American Experiment (89 page)

Hawthorne played up the pastoral theme of Emerson and Thoreau, but he went beyond it. He had been captivated, in a trip to the Berkshires in 1838, by the factory life of North Adams—by the mills, “supremely artificial establishments, in the midst of such wild scenery,” by the mill girls looking out at Greylock, the northern crown of the Berkshires, while the machinery whizzed behind them, by the factory steam engine “supposed to possess a malignant spirit,” that catches a man’s arm and pulls it off, or catches a girl by the hair and scalps her. The story Hawthorne wrote years later, “Ethan Brand,” pitted against the pastoral and mountain landscape an engine of a different sort—the fiery kilns on Greylock that converted white marble into lime.

But Hawthorne was pursuing here another, even more powerful dualism—the individual in society, individual self-realization amid collective aspiration, brotherhood versus ambition and alienation—ultimately, individual liberty in an increasingly industrialized, interdependent culture. The people in “Ethan Brand” were lonely, isolated people: the rude lime burner and his son, the alcoholic doctor, the ex-lawyer whose hand had been “torn away by the devilish grip of a steam-engine,” a shabby old man desperately looking for his runaway daughter, a Wandering Jew—and Ethan Brand himself, a former lime burner who had once loved both man and nature. After communing with a satanic figure that lurked in the lurid blaze of his kiln, Brand went forth to discover the nature of the Unpardonable Sin, and in the quest he became an educated man, an intellectual, indeed a world-renowned scholar. But in that quest too he lost his sense of brotherhood, his sympathy for mankind, his “hold of the magnetic chain
of humanity.” Rather he became an ambitious, manipulative man, converting people into his puppets and coldly corrupting them, looking on them as merely “the subject of his experiment.”

And that—cutting himself off from humanity—was the Unpardonable Sin.

In a week or so, Herman Melville wrote Hawthorne in June 1851, he would go to New York, “to bury myself in a third-story room and slave on my ‘Whale’ while it is driving through the press.…

“By the way,” Melville continued, “in the last ‘Dollar Magazine’ I read ‘The Unpardonable Sin.’ He was a sad fellow, that Ethan Brand.…” As he wrote, Melville seemed to be connecting Hawthorne’s themes to his own. There was a “frightful poetical creed that the cultivation of the brain eats out the heart.…I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head. …The reason the mass of men fear God, and
at bottom dislike him
, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.…”

Melville scribbled on. In reading some of Goethe’s sayings, “so worshipped by his votaries,” he had come across this:
“Live in the all.”
Get out of yourself, Goethe was saying, spread and expand yourself, reach out to the flowers and woods, etc. “What nonsense!” Melville exploded. “Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. ‘My dear boy,’ Goethe says to him, ‘you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must
live in the all
, and then you will be happy!’ ”Melville went on: “As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous deal of it in me.” Melville added teasingly: “P.S. ‘Amen!’ saith Hawthorne.”

The man Hawthorne had come to know in Pittsfield and Tanglewood cut a different figure from the literary types of Salem and Concord. Born in New York in 1819, almost a generation behind Emerson and Hawthorne, into a distinguished but impecunious family, left without a father at twelve but with a mother who, he said, hated him, young Melville quit school at fifteen and knocked about in various jobs until he went to sea. His hard, daunting life on the
Acushnet
as a whaleman, followed by an idyll in the South Seas, left him with material for his feverish storytelling, and with an outlook both romantic and skeptic.

A number of specific and general themes run through Melville’s work: alienation of man from his life and work; authority, on a warship, at least, as a system of “cruel cogs and wheels” systematically grinding people up in one common hopper; existence as an ordinary seaman in a disciplined,
totalitarian unit; the tendency of the Age of Machinery to transform men into objects; the rise of expansionist capitalism in an underdeveloped country. But the most significant theme was the role and rights of the individual in an increasingly technological, industrial, urban, and collective society. For Melville was inquiring, Q. D. Leavis has said, “what alternatives are available which allow one to combine some kind of social life with self-respect once one has perceived—as is essential—how fraudulent all relations and institutions generally are.” Or, in Leo Marx’s words, in the end in
Moby-Dick
as in
Walden
, the American hero is either dead or wholly alienated from society.

Ultimately the fame of Emerson and Thoreau, of Hawthorne and Melville, would come to turn on the manner in which they wrestled with transcending philosophical dualisms and ambivalences—good and evil, freedom and fate, order and change, technology and nature, “civilization” and “savagery,” guilt and innocence, appearance and reality, as well as the individual in society. They resolved none of these questions, but they posed them so dramatically, through such compelling essays and stories, as to bring their fellow Americans to a higher consciousness of the supreme moral and political choices facing them.

But those Americans—including the other writers who aped or criticized or ignored the celebrated authors—were not passive receptacles. Some of these moral and political issues reached straight to their physical and spiritual needs and others did not. Events too would be in the saddle, as domestic and foreign crises forced Americans to make choices. Those needs and those crises would make the general issue of individualism in society, of liberty under government, the central issue for the 1850s. The narrow issue would be the relationship of liberty and equality. Thousands of educators and editors and ministers, having read about Walden Pond and Brook Farm, about Hester and Ahab and (later) Billy Budd, would have to make their own moral judgments and political decisions in the days to come.

Still, on the central, perplexing issues of liberty, the celebrated writers of the day left a legacy of intellectual leadership that was as ambiguous in content as it was evocative in tone. Emerson’s individualism could be defined as an enriching self-fulfillment or as the liberty to climb over the backs of others to embrace the bitch-goddess success. Thoreau’s retreat to Walden could be seen as an effort to achieve a creative autonomy or as a device to deny his dependency on—and evade his responsibility to—the wider community. Hawthorne viewed the pursuit of self-interest as fundamental in human character but inadequate as the moral foundation of a stable community; on the other hand, reformers’ attempts to replace
competition and social distinction with harmony and communal equality could end up doing more harm than good. These literary men had ambivalent feelings toward the railroads and factories, the authority and the discipline, that came with the Age of Machinery and would have colossal influence in both narrowing and broadening people’s liberties. Thus the literary culture of liberty gave out mixed signals to people trying to find the elusive border lines between individual freedom and communal needs.

A church somewhere in the “burned over” area of western New York, 1830.
Charles G. Finney is preaching. His voice thunders; his great eyes seem to burn into the very souls of the hundreds watching him. He seems to be speaking to each and all directly, personally, assuring them that salvation is possible for all, not just for the limited elect; if they repent and embrace the Lord they could escape the terrible guilt and awful consequences of sin. Near Finney stands his famous “anxious seat,” waiting for sinners ready to undergo conversion. As Finney rises to a passionate climax, his tall body straight and erect and his great arms outflung in the image of the cross—and had not Finney’s life been threatened too?—people are crying out, bursting into tears, fainting, falling into trances.

While the pundits and philosophers of Concord and Boston were reaching thousands of persons through the printed word, the parsons and preachers of trans-Appalachia were attracting tens of thousands of persons through the spoken. New York’s “burned over” district was so called because it had been so often kindled and rekindled by flaming revivalists. Easterners viewed western religion with hope and dismay. Many of their own sons—Finney for one—had migrated, west. As wave after wave of settlers swept beyond the Appalachian frontier, eastern ministers had called for missionaries to take the gospel to them. Society there, Theodore Dwight Bozeman noted, was “ ‘in its forming state,’ lacking moral ligaments, susceptible to rank growths of ‘wild fanaticism,’ and painfully needing lessons in the security and quiet of good community.”

Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, saw only three types of people on the frontier as he traveled through upstate New York in 1810: hunters and trappers “impatient of the restraints of law, religion, and morality; farmers who worked the land for a while and then moved on; and permanent settlers who stayed to prosper on the land.” Only the last group, wrote Dwight, were God-fearing, and they lacked pastors to guide them. The churches must sponsor religious missions to “soften and humanize” the hearts of western settlers and win them back to religion.

Easterners were used to the flowing and ebbing of worship. There had been a “very wintry season” for religion everywhere in America after the Revolution. Ninety percent of the people lay outside the churches. Political events eclipsed religion, as people concentrated on establishing the new nation and winning the War of 1812. The outstanding men of the country such as Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were statesmen, not ministers. Embracing the rationalism and deism of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers instituted religious freedom and welcomed conflict among the churches as a positive good—as the way to differentiate truth from error.

Democratic ideals of the Revolution shaped religion. Nowhere else in the world, Protestants felt, did they enjoy the freedoms they had in America after the Revolutionary War—freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. The First Amendment put first among its list of liberties: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Article VI of the Constitution prohibited religious tests “as a Qualification to any Office.” Revolutionary political beliefs had made state control of religion unacceptable, and the growing number of denominations made legal establishment of churches impossible. Earlier the churches had looked to the state for legal support in a wild and open land. When the Constitution separated church and state, choice of religion became an individual one. There seemed to be a price: With voluntary associations and denominations, and no exclusive national church, church attendance—even inherited membership—seemed to weaken as people moved to the frontier. Some feared that liberty had fatally impaired religion.

On the moving frontiers, each minister worked far from the power and status of his church; as civilization followed, ministers could join into Presbyteries, Ministeriums, Conventions, or Conferences. Ministers in America were persuasive and political. As Tocqueville learned, everywhere “you meet with a politician where you expected to find a priest.” Ministers in the colonial period had looked to the state for financial as well as legal underpinning, but as state after state disestablished the churches and withdrew funds for support, it seemed to many ecclesiasts such as Timothy Dwight that religion had suffered another hard blow. The laity provided a minister with support and a salary, but, according to Dwight, “a voluntary contribution, except in a large town, is as uncertain as the wind; and a chameleon only can expect to derive a permanent support from this source.”

As settlers cut themselves off from family roots and familiar surroundings to move to the frontier, they needed all the more a religious faith that could move with them and fortify them for their harsh battles with an
unforgiving wilderness. Religion, by preparing people for another world, could make the troubles and hardships of the present one less burdensome. The churches were the key to neighborhood stability, ordered family life, and the education of children on the frontier, defenses against instability and indiscipline in an unsettled land.

Religion served as solace and security in the East too. Mill workers found it easier to work their twelve-hour shifts, the ministry believed, if they looked to religion for comfort. Factory owners erected churches in the mill towns, making Sunday attendance compulsory for their hands in the belief that churchgoing conveyed spiritual comfort—and greater stability in the work force. With the rise of the plantation, system, many a slave owner brought religious worship to his slaves—religious worship that counseled obedience to the master, for a slave’s obedience would mean entrance to heaven, that other world which promised to be so much better than the present one.

In 1800, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, and Methodists were all established denominations, but the largest and most powerful were the first two. Between them, Congregationalists and Presbyterians controlled half the total number of congregations in America. They had founded, or helped to found, six of nine colonial colleges. Their assertive ministers—men such as Timothy Dwight—supported order against universal manhood suffrage, labor unions, poor relief, public education, western disorder, and other facets of liberty and equality. They retained the strict Calvinism of the Puritans, teaching that humanity, sinful by nature since Adam’s fall, was inescapably predestined to eternal damnation. The death of Jesus Christ made atonement for sins and admission to heaven a free act of God’s sovereign grace, but only for a limited few who underwent a transforming “election experience” and maintained a consistent life afterwards. To Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, this election experience, “being born again,” was the greater part of religious life, more important than good deeds or sacraments. These churches, gathered around the elect, carried the name “evangelical.”