mance, for Mrs. Stowe aimed to set forth life as it really was. Readers of course made the mistake of assuming that all slavery was as bad as the one picture of it which she drew, and so she was often charged with exaggeration. But that she meant to be just, and that she was aiming, not at a section of people, but at a national crime, is shown by the fact that some of the best characters in the book are Southerners, while the brutal slavedriver is of the North. The story is deficient in many points of art, but it has the art of life-real people and real passions, humor, pathos, dramatic situation and action-and this, even apart from its political and social interest, would doubtless have carried it well into favor.

Yet the strength of the book on this point is scarcely sufficient to insure its future vitality. If the extent of a writer's audience and the measure of his immediate influence were the final tests, and not artistic excellence and the measure of his insight into the eternal verities of the human spirit, Mrs. Stowe would deserve to stand with the major novelists of her time. But the book to which her fame is inseparably bound grew out of a single social movement, and it will surely suffer the final eclipse that overtakes all such productions. The movement, as it chanced in this case, was of extraordinary significance, and the fate of the book is therefore indefinitely postponed, but already it has long been more like a historical document than a living force.

Mrs. Stowe continued to exercise her gift for drawing character, and some of her later stories-such sketches of New England village life, for instance, as The Minister's Wooing (1859) and Oldtown Folks (1869)-would in themselves give her a respectable place among writers of fiction. But these books are in no sense romances. With Mrs. Stowe's later work, indeed, those phases of romantic activity which it has been the purpose of the present chapter to set forth, are practically lost sight of, and the realistic novel of the post-bellum period begins to appear.

CHAPTER VI

THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT.-EMERSON, THOREAU

There has been in American literature but one instance of anything like a conscious and organized intellectual "movement." The groups of writers we have thus far considered are groups made by the historian of literature who, looking back over the field, tries to bring men and events into some definite relations. Writers have been discussed together, not because they consciously worked together, but because they were contemporaries or because they chanced to possess similar traits. But about a decade before the middle of the nineteenth century a few men and women in New England, holding certain views of life and morals, made a deliberate attempt to unite for the defence and spread of their views; and though they never effected any organization that could be called a church, nor even established a permanent school of philosophy, they did make a strong impression upon the intellectual life of their time, and their theories had issue in a small but very vital body of literature. The history, therefore, of Transcendentalism-a ponderous but not unfitting name which these thinkers themselves imported from abroad and which, though it was often employed by others in ridicule, they always treated gravely-belongs peculiarly to the history of American literature.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN NEW ENGLAND

In the theology of New England, Calvinism had for two centuries held its own almost unchallenged. But the spirit of revolution and free thought that, about 1800, was working

such changes in Europe, made itself felt also in America, and the sterner features of the religion of the Puritans had to give way before it. Many found it no longer possible to subscribe to the old doctrines, which taught, among other things, that human nature is totally depraved and that only certain "elect" are marked for salvation. They began to declare more liberal views, and their declarations rapidly crystallized into what is now familiarly known as Unitarianism. This was a form of faith which practically ignored all revelation outside of conscience, holding that man must look for guidance solely to the moral nature within, believing it to be good, and so between himself and the one God work out his salvation.

The new theology spread, if not far, at least so effectually that it was soon established at the Divinity School at Harvard and in many of the prominent churches in and about Boston. Its growth and influence were largely due to that great vindicator of personal character as against professed creed, Dr. William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), who was regarded through the thirty-odd years of his ministry at Boston as the most eloquent pulpit orator in America, and whose works are still held in high respect. Other prominent advocates were Theodore Parker (1810-1860), who gave to the cause his youthful zeal, and James Freeman Clarke (18101888), one of the foremost of the later Unitarians, both in the pulpit and in letters.

Congrega

Of course, the old church was not overthrown. tionalism, though of a liberalized type, still prevailed in many parts of New England as it did elsewhere. And in Horace Bushnell (1802-1876), who preached at Hartford, and Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), who preached at Brooklyn, Congregationalism had, through the middle of the century, exponents nearly or quite as distinguished as Channing. But though these two published as well as preached-Beecher even wrote

a novel-they scarcely concern us here. Neither Congregationalism nor Unitarianism, as such, produced anything in the nature of enduring literature, and their progress has been glanced at here only because it will assist to an understanding of the half-religious and half-philosophical Transcendental movement, which, as was said, does touch literature closely enough to demand our attention.

Into the precise origin of this movement we need not inquire. Doubtless the underlying philosophical ideas are older than Plato or Buddha, and were transmitted from the far East. The immediate impulse came from the philosophers of Germany, through many agents, conspicuously the English Coleridge and Carlyle. Beginning as a speculative philosophy only, it struck in New England upon very ardent moralists and very practicalminded men, among whom had already been sown the seeds of liberalism, and who, dissatisfied with their old forms and creeds, caught up this attractive philosophy and proceeded at ɔnce to erect it into a kind of gospel and guide of life. At the base of it lay what is called idealism—the reliance, as the word implies, upon ideas, or the world within, as the only sure testimony we can have of matter, or the world without. Transcendentalism (as understood in New England-not the Transcendentalism of the German Kant) meant the belief that within the mind are certain intuitions, or knowledge of truth and right, that transcend, that is to say, go beyond, are independent of, all experience. Whence these intuitions come we do not know; nor can we logically prove their validity-"truths which pertain to the soul cannot be proved by any external testimony whatsoever." We can only follow, with implicit trust, the "inner light." This, of course, is sheer individualism, the doctrine of the Unitarians pushed to its extreme, making every man his own moral guide and sweeping away at a blow all theological systems. It is therefore no matter for sur

prise that many men, among them notably Theodore Parker, were carried completely outside of the Unitarian church.

masses.

The movement, however, was not of a nature to attract the It differed from "The Great Awakening," that religious revival of a century earlier,* in being less sudden, less violent, and in every way more restricted. It differed radically, too, from the temperance and abolition movements of its own time, both of which owed much to it, in that these, being more definite "causes," could be fought out on the platform or by the people at the polls. Transcendentalism was a cult of the cultured, and the other classes scarcely knew of its existence. Yet, though stripped of emotional and popular elements, it was none the less a wave of sentiment and reform-a genuine quickening of spiritual life. It had a large element of religion in it. Nothing could lightly shake the moral earnestness of the New Englanders, deepened as it was by more than two centuries of persecutions, hardships, and wars. The Unitarianism that came to divide the old church was altogether reverent and serious. And when new doctrines came to burst even the wide bonds of Unitarianism, there was still never any thought of giving up the fundamental principles of morality and religion. Men concerned themselves no longer about special schemes of salvation. But they were all the more deeply concerned about right living and thinking; and the common definition of Transcendentalism as a doctrine of "plain living and high thinking," loose as it is, is by no means bad.

Some definite facts may serve to set the movement in a clearer light.

Some time in 1836 a little knot of men and women began to meet in Boston, drawn together by a common interest

• See page 30.