To brand this new theory, no terms were found too strong even by the religious periodicals of the day. Unwilling to bide their time, to test its soundness by its strength and duration, its opponents rested not. It was confidently predicted that the movement would influence its followers to skepticism and atheism. The accusation of the sixteenth century was revived, and St. Bernards cried from pulpit and press, 'The limits of the forefathers have been transgressed!' To the great mass of the opposition, the horror was not that Trinitarianism had been assailed, but that men had been found so bold as to question it. The crime with the unlearned and the majority of the professors was not heresy, but daring. But Christians, fervent and earnest, were not wanting who denounced the movement in its anticipated consequences. The young and adventurous, the men of impulse and daring, would drift, it was feared, to the very borders of open infidelity. But the contrary was the result. A pietism the very reverse was developed, which, aided by the beloved Channing, was disseminated through New England. Justice Story even asserted that in Unitarianism he found refuge from the skepticism to which in youth he had tended.
Permitted, by the liberal character of the welcome substitute for a theology that had become too stringent for the age, to prosecute their researches into fields hitherto forbidden to the orthodox, thinkers, economists, statesmen and theologians gathered round the standard, and a new impulse was given to the intellectual character of the times. A revolution in Thought was impending.
In Literature we dared challenge the nations. The popularity of Cooper was at its high noon. Irving, with the graphic and delicate strokes of his sympathetic pencil, had written himself the Claude Lorraine among litterateurs; and Prescott, with his sentences of granite, was building himself an immortal name. Still, we were behind Germany, and even France, in that wide comprehension and universal criticism that determines more accurately than its politics the real status of a nation. These elements were now to be supplied. Carlyle had played in England the rôle so humorously yet thoroughly enacted in Germany by Heine, and so gracefully and airily performed in France by Cousin. He had popularized the philosophers. Without the acute, electric perceptions of the great German or the industry and amiable vanities of that De Sevigné among philosophers, Cousin, he presented, by fierce dashes of his crayon, black, blunt, and bluff, to the hitherto ignorant British public, some phases of the great metaphysical bearings of the age upon Literature and Art, as developed in Teutonic poetry and prose. In a word, he familiarized his readers with the Æsthetik of Germany. He published in 1830 his Sartor Resartus, which, clothing the man in 'der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid,' usurped for him at once an office not inferior to that of the Erd-geist in Faust. The shrill notes of the bagpipe of the critic of Craigenputtock blew across the mountains and valleys of his island home, rousing the judge on the bench, and, penetrating the long halls of Cambridge and Oxford, streamed yet distinct and powerful to our shores. Astonished by the richness and fullness of a literature so comprehensive, which seemed to inclose in its brilliant mazes all that their meagre and unfruitful dogmas denied of comfort to the heart and systematic development to the mind, the men who, with girded loins and scrips in their hands, had long wandered disconsolately on the shores of a seething ocean, now saw its waters parted, and crossed upon dry ground. Before them stretched the vast wilderness of German Philosophy. To their bewildered gaze, each system was an Arabia Felix, and every axiom a graceful palm.
Meanwhile, a second influence was at work among the orthodox, an influence that tended to the same great result, no longer an accident, but a necessity of the age. The Biographia Literaria and The Friend of Coleridge, embodying a dwarfed but not distorted version of the metaphysical system of Kant, which had created a profound sensation in England, met with an even more enthusiastic reception in this country. The Christian character of their author was beyond reproach, his genius undisputed; as a poet he ranked among those to whom Great Britain owed the laurel; and as an essayist, even the bitterest critics yielded him the palm. When, therefore, this man, one of the most evangelical of his time in the Established Church, brought to the aid of a time-honored and beloved theology the principles of that very philosophy which was deemed by others its fiercest antagonist, not a few who had been hitherto deterred from its investigation by a dread of the accusation of heresy, eagerly availed themselves of his labors. His Aids to Reflection was presented to the American public under the patronage of Dr. Marsh, late president of Burlington College, Vt. An elaborate preliminary essay by this eminently pious clergyman established the claims of the work to favor, and it was even taken up as a text-book in Amherst and one or two liberal Congregational universities in New England.
The effort of Coleridge, rendered obscure by his turgid and florid style, was to explain the religious doctrines of Archbishop Leighton and the early Puritans, which he held as orthodox, by means of the momentous distinction between Reason and the Understanding, which he borrowed from the Critik der Reinen Vernunft of Kant. However plausible, when disencumbered of its poetical drapery, the theory of Coleridge may be, and however convincing, so far as it goes, of the truth of his principles, we can not forget that the final tendency of the critical philosophy of Kant is, if not a positive approach to skepticism, at least to afford a scientific basis for it. But the formula of the author of Christabel was the pure exponent of his creed. The terror of metaphysics vanished as the oft-repeated words met the eye of the wary and suspicious investigator. 'World—God = 0: God—world = Reality Absolute. The world without God is nothing: God without the world is already, in and of himself, absolute perfection, absolute authority.'
Thus, while Carlyle, bold, versatile, shrewd, untrammeled, worked upon the Unitarian element in America, Coleridge, evangelical, polished, yet adventurous, leavened the Congregationalists and other shades of orthodox Christians with the same result. But the first literary outgrowth and original product of the Transcendental movement in America was Emerson's Essay on Nature, which appeared in 1838, forming a nucleus for the writings of the Dial-ists, and proving a sort of prolegomena to the new edition of Hermetic Philosophy. 'Non est philosophus nisi fingit et pinxit,' said the great pioneer. Here Emerson does both, proving, by inversion, his claim to the title. Whatever may be the negative virtues of this preliminary essay, it undoubtedly possesses the positive one of having given a strong impulse to the study and love of Nature. True, the man who is to grasp its details, sympathies, significations, to hear, in all their grand harmony, its various discordant symphonies and fugues, to see its marvelous associations, needs to be Briarean-armed, Israfel-hearted and Argus-eyed, as perhaps none in our imperfect day and generation can claim to be. But at least this 'Nature' of Emerson's insinuated, dimly and dreamily, in spite of its positive air, an occult relation between man and Nature. It invested rock and sky and air with new and startling attributes. The deep thinker might even draw upon its pages some pays-de-Cocagne landscape, flowing indeed with milk and honey, but in Tantalian distance. Nature's true heart is invested with a pericardium so thick that it resists the scalpel of the skillful critics, to whom the stethoscope alone betrays the healthful throb of vitality beneath. With portly arguments, Emerson bars the door to the simple but earnest-hearted. That Nature, whose prophet he is, gleams, bright and unloving, down from a cold, unsympathizing heaven.
'Not every one doth it beseem to question
The far-off, high Arcturus.'
And we, the lazzaroni on the piazza, can not even see the sky for the mist of 'mottoes Italianate and Spanish terms' of an effete logic that has risen before it.
Nevertheless, here are the first gleams of a genial appreciation of the Æsthetik of Germany, that large-hearted discernment that grasps similitudes from the antipodes of Thought, and writes them upon its sunny equator. And there are appeals to those finer impulses and experiences of every feeling soul that manifest a sense, imperfect yet animated, of that marvelous sympathy that exists between all phases of life, whether in humanity or in external nature. His natural outbursts of feeling are rare, but delicious as caviare, with a certain quaver of piquancy. 'Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos and unimaginable realms of faërie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding, and night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.' Only a fantasy, and yet how he bends Nature to suit the curve of his own temperament. And who has not felt the involuntary exhilaration, appalling from its very depth, that possessed him, crossing a bare common, on a bleak October afternoon, sunless and chill, with gray winds sweeping by—'I was glad to the brink of fear.' An intense emotion is imprisoned in these words,—the irresistible intoxication of deep delight, the consciousness of an unbounded faculty for enjoyment, and a lurking but delicious dread of the lavish power of sensation cooped within the senses. Heine, in his 'Lutetia,' speaks of the 'secret raptures attendant upon the tremors of fear.' Still, Emerson's Nature is rather a Nature à la Pompadour, in powdered hair and jeweled stomacher and high-heeled slippers; not the dear green mother of our dreams, who was wooed by the bending heavens, and
'Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth from the mighty embracement;
Thousand-fold tribes of dwellers, impelled by thousand-fold instincts,
Filled, as a dream, the wide waters; the rivers sang on in their channels;
Laughed on their shores the hoarse seas; the yearning ocean swelled upward;
Young life lowed through the meadows, the woods, and the echoing mountains,
Wandered bleating in valleys, and warbled in blossoming branches.'