Among the novelists have been several who were Unitarian ministers, including Sylvester Judd, William Ware, Thomas W. Higginson, and Edward Everett Hale. Judd's Margaret was of the very essence of transcendentalism, besides being an excellent interpretation of some of the phases of New England character. Ware's historical novels were popular in their day, and are now worth going back to by modern readers, and especially by those who do not insist upon having their romances hot from the press. Catherine M. Sedgwick is another novelist worth returning to by modern readers, and especially by those who would know of New England life in the early part of the nineteenth century. She became an ardent Unitarian, and her biography gives interesting glimpses of the early struggles of that faith in York City. Other Unitarian women novelists were Lydia Maria Child, Grace Greenwood, Helen Hunt Jackson, Louisa M. Alcott, and Harriet Prescott Spofford.
In naming John T. Trowbridge, Bayard Taylor, Bret Harte, William D. Howells, and Nathaniel Hawthorne as Unitarians, no merely sectarian aim is in view. In the common use of the word, Hawthorne was not a religious man; for he rarely attended church, and he had no interest in ecclesiastical formalities. No man who has written in this country, however, was more deeply influenced than he by those spiritual ideas and traditions which may be properly called Unitarian. The same may be said of Howells, who is not a Unitarian in any denominational sense; but his religious interests and convictions bring him into sympathy with the movement represented by Unitarianism.
It may be said of the most popular novels of Edward Everett Hale, such as Ten Times One Is Ten, In His Name, His Level Best, that they are the best possible interpretations of the Unitarian spirit; for it is not merely a certain conception of God that characterizes Unitarianism, nor yet a particular theological attitude. It is the wish to make religion real, practical, altruistic.
Unitarian Artists and Poets.
Unitarianism has been as friendly to poetry and the other arts as it has been to philosophy and science. In its early days it fostered the artistic careers of Washington Allston, the painter, and Charles Bulfinch, the architect. It has also nurtured the sculptors, William Wetmore Story, who was also poet and essayist; Harriet Hosmer, whose career shows what a woman can accomplish in opening new opportunities for her sex; Larkin G. Mead and Daniel C. French. To these must be added the actors Fanny Kemble and Charlotte Cushman.
It is as one of the earliest of our poets that Charles Sprague is to be mentioned, and one or two of his poems are deservedly remembered. Jones Very was one of the best of the transcendental poets, and a few of his religious poems have not been surpassed. The younger William Ellery Channing and Edward R. Sill belong to the same school, and deservedly keep their places with those who admire what is choice in thought and individual in artistic workmanship. As a biographer of O.B. Frothingham and as a member of his congregation, it may be proper to add here the name of Edmund C. Stedman.
Among our greater poets, Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Stoddard, and Bayard Taylor were Unitarians. As being essentially of the same way of thinking and believing, Whittier and Whitman might also be so classed. Though Whittier was a Friend by education and by conviction, he was of the liberal school that places religion above sect and interprets dogmas in the light of human needs and affections. If he had been born and bred a Unitarian, he could not have more sympathetically interpreted the Unitarian faith than he has in his poems. Whitman had in him the heart of transcendentalism, and he was informed of its inmost spirit. To the more radical Unitarians his pleas for liberty, his intense individualism, and his idealistic conceptions of nature and man would be acceptable, and, it may be, enthusiastically approved.
William Cullen Bryant early became a Unitarian; and he listened to the preaching of Follen, Dewey, Osgood, and Bellows. "A devoted lover of religious liberty," Bellows said of him, "he was an equal lover of religion itself--not in any precise, dogmatic form, but in its righteousness, reverence, and charity. He was not a dogmatist, but preferred practical piety and working virtue to all modes of faith."[[8]] It would be difficult to give a better definition of Unitarianism itself; and it was the large humanity of it, and its generous outlook upon the lives of individuals and nations, that made of Bryant a faithful Unitarian.
Henry W. Longfellow was educated as a Unitarian, his father having been one of the first vice-presidents of the Unitarian Association,--a position he held for many years. Stephen Longfellow was an intimate friend of Dr. Channing in his college years, and he followed the advance of his classmate in the growth of his liberal faith. "It was in the doctrine and the spirit of the early Unitarianism that Henry Longfellow was nurtured at church and at home," says his brother. "And there is no reason to suppose that he ever found these insufficient, or that he ever essentially departed from them. Of his genuine religious feeling his writings, give ample testimony. His nature was at heart devout; his ideas of life, of death, and of what lies beyond, were essentially cheerful, hopeful, optimistic. He did not care to talk much on theological points; but he believed in the supremacy of good in the world and in the universe."[[9]]