiful and magnificent spectacles
which nature presents.30
Despite its dismissive intent and tone, Norton's blast against Transcendentalism is an
excellent recapitulation of their religious philosophy. The crucial difference consisted
in the respect accorded to "undefined and unintelligible feelings."
The miracles controversy revealed how far removed the Harvard rebels had grown
from their theological upbringing. It opened a window onto the fundamental dispute
between the Transcendentalists and the Unitarians, which centered around the
relationship between God, nature and humanity. The heresy of the Transcendentalists
(for which the early Puritans had hanged people) was to countenance mysticism and
pantheism, or the beliefs in the potential of the human mind to commune with God
and in a God who is present in all of nature, rather than unequivocally distinct from it.
Nevertheless, the Transcendentalists continued to think of themselves as Christians
and to articulate their philosophy within a Christian theological framework, although
some eventually moved past Christianity (as Emerson did in evolving his idea of an
"oversoul") or abandoned organized religion altogether.
Transcendentalist Women
When you hear the word "Transcendentalism" do you immediate think "high school
English class" or "Ralph Waldo Emerson" or "Henry David Thoreau"? Very few, I'll
wager, think quickly of the names of the women who were associated with
Transcendentalism. (If Transcendentalism is new to you, or you're not sure what it
means, check here.)
83
Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody were the only two women who
were original members of the Transcendental Club, but other women were part
of the inner circle of the group who called themselves Transcendentalists. In this
series, I highlight a few of these Transcendentalist Women: Margaret Fuller
(1810-1850)
"Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow."
Fuller's biography, not (in my opinion) yet adequately told anywhere on the Net, is
rich and fascinating. Her father, disappointed that she was not a son, educated her in
what was then considered the masculine style. She was intellectually the superior of
most if not all her contemporaries. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, a friend and colleague,
made fun of her statement that "I now know all the people worth knowing in America,
and I find no intellect comparable to my own." Of course, he felt like he was one of
the exceptions!) She often found herself -- as many over-educated intelligent women
have -- without peers, without enough challenge.
She came, as an adult, into the circle of people who would soon grow into the
Transcendentalists. She was hired as a teacher in Bronson Alcott's school, where
fellow teacher Elizabeth Peabody became her close friend. She met the English author
and reformer Harriet Martineau who introduced Fuller to Emerson. James Freeman
Clarke and Henry Hedge were Harvard students who moved in many of the same
intellectual circles as she did.
From 1839-1844, she earned a living by sponsoring her famous Conversations, to
which were invited many of the educated women of Boston and surrounding areas -wives of famous men like Emerson and Theodore Parker, but also women who were
developing their own work and careers, often as writers. Included were Lydia Maria
Child, Elizabeth and Sophia Peabody, Ellen and Caroline Sturgis. (A series involving
both men and women failed to have the same lasting success as those attended just by
women.)
Fuller contributed art and literary criticism to the Dial, published by the
Transcendentalists, and became editor of that journal at its founding in 1840. The Dial
was only published for four years, but was a turning point in American literary
development.
She helped plan and develop Brook Farm, a utopian experiment; though she never
lived there, she was a frequent visitor.
In 1842, when she tried to remove herself from editor of the Dial, Emerson
volunteered to take over. But according to some sources, she continued to do most of
the editing work until she left New England in 1840 to work on Horace Greeley's New
York Tribune as literary critic.
In 1845, Fuller published Woman in the Nineteenth Century (see links below),
considered now as a classic work of feminist writing. In 1846, she took up an
opportunity Greeley offered to serve in Europe as foreign correspondent with the
Tribune.
In England, she met -- among many others -- the Italian revolutionist Mazzini, then in
exile. After a stay in France, she went to Italy, where she involved herself in the cause
84
itself. In 1847, her friends and family began to receive letters with a new buoyancy
and enthusiasm: Margaret Fuller was in love. Her lover, Giovanni Angelo, Marchese
d'Ossoli, helped draw Fuller into revolutionary activism. By 1848, she was pregnant;
after several months spent with their child, Angelo Eugene, Fuller left him with a
nurse and returned to Rome and her lover.
The Republic that she and Ossoli had been involved in creating was defeated in 1849,
and Fuller, Ossoli, and their child fled to Florence. She began writing a history of the
revolution. She claimed in letters to have married Ossoli; the exact date and place are
in doubt, and some scholars suggest that the marriage was invented to ease her return
to society in America.
With husband and child, Fuller sailed to New York. Tragically, just a few hours
outside harbor, a storm drove the ship onto a sandbar. Just a few hundred feet from
shore, the ship broke apart. The child's body was later found; neither Fuller's nor
Ossoli's ever was.
第七部分：Emerson
思考题：
1． 爱默生的宇宙观和人生观
2． 爱默生对美国意识的贡献
3． 爱默生对美国浪漫主义文学的贡献
85
Plot Summary
Emerson's Essay 'Self-Reliance' proposes a code for living that defies all previous
constructs and encourages a societal outlook foreign to many minds. He encourages
the reader to free himself from the constraints of conformity and give himself over to
his nature, which he supposes "no man can violate" (Emerson, 1627). His theory is
that everything in nature operates in tune with divine Providence, and that by
conforming oneself to societal conventions, man cuts himself of from that rhythm
which dictates all life. The text then proceeds to encourage man to get back to that
state. To strip itself of the routine thought associated with the rigidity of society, and
to live in tune with the whims of the spirit, which he insists, will not mislead. Can not
mislead in fact, because the spirit is inherently attuned to the will of the Most High
power. "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string" (Emerson, 1623), this
topic sentence could just as easily serve as Emerson's thesis statement, for every
argument after this, can be reduced to the same meaning.
He emphasizes over and over again that in order to gain ones own independence, one
must first abandon all learned things and seek to accumulate thereafter only the
knowledge which one attains firsthand and deems pertinent to be assimilated into ones
own truth. "Nothing is at last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind" states
Emerson, because "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself".
Formal Analysis
Emerson's writing style can be labeled unconventional. Indeed he comes across as a
writer more familiar with the conventions of public speaking than the protocol of
literary form. In fact, his writing fluctuates like a conversation, often appearing to
become tangential, until upon concluding the piece, the reader develops a sense of
how perfectly each strand of information was woven into the piece. Often this sense
of cohesion remains elusive until the end of the writing. Perhaps Emerson's ability to
pull all of these points together and relate them back to the original thesis is part of
the beauty of his writing technique. He has a certain ability to pull his thoughts
together just before his point is lost, leaving the reader a bit dazed and over-informed,
but impressed never the less. His colleagues, though fond of him, were not oblivious
to this tendency. His dear friend Louisa May Alcott for instance has been quoted as
saying that he could be read just as easily in reverse as from front to back. Of this
obscure style Emerson says: "If you desire to arrest attention, do not give me facts in
order of cause & effect, but drop on one or two links in the chain, & give me with a
cause, an effect two or three times removed" (Buell, 399). This perfect description of
his style lends credibility to Buell's theory, that ì the dense, obscure style for which he
is best known was a deliberate choice" (400).
It seems that the energy he saved by not concerning himself with form was reinvested
in his employment of analogies. This may be another reason why he is such a favored
writer. His skill in providing everyday examples for his often obscure and abstract
ideas had the effect of simmering his lengthy descriptions down to bite-sized morsels
easily digested by even the common reader. These analogies also lent his writings a
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certain visual element, which served to keep the reader enticed by the work.
Emerson was also given to indulging in the use of colloquialisms to further illustrate
his writings. This practice, which he enjoyed to practical excess in 1841 when
Self-Reliance was first published, was later largely omitted from subsequent
publishing, having fallen victim to his 1847 revisions.
Interpretive Overview
While his language may not always reflect a humble tone, his overall message of
universality is a premise, which places the individual above the masses, regardless of
their identity as long as they act out of their own personal volition. While at first this
may not reflect the common idea of humility, the premise is that everyone has the
potential to reach the loftiest esteem, therefor no one person is innately superior to
any other. This sentiment also portrays the optimism, which permeates the speakers'
views. Every one can achieve happiness, for it is not contingent upon anything
inherent, rather, it requires a simple shift in ones mental paradigm, a shift any given
person can make at any point in their life. Though Emerson may come off as
supercilious at times, he does so from an equalitarian standpoint. His character has no
prescribed prejudices rather he bases his judgements on independence of thought and
strength of conviction. Emerson's character exhibits a sense of duality that virtually
nullifies any extremes of his character. While in one paragraph he may border on
condescension speaking as a teacher, in the next he humbly admits that he himself has
far more to learn. The true nature of his character therefor remains almost elusive,
save a few traits that can be ascribed without limiting their bearer to a certain
disposition, such as honesty and integrity. Emerson's duality was undoubtedly
deliberate. As an intellectual whose thoughts were constantly meeting many great
influences, maintaining a certain consistency of thought would have limited him too
greatly. " With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well
concern himself with a shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words,
and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, although it
contradict every thing you said today". (Emerson, 1626-27)
Historical and Biographical Background
In order to compose a piece of literature such as 'Self-Reliance', the author must
undoubtedly possess an uncommon freedom of thought. In Emerson's case this is the
product of a cocktail of childhood conditions, adult experiences and powerful
influences. Born in pre-Depression America, Emerson was the son of a Unitarian
Minister, a legacy he later continued. His family was not exceptionally wealthy, but
they remained respected in their community. It was this environment of spirituality
that formed his morals and fostered his ardent, if unpopular, views on anti-slavery and
the women's movement.
He married at the age of 26 and was widowed just 16 months later, an experience that
left him heartbroken, and inspired him to travel abroad. It was during these travels
that Emerson met Coleridge and Wordsworth and was first exposed to English literary
and intellectual influences. During this time he also began formulating the ideas that
would later be born into the essay 'Self-Reliance'. The combination of his wife's death
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and the exhilaration of travel to distant lands (including Italy, France, England, and
Scotland), undoubtedly provided the catalyst for the feelings of independence and
strength that emerge in this piece.
The great Depression, having set in about 10 years earlier, provided the backdrop for
the readers of this writing, but it was undoubtedly witnessing the flourishing
economies of Europe during that time that led Emerson to such optimistic conclusions
about personal potential.
Before this essay was first published in 1841, Emerson took it along on his frequent
lecture tours. This gave him the opportunity to test it on several audiences as a lecture
and refine the piece until he felt it had the greatest impact. This probably explains the
excess of colloquialisms that he later edited from the essay.
Talking Back
Emerson was a revolutionary thinker. His opinions on society and human interaction
have sparked many intellectual debates and incurred many criticisms. Many of the
latter concerning issues of race and gender and sometimes age. It seems that within
my peer group the majority feels that Emerson not only excludes women and blacks
from the premise of his essay, but also seems to target strictly young, white males.
While he does make frequent reference to the advantages of youth, and he often
addresses his readers in the male first person, it is my conclusion that he does not
intend to exclude older people, nor does he aim to inspire only men with his words.
As a writer one learns early on that an effective piece of writing is geared specifically
towards the audience on intends to address. As Emerson frequently gave this essay
life by delivering it as a speech during his lecture series, which were attended
predominantly by white males, it is only natural that his language would reflect his
audience. Aside from the semantics of actual wording critical readers will find little
exclusion in the content of his essay. And indeed if one takes a look at the author
himself, based on his renowned work with the women's movement, and ongoing
friendships with some of it's founders, one can certainly infer that he would not then
exclude women from this essay. It is likewise for people of color, with whose plight
he has continually concerned himself.
His sole oversight may lie in the perspective from which his points are conveyed,
through analogies that perhaps not all people can relate to, for instance his reference
at the beginning to young boys. The boys he described were undoubtedly more
privileged, than the average black man of that time. And throughout the work women
are similarly excluded, but once again, does a good writer not gear his work towards
is audience? Especially the analogies whose shear purpose are to more obviously
relate the content of the story to the listener.
The over all sentiment of this work, empowerment through personal freedom, is a
feeling that, while being more immediately tangible to some, is appealing and
empowering to all. Upon close analysis it is evident that in order for Emerson's theory
to function ideally it requires the participation of all members of society. This means
men and women of all races and ages.
This text, in my opinion, is a wonderfully
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motivational, inspirational piece of literature. Placing emphasis on self-trust, the
recognition of ones own divinity and the resilience and inherently positive nature of
ones soul: " The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane
to seek to interpose helps." (Emerson, 1629)
Ann Woodlief On "Self-Reliance"
Class Discussions
Questions to consider before reading the essay
Emerson said, toward the end of his writing career, "I have taught one doctrine, namely,
the infinitude of the private man." That's why we begin our study of American
transcendentalism with this essay. His basic philosophical faith (one shared by many
Americans) is that the ultimate source of truth is within ourselves. We recognize truth
outside ourselves, in nature or in others, and the key word here is "recognize," even if
only very dimly. We are often not "in touch" with ourselves or trust ourselves enough to
find these truths and so must often depend on others, books, etc. to express it for us, but
it is somehow within us. Now, there's no particular empirical evidence for this; Emerson
is making a great intuitive leap of faith, and you either believe (because you've
experienced it to some degree) or you don't. It is this concept of what some critics call
the "imperial self" which lies at the heart of romanticism, both positively and negatively.
However, this is not necessarily self-centered, because the truth which lies within is
universal, shared and recognized by all (if they only knew it) and generated by Self
(God, Over-soul, whatever). All we can really know is within us, but we must assume
that other people have the same potential as we do--and assume that they do, in fact,
exist (although you really can't prove it!) Presumably, trusting oneself means much
more than that; it means trusting that somehow or other we have an innate wisdom
which is a projection of the god within, and that every person has that wisdom, although
few have much access to it. Those few we often call poets and prophets (but never
politicians!) and we cherish the insights into our own truths that we glimpse through
them. Theoretically, then, to believe in our selves and our deep capacity to understand
and recognize truths is to believe in every self, though we have no access to any other
self besides us. Practically it may be another matter, but Emerson is a bit of an idealist
and not terribly practical (we can't all be everything!)
One characteristic of Emerson's essays is the gaps he leaves the reader to fill (or to
flounder in); it is probably their greatest strength (because you may personalize what
you read) and greatest weakness (it can be confusing). For example, at the beginning of
the essay he speaks of verses he has read which are original, but he does not tell you
what those verses are. You have to imagine what "original" might be. His emphasis is
not on these particular verses, or even the definition of originality in poetry, but a
discussion on originality and recognizing your own ability to be original and not
imitative. After all, he can't say what would be original for you, could he? But he wants
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you to imagine what that might be. This will happen repeatedly through the essay. Try
your best to fill those blanks in ways that make sense to you and your experience, and if
you can't, ignore them and keep going.
One problem you may find with this essay is that you feel that he is hitting you over the
head with the same idea over and over, like a big hammer labeled "believe in
yourself." I'm sure you wished to cry out, "ok Ralphie, I've got it, I've got it!" He
makes sure that you consider the implications of this idea in every way possible. It
doesn't matter if there are gaps in what you understand; he'll catch up with you
somewhere or other in the essay. A little overkill, perhaps. Why? Whom is he trying to
convince? Perhaps himself as well as his reader. But the message seems to be one that
we all need, especially today when the ever-present media assaults us with ideas and
images of how we should live and what we should believe.
Remember that we are reading this 150 years later or so. What seemed like a rather
novel idea then has deteriorated into a cliche, embedded in just about every self-help
"psychology" book in the local mall bookstore that you can find. It is hard for us to see
the original force of this in 1838, when people felt far less secure about themselves, as
individuals and as Americans (whatever that was). In many ways, this is as much a
cultural/intellectual declaration of independence as it is an exhortation to believe in
yourself. Its major power today is probably directed toward the younger reader,
struggling with the very powerful forces toward conformity that seem endemic in
American high schools. However, it also works in a class like this, where I am, in a
sense, forcing you to express your ideas and not giving you such an easy way out as
taking notes on what wisdom I might have to impart.
Emerson had his own personal reasons for writing this. He was deeply insecure in many
ways (aren't we all?), and a rather revolutionary speech about religion that he delivered
at the Harvard Divinity School about this time (asserting the doctrine of the God within)
caused a tremendous uproar and criticism from people he respected. There would be no
job for him at Harvard! He had left the ministry a few years earlier and had lost his
young wife to tuberculosis after 18 months of marriage. He didn't really have a career at
that point; he just had the ideas he believed passionately and thought needed to be
heard. He was involved in a very deep career crisis (which many of us can relate to).
There simply was no way to earn a living doing what his heart told him that he must
do--to write and to speak. Except, as it turned out, there were ways to realize his dream,
as long as he didn't lose his faith in himself.
The rhetoric of this essay shows signs of his years in the pulpit; it's like he's demanding
you to listen and to go out and act. But he may well be exhorting himself just as much
as, if not more than, his readers. What he wanted to do--to establish himself a place as a
writer and thinker--was extraordinarily difficult to do outside of an institution like the
church or the university (so what else has changed!), and it would take all the nerve he
could summon. And after all, he was no kid; he was 35 years old and counting.
It all sounds so simple: just make up your mind to trust your deepest instincts and go for
it! I know it isn't that simple--and in fact, so did Emerson, and seeing the problems
inherent in such a personally energizing idea kept him busy writing for some time. If
you look carefully, you can see some awareness of this conflict in the essay, but it
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doesn't really blossom forth for a while. For one thing, he gives a lot of credit to innate
goodness, and almost totally ignores the very crucial environmental shaping factors. He
and his readers were raised in an extremely "moral" environment, and though they
might rebel against church doctrine, they were deeply "indoctrinated" with those moral
codes. This is not necessarily the case in the "murder capital of the world"! Another
problem is the extreme "masculinity" of the essay--one of his favorite words is
"manliness." I can just visualize this very assertive and muscular male as an underlying
ideal (was Emerson insecure about that too? Probably, since writers/thinkers/preachers
were considered rather feminized by his society, unlike those competitive,
money-making businessmen so idealized by his compatriots.) I don't believe that
self-trust is a male-marked trait, although I suspect that he does believe it (though, bless
his heart, he doesn't really know it!). I know, I'm reading this from my own perspective,
but as Emerson would say, isn't that the only way you can read? Actually, I think you
can try to place yourself in another context, but that must be a work of imagination to
some degree (I can try, anyhow; I'll just substitute woman for man and you can do
whatever you like!)
Emerson doesn't just keep preaching the same doctrine though, you may be relieved to
hear, or at least not with the same simplistic fervour. There is a flip side to this: as
exciting and energizing it may be to follow your deepest instincts and do/say what you
think is right, it's also depressing to think that maybe all we can know is what is within
us. In a sense, we may be imprisoned within our own perceptions and experiences, and
can never really know what might be true. We can't even be sure if anyone or anything
else exists, because all we can know is what's in our little individual heads. Emerson
will come to see this, as well as the many limitations on our power that are imposed by
circumstances and environment, which he calls Fate. He gets a lot more interesting
when he confronts these conflicting forces.
Wouldn't it be nice if all we had to do is "trust ourselves" and follow our own stars?
Actually, it's rather amazing what people can accomplish if they do just that. However,
that's not the whole story, and Emerson knew it, especially after life dealt him a few
more tough blows--like his beloved 5 year old son dying of scarlet fever. Self-reliance
can look like a pretty puny doctrine in light of a tragedy like that, but it did sustain him
(although perhaps in a modified form)..
So the important thing is not whether Emerson is right or wrong here. He's both--and we
are to draw from the essay what means the most to us. That's one reason it's written as it
is. Buried in there are sentences which strike right to the heart of readers, and suggest all
kinds of possibilities for them. For example, many students trying to see their way
ahead in life have found great comfort in this metaphor:
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the
line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average
tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your
other genuine actions.
You could interpret this in several ways. When you look at your life, especially when
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you are young, if you follow your "inner gyroscope" and do things and take courses that
just "feel right," it might look to others (parents in particular) as if you just can't make
up your mind and are zigzagging all over the place. The coherence will be an inner one,
perhaps not even visible to you, but over time, it will probably make sense, just as you
have to zigzag when sailing to reach a point most directly. One difference, of course, is
that you (unlike the sailor) often haven't a clue where or what that "point" might be, and
have to trust that by following your instincts and strengths, you'll actually reach some
kind of point. I find that rather profound, as I look at my own life, and the decisions that
I made that didn't make a lot of sense, perhaps, to others and seemed inconsistent, but
that were in fact quite consistent with who I was and what I wanted to be, although I
hadn't a clue what that might be (I never dreamed I'd end up teaching, etc.!)
OK, that's my personal testimony (although I'll admit, I cruised past that passage when I
was in college and needed to read it most)--you'll have your own, I imagine. If you'll be
patient with Emerson (and his vocabulary and greater reading knowledge), he is likely
to speak very personally to you, if not on this reading then maybe on another. Besides,
just think of all the money you can save on those self-help books and therapy groups by
going right to the source! ;
Self-Reliance and Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, VA
The Rev. Paul L’Herrou
January 11, 1998
In his Biographical Sketch of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elliot Berlin warned us not to
canonize and make a saint of Emerson. It may, however, be too late. Every religion
has its saints, those revered individuals who seem larger than life, those individuals
for whom churches are named - St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, St. Andrew’s
Episcopal Church, Emerson Unitarian Church of Canoga Park, California, the first
church which I served as minister. Even we Unitarian Universalists have our saints,
those individuals for whom our churches are named. The last time I checked the UUA
Directory, I concluded that Emerson is our most popular saint. We have five churches
named for him.
As Elliot mentioned, Emerson was a Unitarian minister, although he only lasted about
three years before he went on to become a renowned public lecturer and essayist.
There are many opinions as to why Emerson left the active ministry. At least one
contributing factor was that, in spite of his commanding presence in the lecture hall,
he was quite introverted and uncomfortable in personal interactions.
It is reported that in 1829, when Emerson was Minister at Second Church in Boston,
he called on a Revolutionary War veteran on his death bed. Emerson was hesitant and
awkward and was told by the dying veteran, "Young man, if you don’t know your
business, you had better go home." Even our saints have their weak points.
Probably Emerson’s best-known essay is "Self-Reliance." It is the supreme argument
for forming our own opinions and standing up for our own beliefs. "Self-Reliance
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contains some lines which have become as much a part of our collective unconscious
as many familiar Bible Passages. For instance, "Whoso would be a man (and I would
add - or a real woman), must be a nonconformist… It is easy in the world to live after
the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man (or
woman) is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the
independence of solitude."
This is a stirring call for us to hold firmly to our own particular understanding of what
is right and true. These words buttressed those of us who opposed the Vietnam War
long before it became popular to do so. These words have been the solace of families
which have fought against prayer in public schools. These words have inspired those
who have taken and upheld unpopular positions in many times and places. These
words have inspired a reliance on individual conscience in standing up to and
influencing the larger community.
But, these words also inspire us when we verbal, outspoken Unitarian Universalists
step into the arena of a congregational meeting or a district conference or our annual
General Assembly to duke it out with no holds barred from our opposing viewpoints.
It may be those who ardently believe that a church should take strong public stands on
social issues against those who say that a Unitarian Universalist church cannot
possibly take a stand, because taking a unified stand would exclude those members
who are in disagreement and because of our principle of freedom of individual belief.
It may be those who do not want anything that reminds them of "traditional" church
against those who value a sense of reverence and liturgy. It may be those who value
process and dialogue even when it does not achieve resolution against those who are
ready to set process aside in order to achieve results.
At various times, in every congregation, people who are absolutely committed to
opposing opinions line up on their respective sides to fight it out, each defending the
absolute rightness of their position, unwilling to search for common ground on which
both can stand. Each seemingly convinced that to be a real man or a real woman, they
must, in the midst of the crowd, keep with perfect sweetness and toughness the
independence of solitude - even if it destroys the community. These words and a
surface reading of Emerson have led to the adoption of Self-Reliance as the
justification, the manifesto, the scripture of rugged individualism.
Rugged individualism is the go-it-alone, I am right and I will not be influenced by you,
I don’t need anyone else approach to life. Too often, our veneration of rugged
individualism results in ragged and rent community. People feel compelled to defend
one side or the other. The pursuit of rugged individualism suppresses true
self-reliance, which is rooted, according to Emerson, in an individual perception of
the Ultimate. Churches become fragmented. Individuals are denigrated, damaged and
dismissed. People become reluctant to share feelings and thoughts for fear of ridicule
and censure. So, the inner, intuitive search for ultimate truth is curtailed. It feels
unsafe to be uncertain and to try out different approaches or ideas. Yet, community,
and church community in particular, should be a supportive place for the spiritual
search, the search for meanings and for purpose in our lives, a place where we can
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explore and try out different perspectives and understandings, as we grow and change
throughout our lives.
And, in fact, in “Self-Reliance,” Emerson writes, “A foolish consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines…
Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks
in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day… The voyage of
the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. (Those were the days of sailing ships.)
See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions.
Your conformity explains nothing.”
Even though Emerson is cited as the justification of so-called rugged individualism,
of unbridled freedom, of doing your own thing, he is really saying something very
different. He is saying neither - be so convinced of your rightness that you march off
in one direction no matter who or what gets in your way, nor allow the crowd, popular
opinion, pop culture to determine your direction.
Emerson is saying - each one of us participates in the Ultimate, in what he calls, in
another essay, - The Over-Soul. Each one of us, through our intuition and a
heightened sense of openness and wonder, can perceive our own understanding of
ultimate value. That understanding of ultimate value, of ultimate truth, even though
we may understand it differently next week, has got to be our compass - not popular
opinion and not our own imposed will. And, because I respect that glimpse of the
Over-Soul which I find at the depth of my individual soul, I will also respect your
attempt to touch the depth dimension within you. In contemporary language, in our
current Unitarian Universalist Statement of Principles, we are called “to affirm and
promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth.
We can support each other in the quest for truth and meaning, and through our
differing understandings and the respectful dialogue of strongly-held ideas and
commitments, we can draw closer to what has ultimate meaning and satisfaction for
us all.
This is the meaning of community. It is not conformity, nor is it separateness.
Community is the ability to be with one another in all of our uniqueness, with all of
our differences, without losing our selfhood and to so respect our own understandings
and perceptions that we also respect the sincere perceptions of others, while being
vulnerable enough to allow our self to be influenced and changed by the very different
viewpoint of another.
Self-reliance is the pre-condition for true community. True community is the
nurturing environment for strong and healthy individualism. Maturity, individuation,
is the ability to be self-reliant and intimate at the same time.
Self-reliance is the quality of respecting your own inner search for what seems most
true and meaningful for you and contributing your resulting unique viewpoint to
enrich the community through diversity. As Emerson puts it - “The power which
resided in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do,
nor does he know until he has tried… Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift
you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation;
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but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half
possession.”
However, as Unitarian Universalists, as members of a religious denomination which
rejects dogma and scriptural revelation, we sometimes seem to have taken rugged
individualism as our dogma and Emerson’s Self-Reliance as our gospel. We have
sometimes made an absolute value of independence, as if to be dependent would be
depersonalizing and degrading. But, Emerson was not independent. If nothing else, he
was extremely dependent on the women in his life. He was dependent on his aunt,
whose writing inspired some of his best thinking. He was dependent on his
consumptive first wife, who conveniently died and left him enough money so that he
could pay off his debts, drop out of the ministry and take up a leisurely life of writing
and lecturing. He was dependent on his second wife, who cooked and cleaned and
mended, cared for the children and took care of his needs so that he could spend half
his life quietly thinking and writing and the other half lecturing, traveling and
enjoying the adulation of his fans.
Emerson was dependent, just as we all are more or less dependent. We are dependent
on human relationships which nurture and support us. We are dependent on the
physical world which sustains us. We are dependent on our employers and the
economy, which are, in turn, dependent on us. We are dependent on our automobiles
to give us some measure of independence.
The gist of the problem seems to be that we understand Emerson to be saying that it is
noble not only to be an individual, but to be independent. But, every human being
needs other human beings in order to survive. Total independence, the independence
which much in our culture glorifies, is an illusion, an illusion which blinds us to the
realities and the deficiencies of our dependencies and the dependencies of others upon
us.
Emerson is often quoted out of context, by those who would justify rugged
individualism, as writing “…do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my
obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?” Actually,
Emerson was making a point that our actions and assistance should emanate from the
essence of who we are, rather than from a disconnected sense of charity.
It has been my experience that when someone says, such as Emerson might seem to
be saying, when someone protests that they don’t want others to need them, and that
they don’t need others, it is really because they are afraid to ask for help. They may be
afraid that they will be refused or that the price will be too high. They may be afraid
that they will have to acknowledge just how dependent they really are. The rejection
of dependence does not lead to freedom. Freedom comes from facing our
dependencies and bringing their costs and their benefits into balance.
Dependence is healthy, when what we depend on and its cost to us is in relative
balance - when we are interdependent. Dependence is destructive when the cost and
benefit are out of balance. Romantic relationships are destructive when we are so
dependent on what we hope to get from the other that we feel helpless or
self-destructive and undermine our own sense of wholeness. An out-of-balance
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dependence on the resources of nature is destructive. An in-balance, interdependent
relationship is the goal of the ecology movement.
We are all dependent. You folks who sing in the Choir are dependent on a skillful
director, on Vera to draw out your untouched talents and meld your efforts into a
cohesive whole. But, Vera depends on you to create the sound. Our children, both our
own children and the children of our congregation, are dependent on us for their
support and nurture and guidance. But, we also are dependent on them to pick up the
task and carry out our hopes and dreams for a more livable, more just and peaceful
future. Our friendships, our work relationships, our parent and child relationships, our
sexual-affinity relationships, our most intimate relationships are expressions of mutual
dependence.
Emerson, put it in this way: “Within all is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the
universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.”
In contemporary usage, this is expressed by our Seventh Principle: “Respect for the
interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” Like the writings of
Emerson, this is based on a theology of relatedness.
There is continuity and coherence between the theology and values of Emerson and
those we express today - though the words may be different. The seventh principle is
an expression of a theology that suggests that the divine, the holy, the sacred is in the
relationships between all things. Ultimate Reality is not a noun. The Ground of Being
is not something out there. The Spirit of Life is a verb. It is the interaction of things in
relationship. There is a spark of divinity within each of us which binds us one to
another and which calls us to be co-creators of this world.
In Emerson’s words, “We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us
receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we
discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.”
Such a theology carries a heavy weight of responsibil-ity. If we are co-creators with
the Ultimate, if we are part of the interdependent web of all existence, and yet live our
lives as if existence were composed of separate beings doing their own thing, we in
fact destroy the very fabric which connects us.
We are partners with the Goddess, God, Creative Interchange, whatever we name it,
in the always becoming universe. This is a theology which understands the
Interdependent Web as the flow, the wholeness, the infinite variety and richness of
Life itself. We are linked to all of creation, yet must recognize our individual unique
qualities, gifts and understandings. We are co-creators with this Reality in the eternal
process of creation.
Rebecca Parker, the president of Starr King School for the Ministry, the seminary
from which I graduated, puts it in this poetic expression:
Your gifts - whatever you discover them to be - can be used to bless or
curse the world.
The mind’s power,
the strength of the hands,
the reaches of the heart,
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the gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeing,
waiting
any of these can serve to feed the hungry,
bind up wounds,
welcome the stranger,
praise what is sacred,
do the work of justice
or offer love.”
“None of us alone can save the world.
Together - that is another possibility.”
Amen
第八部分：Emily Dickinson
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