The Catholic World, Vol. 27, April 1878 to September 1878

by Various

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

A Life of Pope Pius IX. By John R. G. Hassard. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.

“It is ... with the story of the private virtues of Pius IX., the outlines of his public life, and the most important works of his pontificate that the present biography will be chiefly concerned,” says the author of this really excellent life of the late Pope. Mr. Hassard has closely kept to the programme which he thus clearly set down for himself in the beginning, and the result is one of the most comprehensive biographies of Pius IX. that we have yet seen. The book is by no means a bulky one, yet the story of the wonderful pontificate is all there; the events that mark it grouped with the skill of a thoroughly practised and efficient pen: the secret forces that impelled those events brought to light; and the lights and shadows of the ever-shifting scene pictured with a rapid yet bold and true hand. Mr. Hassard has the happy gift of collecting his facts, setting them together in the briefest and most intelligible form, and leaving the reader to make his own comment on them. The comment is sure to be such as the author himself would make, so clear and logical is his arrangement of the premises. Another happy feature marks this biography: there is an absence of gush. The author writes tenderly and with an open admiration of his subject; but the tenderness never sinks into sentimentality, and the admiration is always manly and reasonable. The anecdotes are well chosen and happy, and most, if not all, of them will be new to the general reader. The author’s study of the workings of the secret societies, which play so prominent a part in the history of the last pontificate, has been close and searching. His acquaintance with European politics generally, so necessary in a biographer of Pius IX., is equally thorough. These necessary qualifications give a special value to the present Life, while the whole story is told with a genial glow of personal regard and admiration for its subject, none the less charming that its tone is rationally subdued. Mr. Hassard is to be congratulated on having produced a biography that will be cherished by Catholic readers as we cherish and keep by us, and look at again and again, a faithful miniature of one very dear to our hearts.

Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne. From the original manuscripts, with introduction and notes by Harry Buxton Forman. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1878.

Were these the letters of John Brown instead of John Keats the world would wonder, with reason, what possible motive could have induced their publication. Well might poor Keats, were he alive, say on seeing them in print and exposed to the public gaze, “Save me from my friends!” Their publication is, perhaps, the greatest injury that the unfortunate poet, or his memory, ever had to sustain. As letters, even as love-letters, they are remarkably dull and insipid. How Miss Fanny Brawne received them of course we do not know. Love is reputed to be blind. It is certainly color-blind. Othello could never have looked black—at least not very black—to Desdemona. Had he worn his native sable that poor lady would undoubtedly have been reserved for a better fate. So it is presumably with love-letters. They may contain wells of wit and wisdom and eloquence and fire to the party to whom they are addressed, and who is bewitched by love’s potion, though to all the rest of the world they are the very embodiment of absurdity and nonsense. Titania, over whom the spell has been wrought, sees an Adonis where everybody else only sees honest Nick Bottom, the weaver, fittingly capped by an ass’s head. It is an evil day for Bottom when the love potion has lost its virtue and the scales drop from the eyes of Titania. Such an event does happen at times to all the Bottoms and Titanias, and probably it happened to Miss Fanny Brawne, who never became Mrs. Keats, but Mrs. Somebody Else. If ever she had cause for a grudge against Keats she has more than revenged it by allowing some prying busybody access to these very silly letters which are now given to the public for the first time.

They show nothing but weakness, mental and moral, in their author. It should be remembered, however, that they are the letters of a man marked for death. They exhibit not a trace of the wit and humor which Keats really had, and to which he sometimes gave expression. They are utterly without his classic grace and profound, if pagan, sympathy with nature. They are the expressions of morbid feeling, and of nothing else. They can serve no purpose but to lower Keats in the estimation of all who read them. He was never a robust character; but these exhibit him as a weakling of weaklings, and it was simply cruel to publish them. The whole thing is a piece of the worst kind of bookmaking we have seen. The introduction, which is worth nothing save to perplex, occupies sixty-seven pages; the letters, which are of about equal value, occupy one hundred and seven pages; an appendix of nine pages sets forth “the locality of Wentworth Place”; to all of which there are no less than six pages of an index with such headings as these: “Arrears of Versifying to be Cleared”; “Books lent to Miss Brawne not to be sent home”; “Brawne, Fanny”; “Brawne, Margaret”; “Brawne, Mrs.”; “Brawne, Samuel, Jr.”; “Brawne, Samuel, Sr.” (why not “The Brawne Family” at once?); “Café, Keats will not sing in a”; “Flirting with Brawne”; “Front parlor, Watching in”; “Getting Stouter”; “Laughter of Friends”; “Sore throat, Confinement to the house with”; and so on. We do not know who Mr. “Harry” Buxton Forman may be, but if ever it came to pass that we were threatened with fame at the cost of a future Harry Buxton Forman to hunt up our love-letters or butchers’ and bakers’ bills, or every scrap that we might write in an incautious moment, we should certainly prefer to all time our present happy obscurity.

Life of Henri Planchat, Priest of the Congregation of the Brothers of St. Vincent de Paul. By Maurice Maignen. Translated from the French, with an introductory preface. By Rev. W. H. Anderdon, S.J. London: Burns & Oates. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)

This Life is a beautiful one. In reading it we are constantly reminded of the just and faithful man—the privileged servant of God—who, amidst the turmoil of the world, possesses his soul in peace. Henri Planchat was born of good parents at Bourbon-Vendée on November 22, 1823. After a holy youth he was called to the sanctuary and studied under the venerable Sulpitians at Paris. Being ordained priest on December 22, 1850, he offered his first Mass the next day, and the day after that “attained,” says his biographer, “the climax of his wishes by becoming a member of the little community of Brothers of St. Vincent of Paul, in order to live and die in the service of the working classes and of the poor in general.” Interior recollection, humility, and the perfect performance of the duties of his ministry raised him to a martyr’s throne. A dreadful storm, the fury of the Commune, suddenly burst upon this life of singular simplicity and charity, devoted to the needy and the ignorant for upwards of twenty years, and he was basely massacred, out of hatred to religion, in the Rue Haxo, on the 27th of May, 1871, among that very class of people for whom he had labored so earnestly and so long. “We are the good odor of Christ,” says the apostle, and in the untimely yet happy death of Henri Planchat we perceive the aptness of Bacon’s saying about adversity, that “virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed.”

The Rev. Father Anderdon, S.J., has written an introductory preface to this English translation which is short and to the point; but a scholar like Father Anderdon should not have mistaken (preface) Poitou for Picardy, which was an altogether different province of the territorial divisions of France before the Revolution.

One of God’s Heroines: A Biographical Sketch of Mother Mary Teresa Kelly, Foundress of the Convent of Mercy, Wexford. By Kathleen O’Meara. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.

Nothing that the very gifted author of the Life of Frederic Ozanam writes can fail to attract attention or excite admiration. Miss O’Meara seems equally happy in biography as in fiction. Her stories, such as Are You My Wife? Alba’s Dream, etc., etc., need no recommendation to readers of The Catholic World. In the touching little biography which calls for the present notice Miss O’Meara has evidently performed a labor of love. The title exactly describes the subject of the sketch. Mother Kelly was indeed “one of God’s heroines,” called up at a time when such heroines are peculiarly needed—in our own days. She was born in 1813; she died on Christmas day, 1866. Her religious life was a sustained series of heroic actions—actions none the less heroic that they were done in a practical, unostentatious, matter-of-fact manner. Her good works live after her, and it was a kindly and just thought to commemorate them as they have been commemorated in the bright pages of this tender and graceful little memoir by so skilful a hand and appreciative a heart. No one can read One of God’s Heroines without feeling that after all the world is a brighter place than so many writers are wont to picture it. It will always be bright and worth living in while it can boast of such pious and charitable souls as Mother Mary Kelly. The only fault to be found with the present sketch of that life is its brevity.

To the Sun? From the French of Jules Verne. By Edward Roth. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger. 1878.

That very clever Frenchman, Jules Verne, has again given us a most interesting and wonderful tale, which has been very successfully translated by Mr. Roth. It is to be wished that all translations were equally well done. Captain Hector Servadac and his servant, Ben Zoof, a typical Frenchman, are hurled into space upon a piece of the earth’s surface, and proceed with alarming velocity toward the sun. Of course they are not the only ones removed from this sphere. There are some Englishmen and Spaniards, and a Dutch Jew. We must not forget a Russian count and his companions, who all play an important part in this wondrous story. Verne’s object is to interest boys in the exact sciences, as Mayne Reid’s was to awaken a corresponding interest in natural history. At the present day, when stories for boys are becoming so intensely vulgar, and contain so much slang which passes for wit and playful badinage, it is a relief to find a story that is told in good English, and that contains, moreover, in a marked degree the highest sentiments of manly honor. There is in it an undercurrent of the strongest feeling against the Germans, which is vented upon a Holland Jew. The book would have been better without this. Some English officers come in for a few hits at their national characteristics, but, on the other hand, our young captain himself is frequently reproved by his Mentor, the Russian count, who, of course, is nearly faultless.

The chief beauty of the book is the large amount of interesting scientific knowledge which can be gleaned from it, if carefully perused, and although not as amusing as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea or A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, it can be cheerfully recommended to our boyish friends as full of absorbing interest and healthy in its moral tone. It is to be followed by a sequel.

Thirty-Nine Sermons Preached in the Albany County Penitentiary, from May, 1874, to March, 1877. By the Rev. Theodore Noethen, Catholic Chaplain. Albany: Van Benthuysen Printing House. 1877.

These discourses are published in aid of a fund for increasing the Catholic library of the prison. The author’s preface tells us that the library contains about one hundred bound volumes and a number of pamphlets. “An incalculable amount of good has already been effected” by it; but the number of Catholic prisoners—nearly four hundred—makes many more books necessary. “If,” he says, “there could be some concerted action among the Catholic publishers of the United States, each contributing a few books, an excellent library would soon be formed; and it is but right that this suggestion should be acted on, for the reason that prisoners are sent to the Albany penitentiary from all parts of the Union.” He praises the example of a few of our leading Catholic publishing houses, “whose generous contributions of English and German books, together with rosaries and medals, have earned for them the gratitude” of their unfortunate fellow-Catholics.

These sermons are short and simple, and will be found very useful to pastors whose time is crowded with work, and particularly to those in the country who have more than one “mission” to attend. They will also prove excellent reading for the Catholic inmates of other penitentiary institutions.

The Four Seasons. By Rev. J. W. Vahey. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.

This is a useful book of instruction, written in a pleasing and popular style. The “four seasons” represent the various stages of human life from early youth to ripe old age. The lesson inculcated is the old one, that as a man sows so shall he reap. The author has happily contrived to weave much practical observation and really sound knowledge into his allegory—for such the little work may be styled. The chief object aimed at is to arouse Catholic parents to the necessity of religiously guarding the education of their children, and thus keeping them all their lives within the church into which they are baptized. Father Vahey’s volume has the warm approval of his archbishop, the Most Rev. John M. Henni.

The Young Girl’s Month of May. By the Author of Golden Sands. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.

Golden Sands, which was noticed in this magazine, has become, as it deserved to become, a very popular book of devotion. In the present small volume the same author has given us a work admirably adapted for May devotions. There is a special motive, aspiration, and brief meditation set apart for each day of the month of Mary, breathing a happy piety and tender grace throughout. The devotions need not at all be restricted to “young girls.” The same skilful hand that rendered Golden Sands into English has with equal happiness set this Month of May before English readers.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXVII., No. 159.—JUNE, 1878.

THOREAU AND NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM.[^[72]]

There is a story told of an illiterate cobbler who was wont to attend the theological discussions in an Italian university, and who, despite his ignorance of Latin and the points discussed, always discovered the disputant that was worsted. To a friend who expressed surprise at his acuteness he explained that he had noticed that the arguer who first lost his temper was the one who also lost the victory.

The cobbler’s test admits of wide application. The consciousness of truth begets serenity. What chronic ill-temper was there amongst the first Protestant Reformers! And even to-day a Protestant controversial author writes as though he were aflame with rage. The doughty Luther, warmed, possibly, as much with the wine whose praises he so lustily sang as with polemical zeal, hurls such names as sot, devil, and ass at his opponents. He has declined and conjugated the word “devil” in all cases, moods, tenses, numbers, and persons. We can imagine his broad face purple with rage, and his bovine neck throbbing apoplectically, as he pours out the vials of his wrath upon that “besatanized, insatanized, and supersatanized royal ass,” Henry VIII., whose accredited book won for the monarchs of England that most glorious, though now, alas! inappropriate, title, “defender of the Faith.” The meek Melanchthon had the tongue of a termagant; and Bucer must have suggested to Shakspere some of the characteristics of Sir John Falstaff, so far as a command of billingsgate goes; for the wordy combats of that Reformer (Bucer, we mean) recall the conversational victories of the knight of sack.

Morbid irritability and unwholesome sensitiveness were the characteristics of the movement known, rather vaguely, as “New England Transcendentalism,” which, forty years ago, promised America a new life in religion, literature, and art. This ill-temper was a forecast of defeat. It brought the movement under the suspicion of weakness and error. It was a voice crying in the wilderness; it had not, however, the trumpet-tones of strength and conviction, but was rather the puny wail of complaint and despair. We were just ceasing to be provincial and were opening to world-wide influences. Our national boastfulness was hugely developed, and we flattered ourselves that no pent-up Utica contracted our powers. De Tocqueville says of us that we are a nation without neighbors; and this, of course, means that we are without standards or comparisons of excellence, and so, like the Buddhist devotee, we aim after perfection by self-contemplation. New England was filled with schoolmasters who had read Carlyle and translations of the Encyclopædists, and who in consequence began to have doubts about what not even Pyrrho would have considered a doubt, so far as it had any existence in their minds—religion. The stern-eyed old Calvinism which watched them like a detective became inexpressibly odious to them, and they hated “Romanism,” too, with all that contradictoriness that baffles explanation. It was soon discovered that Scotch Puritanism was unfitted for the latitude of New England, though it must be said that the mechanical virtues and the staid habits of the people owed much to that strange fanaticism which, whether happily or unhappily for them, has passed away for ever.

How to throttle Puritanism, and yet preserve its corpse from putrefaction as a convenient effigy to appeal to, became a problem for which no solution presented itself. The American masses even to this day venerate the Pilgrim Fathers, and no amount of historical evidence will shake their veneration for those fierce and ignorant fanatics, whose memory should long ago have been buried in charitable oblivion. It is only the Catholic historian and philosopher that can to-day respect the inkling of truth which they held, and which St. Augustine says is to be found in every heresy and doctrinal vagary. They attempted to make the Bible a practical working code of laws—an idea which to-day would be greeted with laughter by their children, who have long since unlearned veneration for the Scriptures. There is something quite noble, though irresistibly ridiculous, in the old Puritan notions about the Bible. One wonders that they did not revive the rite of circumcision. Protestants are beginning to acknowledge the wisdom of the church in not making the Scriptures as common as the almanac or the newspaper. The whole atmosphere of New England became Judaic. Biblical names of towns abounded. Scriptural names were given to children, with a disregard for length and pronunciation that in after-years provoked the ire of the bearers. The Mosaic law was ludicrously incorporated with the legal enactments of the civil law. The old Levitical ordinances were carried out as far as practicable, and the minister of the town just barely refrained from donning the garments of the high-priest and decorating himself with the Urim and Thummim. This anomalous society survived even the great social changes which were wrought by the Revolution.

Puritanism repressed all individual eccentricities of religious opinion. The boasted independence of Protestantism scarcely ever did exist, except in name. Let a man to-day dissent from the opinions of the sect in which he has been brought up, and he may as well become a Catholic, though that is the crowning evidence of being given over to a reprobate sense. What liberty did Luther give the Sacramentarians? What divergence of opinion did Calvin allow in Geneva? He punished heresy with death. What toleration was there in the Church of England for Dissenters? And there is a quiet but effective persecution kept up in the English church to-day against all “Romanistic tendencies.” There is not a greater delusion prevalent than the lauded Protestant freedom of investigation and liberty of conscience. The Catholic Church, even as judged by her enemies, was never so intolerant as that obscurest of Protestant sects, the Puritans of New England. The harshest charges that have been falsely made against a merely local tribunal, the Spanish Inquisition, are historically proved against the full ecclesiastico-civil tribunals of Massachusetts in the punishment, not of turbulent and contumacious heretics, but of wretched and harmless old women accused of witchcraft. Every Protestant church is a complexus of social and business influences, all of which are cruelly and unfairly brought to bear against any member who uses the Protestant right of private judgment. If he will disjoin himself from church communion, though his interpretation of the Scriptures may assure him that the Father is worshipped in spirit, he is looked upon as an infidel and blasphemer. The petty persecution of the Protestant church is a subject admissive of infinite illustration.

Cramped and crippled by a fierce Scotch Covenantism, what were the aspiring minds of New England to do? A natural idea struck them. Some of the fathers of the Revolution were infidels. That great and glorious light of American history, Benjamin Franklin, who was held up as a model to every New England boy, was a sort of deist. The influence of that man’s example and writings has been one of the most baleful in our country’s history. The fathomless depths of his pride, the cool assurance of his “virtue,” the intensely worldly spirit of his maxims, and his Pharisaical reward of wealth and honors in this world have been imitated by thousands of American youth. That nauseating schedule of “virtues” which he drew up; such hideous maxims as “Rarely use venery” and “Imitate Jesus and Socrates,” which seem to us infinitely more shocking in their cold calculation than a wild debauch or a hot-headed oath; his constant prating about integrity as the high-road to health and wealth; and, in short, the whole wretched man, body and soul, furnished the worst yet widest-copied example of American virtue and success. Add to such influences the schoolboy beliefs in liberty and independence, the solemn Fourth-of-July glorification of individual freedom, the vision of the Presidency open to the humblest youth in the district school, and the gradual weakening of faith in the Bible, brought about by the rapid multiplication of the poor, deistical histories and scientific miscellanies of fifty years ago, and the end of Puritanism was soon predicted. The heavy hand of the clergy was shaken off. The curiosity deeply planted in the Yankee nature looked around for a new religion. At once all the vagaries of undisciplined thought, so long held in silence by Protestantism, burst out in Babel speech. Chaos was come again. If Puritanism had dared, it would have sent the “Apostles of the Newness,” as they were called, to the scaffold or the pillory, or, at the very least, it would have pierced their tongues and branded them with symbolic letters.

And what a revelation! We laugh at the wild rhapsodies of George Fox, and Mr. Lecky, in his late book, England in the Eighteenth Century, has rather cruelly, we think, dragged up Wesley’s and Whitefield’s eccentricities for the laughter of a world which should rather be in tears over the vanishing of such earnestness as both those deluded men had; but the laughter which New England Transcendentalism evokes is hearty and sincere, from whatever side we view it.

In the first place, there is no meaning in the name. The logician knows what transcendental ideas are—the ens, verum, bonum, etc.; and what philosophy calls the transcendental is really the most familiar, as connected with universal ideas. But Transcendentalism in New England was understood to mean a high, dreamy, supersensuous, and altogether unintelligible and unexplainable state, condition, life, or religion that escaped in the very attempt to define it. Dr. Brownson complains that he had much difficulty in convincing a philosopher that nothing is nothing; and we feel much in the same mental condition as that philosopher, for we cannot see how Transcendentalism (a polysyllable with a capital T) is nothing. It is infinitely suggestive. It is any number of things, all beginning with capitals. It is Soul, Universe, the Force, the Eternities, the Infinities, the βία καὶ κράτος. It is Any Number of Greek and Latin Nouns. It is, in fact, a Great Humbug (in the largest kind of caps). Mr. Barnum’s “What-is-it?” is nothing to the Protean forms of Transcendentalism. A fair definition might be, Puritanism run mad. There was a certain method in it, and it would be false to say that the absurdity ever went so far in America as Fichtism or even Hegelism in Germany. The old Puritan leaven was too strong for that; and the Yankee common sense, which not even the wildest flights of Transcendentalism could wholly carry from earth, instinctively rejected the German theories. Not even Comte’s Positivism, which has quite a following in England and an influential organ in the Westminster Review, ever gained ground amongst us. We do not believe in Cosmic Emotion or Aggregate Immortality, ponderous and unmeaning words, to which, listening, a Yankee asks, Heow?

The surprising fact is how, in the name of all the philosophers and the muse that presides over them, did New England fall a victim to the “Apostles of the Newness”? It was worse than the Protestant Reformation, which is said to have developed more crazy and eccentric enthusiasts than any other physical or social convulsion recorded in history. The shrewd Yankee genius was supposed to be insured against spiritual lightnings. The cold and common-sense temperament of the people seemed farthest removed from the action of “celestial ardors.” But the fierce old Puritanism was taking only a new form. The spirit that sent Charles I. to the scaffold was nurtured amid the gloomy woods. Only that the sweet providence of God, mysteriously permitting and clearly punishing evil, is gradually withdrawing even the physical presence of that spiritually and intellectually unbalanced race, what chance would there be for the action of his all-holy will as wrought out by the church? New England is largely Catholic to-day, yet New Hampshire will have no popery in her councils. “This spirit is not cast out without prayer and fasting.” Milton, who lacks spiritual insight, fails to identify the spirit of pride with the spirit of impurity. New England, alas! has been filled with the spirit of pride, and of hatred against the City of God, and lo! now she is slain by the spirit of impurity, and the stranger within her gates has taken her place and will wear her crown. And that stranger is the despised and hated “Romanist,” who now enjoys the blessing foretold in that mystic Psalm whose counsels New England despised—the blessing of progeny. It is a prophecy and a history (Ps. cxxvi.): “Unless the Lord buildeth the house, they labor in vain that build it. Unless the Lord keepeth the city, he watches in vain that keepeth it. It is in vain for you to rise before the Light. Rise after ye have sat down, and eaten the bread of sorrow. Behold, children are an inheritance from the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows in the hand of the mighty, so are the children of them that were rejected.”

This is the divine “survival of the fittest.” Would to Heaven that the solemn significance of this great Psalm could sink into the heart of New England and cast out the foul demons that have so long lurked within it; that, having partaken of “the bread of sorrow,” she might rise to the contemplation of the true Light!

No sooner was the restraining power of Puritanism cast off than Transcendentalism, like the genie in the Arabian Nights, rose like an exhalation, and afterward defied the command of the invokers to return to its former limited quarters. The men who assisted at this liberation of a powerful and anarchic spirit soon discovered, to their fear and disgust, that they could not control it. It was worse than Frankenstein, for it appeared to have symmetry, and the land was quickly enamored with its beauty. Every theorist felt that the millennium had dawned. A truce to common sense was called. The leaders of the movement were put in the painful but logical predicament of inability to object to the consequences of their teachings. The over-soul was reduced to such limitations as the necessity and obligation of using bran-bread in preference to all other forms of food. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus happening to appear at a time when the inspiration was fullest, Sartorial heresies became the rage. Bloomer costumes asserted their rights. The old sect of Adamites revived, and nothing but tar and feathers, which hard-headed Calvinists bestowed with unsparing vigor and abundance, prevented many from rushing into a state of nudity. There arose prophets of vegetarianism, and, says Lowell, every form of dyspepsia had its apostle. Money, the root of all evil, was condemned by impecunious disciples, who drew largely upon treasures which they imagined they had laid up in heaven. Furious assaults were made upon the Bible, which was stigmatized as a worn-out and effete system. A crew of anti-tobacconists, who regretted that they could not find a condemnation of the weed in Scripture, were joined by a set of teetotalers, who did not hesitate to condemn our Blessed Lord’s use of wine, and, as they were unable to see the high, mystic significance of the Eucharist, they vented their foolish wrath upon such of the Protestant sects as retained wine in the Lord’s Supper, and this with such effect that it became quite common in New England to administer bread and milk instead of wine in the communion, thus destroying even the semblance to the blood which we are commanded to drink in remembrance of That which was shed for our redemption, and which, in the divine Sacrifice celebrated by Christ on Holy Thursday, was then really and truly poured forth, in the chalice, unto the remission of sin.

The revulsion from the unspeakable harshness of the Puritanic interpretation of the Scriptures was so complete that men cast about for an entirely new theological terminology. The transcendental pedants were ready for the want. What was grander than the old Scandinavian mythology? What is Jehovah to Thor? What is the Trinity to the sublimity of the Buddhistic teachings? The cardinal doctrine of the New Testament is the golden rule, which was familiar to the Greeks, and expressed in our own terms by Confucius. Satan’s master-stroke was thus levelled at the Bible, which was the word of life to the New-Englander. Take the written word away from the Protestant, and the gates of hell have prevailed against him. The inscriptions upon the Temple of Delphi preserved Greek mythology for centuries. Infantine belief in the poor, adulterated word of the Scriptures, which, after all, were never subjected to the full action of the Protestant theory, kept alive some remnants of Christian faith and hope. But to cast away the Bible for the Vedas, the Krishnas, the Mahabarattas, the skalds, and the devil knows what other vague and windy compilations of Scandinavian and Brahminical superstitions was to inaugurate a chaotic era, the like of which history does not record. There is no sympathy between the American mind and the Buddhism of the East, much less between the minds of the Yankee Transcendentalists and the wild beliefs of Danish sea-kings, who would have knocked their brains out, as puling and scholarly creatures unfit to wield a club or harpoon a seal, and consequently objects of the just wrath and derision of Odin and Thor. Yet these strange mythologies, intermixed with fatalism, Schellingism, and nature-worship, formed the olla-podrida to which New England for at least ten years sat down, after the unsavory dish of Puritanism had been thrown out of doors.

The spiritual squalor and intellectual poverty of most Transcendentalists were studiously kept out of sight, and the school—for it would be blasphemy to call it a religion—pushed forward into notice its exponents, who, under the stricter requirements of writing, considerably toned down their sentiments, and sought to give intelligible and literary form to their extravagances. A magazine, called the Dial, was published in Boston, in 1840 and a few following years, and notwithstanding the petulant genius of Emerson, its editor, who only now and then yielded to the spirit of newness, the strangest gibberish began to mumble in its columns. The following, from the “Orphic Sayings” of Bronson Alcott, who was considered to be one “overflowed with spiritual intimations,” is an illustration of the jargon. It might be proposed by a weekly paper as a puzzle to the readers:

“The popular genesis is historical. It is written to sense, not to soul. Two principles, diverse and alien, intercharge the Godhead and sway the world by turns. God is dual. Spirit is derivative. Identity halts in diversity. Unity is actual merely. The poles of things are not integrated. Creation is globed and orbed.”

The leaders of the movement cared nothing about letting their infidelity be known; but the mass following were loath to break completely with their religious traditions. They did not know what Kultur meant, and had neither knowledge of, nor sympathy with, Wilhelm Meister or Werther. The Atlantic Monthly, which may be regarded as having taken the place of the Dial, became the repository of Transcendental thought, though, with Yankee shrewdness and savoir faire, the editors managed to give it an unsectarian and, in time, even a national character.

The Atlantic never committed itself to Christianity, or, if it did so, it was to that spurious horror which in rhyme, idea, and general relativeness joins Jesus with Crœsus. A peculiar school of literature, marked with the patient study of German idealism, grew up around the Atlantic, which, with characteristic New England assertion, claimed to be the critic and model of American letters. The orphic style was sternly kept down in the Atlantic, but it would assert itself. Any one who cares about illustrating this idea has but to turn over the older Atlantics to see the painful efforts made to paraphrase the name of God, which, whenever boldly printed, has some title of limitation. We have any quantity of Valhallas and mythologies, and poems about the Christ that’s born in lilies, etc.; but it is tacitly understood that Kultur is the presiding genius. It must be admitted that New England Transcendentalism developed, or at least engaged, considerable literary and poetic talent. Not to speak of its High-Priest, Avatar, Inspirationalist, Seer, or Writer (with a big W), or Whatsoever you call him—Emerson, who has retreated from its altar and seems to be swinging his Thor-hammer wildly in every direction, there appeared a number of writers, all under the mystic spell. They aimed at a certain vague and beautiful language, and were given to pluralizing nouns which are one and singular in meaning. A certain kind of poetry, after the manner of Shelley, but not after his genius, sprang up and monthly bedecked the Atlantic with flowers. The literary men of New England were made to feel that inspiration sprang from Transcendentalism alone.

Nathaniel Hawthorne became its novelist, and Thoreau, whom we have been keeping at the door so long, suggested to him the idea of Donatello in The Marble Faun—a finely-organized animal, acted upon by human and otherwise spiritual influences. Hawthorne’s morbid genius, for which we confess we have little admiration, was unnaturally stimulated by the Transcendental seers. He is for ever diving into the depths of inner consciousness, and always appearing with a devil-fish instead of a pearl. His Note-Books show him to have been a spiritually diseased man, for whom the stench and ugliness of moral fungus growths had more charms than had the flowers. He has the besetting weakness of false reformers, chronic irritation, quite as vehement against the pettiest crosses and vexations of life as against its awful tragedies and crimes. This is the evolution of Transcendentalism. It began with enthusiasm and ended in worse than Reformation anger at everything and everybody, not excepting itself; but it was not an anger that sins not.

Theodore Parker was its theologian by excellence, and as the one god he believed in was himself, we suppose he may be allowed the title. Margaret Fuller Ossoli was co-editor with Emerson of the Dial, and was a strong-minded woman, whom her admirers insisted upon calling Anne Hutchinson come again—so strong, after all, were their New England traditions. Dwight wrote their music, if music can be limited in expression. William Ellery Channing was the poet of Transcendentalism, and Henry D. Thoreau was its hermit.

Thoreau was born at Concord in 1817, and he died in 1862. He was the only man among the Transcendentalists that allowed their theories the fullest play in him, and the incompleteness and failure of his life cannot be concealed by all the verbiage and praise of his biographers. Emerson’s high-flown monologues ruined him. A trick of naturalizing and botanizing which he had, and which never reached the dignity or usefulness of science, was exaggerated by a false praise that acted more powerfully than any other influence in sending him into the woods as a hermit, and among mountains as a poet-naturalist. He appears to have cherished some crude notions about the glory and bountifulness of Nature and her soothing and uplifting ministry, but these notions are, in the ultimate analysis, admissive of much limitation and qualification, if they be not altogether ægræ somnia mentis. The Transcendentalists worshipped Nature and built airy altars to the Beautiful, but they did not venture into the woods on a rainy day without thick shoes and good umbrellas. Thoreau gave up his life to this delusory study and adoration of Nature, and got for his worship a bronchial affection which struck him down in the full vigor of manhood. We have no patience with an ideal that takes us away from the comforting and companionship of our fellow-men. What divine lessons has Nature to teach us comparable with her manifestations in human nature? Why should we run off into solitude, and busy ourselves with the habits of raccoons and chipmunks that are sublimely indifferent to us? How much better is old Dr. Johnson’s theory: “This is a world in which we have good to do, and not much time in which to do it,” and who, on being asked by Boswell to take a walk in the fields, answered: “Sir, one green field is like another green field. I like to look at men.”

Life in the woods is very good for a mood or a vacation, but man escapes from them into the city. The old proverb about solitude runs, Aut deus, aut lupus—no one but a divinity or a wolf can stand solitude. One of the weaknesses of Transcendentalism was an affectation of seclusion. It was too good for human nature’s daily food. Man is such a bore! “O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!” Now, all this is sinful and unreasonable. Why should we shrink from the bad and evil and objectionable in mankind to herd with the wild beasts of the forest? The only thing that sanctifies solitude is the Catholic faith; and, even when the monastic idea sought to realize complete isolation from the world, the superiors were loath to grant permission. They felt that it is not good for man to be alone, and St. Benedict, in his Rule, has a reflection that there were monks lost in solitude who would have been saved in community. The true idea is that we can be solitary in spirit in the midst of crowds. There is no necessity of betaking ourselves to the woods.

Very likely the high praise of isolation, as nutritive of genius, acting upon a naturally retiring disposition, first led Thoreau to his sylvan life. The common idea that he was a hermit or a misanthropist is fully disproved by his biographers. In our opinion he is just the reverse, and if we were disposed to bring in evidence we could show that he was wild for notoriety. His private letters are more affected than Pope’s, who wrote with an eye to publication. All Thoreau’s books are full of his private experiences, thoughts, and emotions. He never suffers you to escape from his overpowering personality. He never sinks the ego. He reminds one of the diary of the private gentleman in Addison’s Spectator: “To-day the beef was underdone. Took a walk. Dreamt about the Grand Turk.” Thoreau is for ever telling us about his personal feelings, his method of baking bread, and his dreams about tortoises, etc. There is something funny in his writing six volumes for men on whom he fancied he looked with Transcendental contempt. The fact is, he was a fine, naturally talented, and poetic man, who was bewitched by the theories which we have sketched; and the contest within his spirit has led his biographers and critics into pardonable misapprehensions of his life and aims. Left to himself and his aspirations, he would have developed into a fair poet or a good naturalist—perchance an Agassiz or an Audubon. He had no theological or philosophical ability, but a deep sense of truthfulness, which made him experimentalize upon the theories which he heard. He found it much easier than would most men to live in the woods, to take long walks, to navigate rivers, and to collect specimens of natural history. His studies in nature have no value to the scientist. He was a good surveyor and liked animals. He wrote some indifferent poetry. He described some gorgeous sunsets. He delivered an oration on John Brown, and he managed to let the world know that he built and lived in a hut at Walden. Voilà tout. He flippantly criticised our Lord Jesus Christ, ridiculed all Christian beliefs, preferred the company of a mouse to that of a man, of an Indian to a white man, and died without a single throb of supernatural faith, hope, or charity. This was a man, too, who had Catholic blood in his veins, but who could not bear to hear the chime of church-bells without some contemptuous remarks, and who professed himself a Buddhist without the Indic veneration, and a worshipper of Pan without knowing or believing that the great Pan had died for his salvation.

Two biographies are before us, one by William Ellery Channing, who was Thoreau’s friend and companion, the other by H. A. Page, who appears to be a biographer-in-general or by profession. Channing’s, as might be expected, is a sort of prose In Memoriam; and Page’s is made ridiculous by an attempted comparison between Thoreau and St. Francis of Assisi, based on the saint’s love of, and miraculous power over, animals, and the Concord man’s ability to bring a mouse out of its hole or tickle a trout. Strange as it sounds, this comparison is carried on through one-third of the volume. Page must be a member of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, for Thoreau’s kindness to brutes he evidently regards as his finest trait. Such stuff as “the animals are brethren of ours and undeveloped men,” and the slops of evolution in general, are poured out in vast quantity, and the impression forced upon the reader is that Mr. Page, who speaks of himself as an Englishman, has no conception of Thoreau’s character, nor, indeed, of any adventurous or sport-loving nature such as freely develops on our wide plains and high mountains.

Thoreau graduated at Harvard, but without distinction. He and his brother taught school for a while at Concord, where the sage lives who gave such cheering voice to Carlyle. There was a wildness in him which nothing could subdue, yet it took no cruel or brutal form. He appears to have had that passionate love of external nature which is so sublime as a reality, so detestable as an affectation. He was made of the stuff of pioneers and Indian scouts, but with rarer feeling and poetic temperament. A water-lily was more than a water-lily to him. He had no social theory to advocate—a delusion about him into which Page falls—but he took to the woods as an Indian to a trail. There is nothing Transcendental about his life, and yet he is the chief and crown of Transcendentalists. He had a brave, high life in him, which is perfectly intelligible and realizable, quite as much in the parlor as in the swamp. Heroism need not leave New York for the steppes of Russia. A naturally timid priest who anoints a small-poxed patient is as brave in his way as Alexander or Charles XII. of Sweden. A thousand hermits have lived before Thoreau, and made no palaver over their social discomforts, which are, indeed, inseparable from their way of life. There is an unpleasant soupçon of Yankeeism when, in Walden, Thoreau lectures us on economy. The Transcendental aurora vanishes before the prosaic hearth-fire.

We remember having read A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers and The Maine Woods during a summer vacation which we spent between Mount Desert and Nantucket, and the sweet naturalness of those two beautiful books sank into our heart, touched, perhaps, by the glorious yet sombre scenery in which we moved. The jar and discord of Thoreau’s theological opinions melted away in the harmony of the great music which he made us hear among the hills and scenes which he loved so well, and of which he seemed a part. Hawthorne’s keen eye, sharpened, we will not say purified, by high æsthetic cultivation, detected in Thoreau the latent qualities of the Faun whose existence, by an anomaly, he has thrown into modern Italy, and even intimates as wrought on by the church. We love to think of Thoreau, not as idealized by Emerson, Channing, or Page, nor shallowly criticised as by Lowell, but as bright and winsome, afar from the sensuous creation of Hawthorne, and full of that boyish love of flood and field which has made us all at one time Robinson Crusoes. This is a most undignified descent from that ideal type of character which Thoreau is supposed to represent; but we submit to any reader of his books, if he did not skip his foolish theories about religion, friendship, society, ethics, and other such themes on which Emerson expatiates, and about which dear old Thoreau never knew anything at all practical, and leap with him into the stream, follow the trails he knew so well, learn the mysteries of angling and hunting, and tramp with him through the forests, read with him his dearly-loved Homer, and, in spite of our half-concealed laughter, listen to his wonderful explanations of the Beghavat-Gheeva.

It is encouraging to notice how bravely he shakes off half the nonsense of Transcendentalism, though bound by the wiles of Merlin, who lived only two miles from Walden. Transcendentalism gave no religion. It was even hollower than Rousseau’s Contrat Social and Émile, in which writings the wicked old Voltaire said that Jean Jacques was so earnest in converting us back to nature that he almost persuaded us to go upon all fours. Even Emerson confesses to the failure of Thoreau’s life. “Pounding beans,” says that wise old man, with the air of a Persian sage—a character which he frequently adopts, especially when he recommends some thousand-dollar Persian book to us as infinitely superior to the New Testament,—“Pounding beans,” says he, referring to poor Thoreau’s attempt to carry out his Transcendentalism, “may lead to pounding thrones; but what if a man spends all his life pounding beans?”

And so, in the style of the tellers of fairy stories, we say that poor Thoreau continued all his life pounding beans, but without caring very much for the bearing of beans upon the eternities, splendors, and thrones, and that he lived a cheerful and wholesome, natural life, though rather an uncomfortable one, in his woods and among his beasts and flowers; that he was kind and gentle to beasts, but not to God or to man, of whom he seemed to be afraid, which was a mistake; and after he was dead he was made out to be a great philosopher, a golden poet, a great social theorist, and a Transcendental saint, which is another mistake.

With Thoreau died the Transcendental hermit, and, so far as human nature and a happy combination of character and circumstance could permit, the only truly ideal man that Transcendentalism has produced. Yet how far he falls below the most commonplace monk in spiritual range and power and aim! No great spiritual fire burns in his bosom; nor will any Montalembert be attracted to his memory. There was not the light of Christian faith or love upon his life, which is distinguished from the savage’s only by its superior mental civilization and its relation to that civilization which he so humorously yet contradictorily despised. With Emerson, who has now convinced himself of the absurdity of immortality, its greatest writer will die. The Kulturkampf of Germany, which New England introduced into America, cannot survive the literary changes which take place every half-century. Emerson will fade into oblivion, and even now he is no longer listened to. But there is that in Thoreau’s books which gives vitality to old Walton’s Angler, and the traveller on the Concord and through Maine will recall the memory of Thoreau, no longer, we hope, to be associated with the eclipse of his false philosophy, but seen bright and vivid in that sunshine and beauty he loved so well.