Romanticism

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ROMANTICISM

The late 1790s through the 1820s constitute the early or introductory period of romanticism in the United States, when radically new ideas about literature, philosophy, and theology coming out of England and Germany were first transplanted to American soil. The published works of the English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in particular their Lyrical Ballads (1798), proclaimed a self-consciously modern literary and artistic esthetic. Inspired by the social idealism of the French Revolution, Wordsworth and Coleridge celebrated unbounded creativity and individual genius over mundane pursuits, the primacy of feelings and intuition over the rational intellect, and an awe-inspiring, infinite Creation over the finite, mechanistic universe of eighteenth-century natural philosophy. Despite this early introduction, it would be a full generation before the more serious philosophical and theological aspects of romanticism bore mature fruit on American soil in the transcendentalist movement, in the "higher criticism" of the Bible, and in the abolitionists' "higher law" arguments against slavery.

The romantic fascination with the marvelous and mysterious found popular expression much earlier, however, in the "romance" (also known as the "historical romance"), a literary genre first introduced in the 1810s by Sir Walter Scott's immensely popular Waverley novels. Scott's richly woven Scottish narratives led some American critics to lament the absence in North America of a feudal past peopled by chivalrous knights and ancient ruins, or of mistshrouded forests filled with gloomy shadows and ghostly apparitions. Other American writers, however, most notably Washington Irving (1783–1859) and James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), were inspired by Scott's example to find in the nation's rough-hewn frontier settlements, dwindling American Indian population, and mythologized colonial and Revolutionary eras subjects suitable for distinctly American romances.

American romanticism's mature period is centered unavoidably in New England. It is important to note, however, the mid-Atlantic and Southern origins of many early American romantic writers and artists. Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), whose supernatural tale Wieland (1798) is considered the earliest American romance, was born in Philadelphia and spent most of his adult life in Pennsylvania and New York. Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, a series of five novels begun in 1823 with The Pioneers and continued over the next decade in The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer, together with Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820), represent the coming of age of the American romance. Both Cooper and Irving lived nearly their entire lives in New York State. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), born in Massachusetts, spent most of his life in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond; the poet William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), also from Massachusetts, lived and wrote in New York City. Washington Allston (1779–1843), considered the father of American romantic painting, was a native son of South Carolina.

The transition from the early, popular period of American romanticism to its mature philosophical and theological phase is best exemplified by the career of Edward Everett (1794–1865), a Massachusetts-born scholar considered by many contemporaries to be the foremost intellectual of his generation. While a student at Harvard College, Everett, like many of his classmates, first read about German romantic or post-Kantian scholarship in Madame de Staël's De l'Allemagne (1813) and in the works of British writers such as Coleridge. After graduating with highest honors, in 1815 Everett accepted an invitation from Harvard to become the Eliot Professor of Greek Literature and negotiated a three-year preparatory trip to Europe. Traveling to Germany with his friend George Ticknor (1791–1871), Everett studied at the University of Göttingen under the direction of Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Germany's foremost scholar of the Hebrew Bible and the leading exponent of biblical "higher criticism." Ticknor returned home after a year abroad to assume the positions of Professor of Belles Lettres and Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures at Harvard. Everett completed his studies in 1817, making him the first American to earn a doctorate at a German university.

In January 1817, Everett published a long essay on Goethe in the North American Review, the first significant essay on German romantic literature to appear in an American periodical. Later, as editor of that journal from 1820 to 1824, Everett published a series of influential essays that celebrated the American romance as the first indigenous national literature. A lengthy review essay on Cooper's historical romance The Spy (1821) triumphantly asserted that "there never was a nation whose history … affords better or more abundant matter for romantic interest than ours." Everett's critical promotion of German romantic literature made a lasting impression on the rising generation of New England intellectuals, in particular the young Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), who lauded Everett's intellectual influence as "comparable to that of Pericles of Athens." Everett, Emerson noted in his journal, was "the first American scholar who sat in the German universities and brought us home in his head their whole cultured methods and results."

After Everett's resignation as editor of the North American Review, the periodical's essayists slowly reversed their earlier positive interpretations of the American romance. Dismissing the genre as overly fantastic and cliché-ridden, critics applauded the novel's greater narrative and emotional verisimilitude. This portentous shift, which reflected the growing cultural influence of Boston's Unitarian intellectuals, set the stage for the emergence of transcendentalism in the 1830s and for the full flowering of American romanticism in the 1840s and 1850s. James Marsh (1794–1842), a Vermont Congregational minister, was the first American transcendentalist to respond critically to this transformation of New England culture. In a long "Preliminary Essay" to the first American edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1828), Marsh condemned the arid mixture of British empiricism and Scottish common sense philosophy that dominated American intellectual and religious life. "So long as we hold the doctrines of Locke and the Scottish metaphysicians," Marsh observed, we "can make and defend no essential distinction between that which is natural, and that which is spiritual." Breaking decidedly with the Unitarians' authorization of scientific naturalism and philosophical realism, Marsh argued that self-inspection, reflecting upon "the mysterious grounds of our own being," was the only means by which individuals could arrive at certain knowledge "of the central and absolute ground of all being."

Younger New England intellectuals such as Emerson, who rejected the "corpse-cold" rationalism of their parent's generation, quickly embraced Marsh's belief that Coleridge provided the philosophical framework for a spiritually reinvigorated religious experience. Fredric Henry Hedge (1805–1890), a student at the University of Göttingen in the late 1810s and a founding member of the Transcendental Club, wrote an 1833 essay on Coleridge that presented the first clear exposition by an American writer of Kant's Critiques and of the post-Kantian philosophies of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling. By 1850 New England was awash in romantic and transcendentalist philosophy and theology. Hedge's literary anthology, Prose Writers of Germany, was followed quickly by the monumental, multivolume Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, and reviews of British, German, and French romantic writers regularly filled the pages of the Christian Examiner, the Dial, the Harbinger, and other progressive literary and religious periodicals.

Several other important manifestations of mature American romanticism emerged in the antebellum period. In the 1840s perfectionist strands of romantic thought inspired George Ripley (1802–1880), founder of the Dial and a former Unitarian minister, to organize and head the utopian community called Brook Farm in Concord, Massachusetts. Similarly, the social reformers John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886) and Robert Owens founded, respectively, the Oneida Community in upstate New York and New Harmony in western Indiana. Theodore Parker (1810–1860), a radical Unitarian minister and a devoted student of German philosophy and biblical criticism, stunned Bostonians in the early 1850s with the assertion that an intuited higher moral law took precedence over the recently passed Fugitive Slave Act and the U.S. Constitution. Darker romantic impulses, in turn, drove the writers Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and Herman Melville (1819–1891) to explore the more mysterious and irrational recesses of the American psyche and to produce the literary masterworks of the American Renaissance.

bibliography

Carafiol, Peter. Transcendent Reason: James Marsh and the Forms of Romantic Thought. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1982.

Flower, Elizabeth, and Murray G. Murphey. A History of Philosophy in America. Vol. 1. New York: Capricorn Books, 1977.

Long, Orie William. Literary Pioneers: Early American Explorers of European Culture. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963.

Miller, Perry, ed. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Orians, G. Harrison. "The Romance Ferment after Waverley." American Literature 3 (January 1932): 408–431.

Pochmann, Henry A. German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600–1900. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.

Thomas, John L. "Romantic Reform in America, 1815–1865." American Quarterly 17, no. 4 (winter 1965): 656–681.

Neil Brody Miller

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation